Evolution Question(s)

by Cassiline 49 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Cassiline

  If we have evolved my assumption is we still are evolving correct? Or am I wrong in this assumption as well? With all that was wrought on JWs this is one teaching I can not get past that of evolution v. creation. That aside here is my question(s).

  Survival of the fittest right? If this is the case then those who evolve and have major problems such as psychosis, cancers, heart disease, and other problems are able to continue living a decent life because of medications prescribed in many cases. If this medication were not prescribed then most likely many would end their own lives or basically drop out of society.

  Have we as men who believe in evolution allowed those who are mentally/physically impaired recreate thusly screwing up our own gene pool? If we did not intervene and those with those problems were to just fade away if you will.

  What are the ramifications for us screwing with evolution? An over populated world etc? If we had allowed natural selection to take place how much different would this planet be?

  Has man interfered with the natural selection perhaps making critical mistakes which will assure the end of humanity quicker then allowing those weak ones to expire?

  I understand that science has made many changes not even touching medical advancemans. Yet the natural selection process of the stronger v the weak surviving seems to make a large impact on Darwin?s theory.

  What if we had not intervened when we could have? Would that equal a world of smart, healthy people giving birth to mostly smart, healthy people not passing bad genes onto children?

  Or if we believe in God given right to live then this makes the latter questions useless I guess.

  Cassi
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  czarofmischief

  What you are describing is the essence of eugenics theory. It is the result of the struggle to define morality when "evolution" is turned into a God.

  Eugenics was espoused by many, including, erm... the Nazis - this allowed them to express their anti-Semitism in industrialized murder, as well as the horrible things done to the mentally ill, homosexuals... etc.

  For the record, there are philosophies that don't require a god to motivate kindness and decency to the ill and the sick, nor does "evolution" demand that we turn our backs on our sapient self-development.

  Probably rem could explain it better than I.

  CZAR
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  AlanF

  Cassiline said:

  : If we have evolved my assumption is we still are evolving correct? Or am I wrong in this assumption as well?

  With evolution, "it's all over when the fat lady sings." This is a serious point to understand, because it means that evolution has no direction. When environmental pressures come into play, then creatures evolve. When the environment is stable, creatures don't evolve much (except by so-called "genetic drift"). This state of affairs is evident in the fossil record and is the reason that Gould and Eldridge came up with the theory of "punctuated equilibrium".

  Evolution happens slowly enough that it's not apparent from present physiology and the fossil record from the past couple of hundred thousand years whether mankind has changed much in that time or not. The oldest known Homo sapiens fossils (discovered last June in Ethiopia) are about 160,000 years old and not all that different from older species. Some paleontologists think that the environment has been stable enough that the evolution of man has slowed down compared to previous rates, and also that other things might be coming into play, such as the stablizing effect of culture. It also appears that human brains may have reached a size limit, since the pelvic opening would have to enlarge along with increased brain size at birth.

  Given the above, no one knows whether mankind will evolve further. Note that "evolve" doesn't mean "progress" -- it means "change".

  : With all that was wrought on JWs this is one teaching I can not get past that of evolution v. creation.

  The only cure for that is to read a lot of literature on the subject.

  : Survival of the fittest right? If this is the case then those who evolve and have major problems such as psychosis, cancers, heart disease, and other problems are able to continue living a decent life because of medications prescribed in many cases. If this medication were not prescribed then most likely many would end their own lives or basically drop out of society.

  Right. This is getting into the effects of culture that I alluded to above.

  : Have we as men who believe in evolution allowed those who are mentally/physically impaired recreate thusly screwing up our own gene pool? If we did not intervene and those with those problems were to just fade away if you will.

  That's right, the gene pool is weakened when those who in past times would have tended to die before reproducing (the "unfit") reproduce. However, culture, and the accompanying technology, have the potential to alter the gene pool drastically.

  : What are the ramifications for us screwing with evolution? An over populated world etc? If we had allowed natural selection to take place how much different would this planet be?

