It is no secret that many people feel that human evolution has been stopped in it's tracks by our civilization. However, I and others, argue that natural selection is still ongoing and has social implications. The article I copied below relates how natural selection of humans is taking palce right now in Taiwan. If you accept the conclusions of this article, it is not a great leap of faith to speculate how natural selection is taking place in the social structure of Jehovah's Witnesses. Consider these facts: 1. JW's rank lowest of all Western religions in educational achievement (implications of lower wage jobs) 2. Nearly two thirds of all JW's in the USA are women. 3. JW singles marry younger and have children more quickly 4. Single female parents live closer to the poverty level than the rest of the population 5. JW's near retirement age have little savings and supplemental income to live on Does this imply in your mind that the conditions are ideal for an accelerated decrease in the living standards of JW's and that this will select for even more people near or below the poverty level in future generations? In short, the selection process will push Witnesses even lower on the economic ladder? Here is the article on natural human selection: http://www.futurepundit.com/ 2003 October 16 Thursday By Randall Parker Human Natural Selection In Taiwan
The competition for females in Taiwan is going to get very fierce.
On Taiwan, abortions have skewed the island's demographics to the point that only two girls are born for every three boys.An obvious consequence is that when the little king passes puberty, he discovers that the girl he liked in high school has gone to USC, probably never to return, while those who remain are being snapped up by other men.
To ease the gender gap, Taiwanese men import brides from the mainland. Unfortunately, these women are outnumbered by those smuggled into the country illegally, who, in exchange for $10,000, can legalize their status with marriages of convenience, then head for the brothels to earn real money. These bogus nuptials are difficult to detect since many Taiwanese men hop between marriages until they find a woman who can bear them a son.
The effect this will have is to select against the reproduction of economically less successful and physically less attractive males. Women prefer wealthier and higher status males and the approximately one third of Taiwanese males who are going to be left unable to reproduce will be, on average, lower status and less affluent. Any genetic variations that reduce economic success or physical attractiveness will therefore be selected against. This will probably tend to raise the average IQ of Taiwanese babies and probably will make them more driven and motivated. For more information on the practice of selective abortion of female fetuses in China and India see the post Girl Shortage Causes Wife Buying In India. While Nobelist Sydney Brenner sees natural selection as obsolete (see Sydney Brenner: Biological Evolution Is An Obsolete Technology) it seems obvious that natural selection is still happening to humans. The only thing that has changed is that different genes are being selected for or against than was previously the case before modern medicine and cheap foods became available.
Update: To clarify a point: It can be debated just what is natural versus artificial selection. What is artificial must somehow involve sentience modifying and creating elements of an environment. Should we limit the use of the term artificial selection to refer only to changes in offspring genes caused by conscious engineering of offspring? Or if we change our environments for other reasons and, as a side effect, cause those environments to exert different selective pressures on us that change the frequency of alleles in successive generations should we call that artificial selection too? Heck if I know. I care less about semantic debates than about understanding the actual processes that are at work.
One can (and some people do) even carve out something called sexual selection as distinct from natural selection (that strikes me as more of a subcategory of natural selection - not that I care all that much whether it is treated as a subcategory). But the important point here is that just because we have modified our own environment in substantial ways does not mean that the environment is not still exerting selective pressures on us.
Selection that causes different frequencies of alleles from one generation to the next is still happening. While there are some exceptions of rather limited scope (e.g. preimplantation testing of IVF embryos) we aren't yet using genetic engineering to customize our offspring. Yet for other reasons we have made many changes to our environments which, as a side effect, are causing changes in the frequency of many alleles in successive generations of humans. Scientists who claim that human evolution by natural selection has stopped are trying to imply that there are no selective pressures at work. But it is incredibly obvious that this is an erroneous conclusion. Skipper