  I wouldn't call the evolution of culture and its accompanying effect of allowing the "unfit" to survive "screwing with evolution". It's all part of overall evolution, really. What part of human culture can truly be called "unnatural"? By what standards and what reasoning? By one standard, overpopulation is a perfectly normal thing. Too many creatures for the resources and, boom! The population crashes. With humans, this is the first time in history that overpopulation has occurred, and as with any new phenomenon, we have little idea how it'll play out in the long run. That culture thing is brand new in the history of life, and it affects things drastically.

  : Has man interfered with the natural selection perhaps making critical mistakes which will assure the end of humanity quicker then allowing those weak ones to expire?

  Maybe, maybe not. Certain genetic defects may well be eradicated soon, what with people now beginning to really understand how genetics works. The next few decades will likely bring stunning results. Of course, then natural selection will be replaced by "artificial selection". But in view of my comments above, is "artificial" really artificial? Or just part of natural evolution?

  : What if we had not intervened when we could have? Would that equal a world of smart, healthy people giving birth to mostly smart, healthy people not passing bad genes onto children?

  Who knows? Had people been doing that all during the past ten thousand years or so of modern history, would Isaac Newton have been born? Maybe a pile of them would have. I know one thing: you and I wouldn't have been born.

  : Or if we believe in God given right to live then this makes the latter questions useless I guess.

  Hard questions, alright.

  AlanF
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  barry

  Alan you have answered questions I have often pondered in my own mind. I have heard people 10,000 years ago were smarter than they are now also English soldiers have different shaped heads than they do now. When making helmets the shape had to be changed.

  How do these facts fit with evolution I would have thought these time periods would make no difference to the long periods required of evolution. Barry
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  Leolaia

  I think what evolutionists say is that human culture has been enormously advantageous and has basically compensated for and rendered moot all the many minor physical and cognitive variances we find from person to person. Never mind the "scientific advancements," just the fact we people have language, culturally-transmitted knowledge of how to make homes, fire, produce our own food, and regulate our own behavior with laws and so forth means as a species we are not living at extremes of survival and we can afford the "luxuries" of having a certain portion of our population disabled, take care of our elderly, hungry, and so forth. And probably because of our wonderfully adaptive culture and intelligence which has allowed people to live at almost any climatic extreme all over the world, and continually mixing our gene pool in our global society, I don't think there is any significant selective pressure to evolve in any particular new direction. Maybe the next stage in evolution would be if humans start permanently living in space which presents a whole host of new environmental challenges which certain variances might be better suited for. But we've pretty much covered the planet as is.

  And anyway, "scientific advancements" have only been around for a handful of generations at most. That's a drop in a very deep bucket, evolutionary speaking.
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  Leolaia

  also English soldiers have different shaped heads than they do now. When making helmets the shape had to be changed. How do these facts fit with evolution I would have thought these time periods would make no difference to the long periods required of evolution. Barry

  Head shape modification is cultural. Many cultures still do it. You start at a young age and bind the head in a way that allows the skull to grow in a skewed, oblong shape. Nothing whatsoever to do with evolution. Babies are still born with normal heads. And evolution is not Lamarckian.

  Leolaia
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  Leolaia

  With evolution, "it's all over when the fat lady sings." This is a serious point to understand, because it means that evolution has no direction.

  I think you mean evolution has no purposeful telelogical direction (i.e. progress). Genetic drift can and does move in a particular trajectory of change.

  Leolaia
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  Abaddon

  Nice question cassi;

  Alan has answered a lot of your questions, but there's a few questions you asked I'd still like to respond to;

  If we had allowed natural selection to take place how much different would this planet be?

  Has man interfered with the natural selection perhaps making critical mistakes which will assure the end of humanity quicker then allowing those weak ones to expire?

  First we have to define the paramaters of that; for the ease of explanation, let us assume that humans diverged into two species, us and 'Klingons'.

  There's no need to explain what the 'us' would be like, as we're it. But our cousins, the 'Klingons', would be as technologically advanced a race as us, but would believe 'weak' children should die, leaders should be replaced when they can no longer defend their position, and that deformity and infirmity were shameful and intolerable.

  Obviously in such a spartan society, overall levels of physical fitness would be higher as those without it would be culled by sociological processes, so, yes, modern human society has made us physically weedier than we otherwise could be. Modern H sapiens is far weedier than some pre-sapiens and some ancient sapiens; Neanderthal's, for instance, are stocky and thick-boned as a rule; you really wouldn't want to get in a fight with one. I have a good level of fitness, but in any society without the technology to make spectacles I would be dead unless I had found a niche where my appaling eyesight didn't make me a liability or easy game for accident or predation.

  However, that doesn't mean that 'Klingons' would win if they and us came into conflict over resources. A snake is physically weedier than a lion, can move less quickly, is a solo hunter, has short-range eyesight... but if it's a poisonous snake, physical strength doesn't come into the equation (this is just a loose example of 'the stongest doesn;t always win the fight).

  By developing 'culture', humans have a meta-inheritance to pass on as well as a genetic inheretance to pass on. This non-genetic transferrable information can make an individual organism in that society and a society of that organisms more succesful in passing on genes than it would do if there was just genetic information.

  Obviously in this thought experiment 'Klingons' would also have culture and all the benefits it brings too, but just having a culture that retained selection factors for strength and natural health doesn't mean that overall levels of reproduction would be higher, or that their culture would be more successful than ours in direct competition.

  What man has done is, first, introduce non-genetic tranferable information that aids survival. Some other species do this a bit, but none approach the scale with which humans transfer information between generations. Culture has become part of our evolutionary inheritance, and the evidence that it works well (aloong with the genes) in making gene survival machines is that we are naked, weak, slow... and the most successful large organism on the planet.

  The advantages given someone by having a strong, fast, healthy body do not mean they will neccesarily have more children that the 140lbs short-sighted geek with a concave chest, or that cultures where one lot is healthier than the other would automatically triumph in a conflict.

  Now man is developing the ability to change what genetic information gets passed on. This is something that at first will be applied to lethal genes, like MS, or severely disabling syndromes.

  Just as using corpses to extend medical knowledege was considered 'wrong' by most people three hundred years ago, and organ transplants are still considered wrong by some, so too shall the negative feelings regarding genetic manipulation receed.

  I don't think we will have potential problems with superbeings, at least in terms of intelligence... it seems that it will be quite a while before we understand how intelligence works and it's nture-based as well, not just a sequence of genes. What we will potentially have in the future is people with good eye sight, robust immune systems, and no-genetic diseases or genetic prediliction to disease.

  There's also people that think the best way to get people with long-lifespans is to breed for it; we have never had any selection pressure for robust and extended old age; we have had selection pressure to be able to reproduce and raise kids. If a group of people started an organisation, such as featured in Heinlein's books, where people with very old grandparents and parents bred, then we'd likely see quite rapid increases in their children's average lifespans, as we'd be stacking the "deck of genes" with genes that worked well in old bodies.
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  Navigator

  As has been pointed out, the "evolution" of our physical bodies is so slow as to be inconsequential as far as we are concerned. A trip to any museum showing clothing from the early 1800's will show how small our ancestors were compared to where we are today. Good diet does make a difference. However, the exponential change in our technology is but a reflection of the exponential "evolution" in consciousness which we are experiencing right now. My father passed away in 1982 at the age of 82. During his single lifetime he saw the first airplane fly and progress to the point where he saw man walk on the moon. Wow! That is what I call evolution. The Creationist vs Evolutionist fight is simply an argument about means and methods and not worth wasting time about. The next "frontier" may be expanding human consciousness rather than outer space.
  
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  drawcad_1

  I have heard that the watchtower makes a hidden reference to evolution in the fact that they say Noah took two of every kind of animal, to make up for all of the room that would be required. This way he would only include two giraffes, rather that two of every species of giraffe; two butterflies, rather than two of every species; etc.. Then they let the reader roll of into thier natural stupid state that all JW literature puts you into so that you will not ask the question of how all of the species came back to populate the planet (evolution after Noah).

  this does not help me to believe the Noah story or feel like I need to get into a disscusion about it.