October 09, 2008
Evolution is complete: so where do we go from here?
From The Telegraph:
Evolution could already be at an end, leaving the human race more uniform than ever, argues Steve Jones:
Things ain't what they used to be - but when were they? Not in 18th-century Japan, when the poet Ejima Kiseki wrote: "The shrewd observer of the modern scene will note that sons are altogether inferior to their fathers, and that the grandson rarely offers hope for improvement." Plato felt much the same and Simon Heffer, the Plato de nos jours, agrees. Markets, crime, education; every day, in every way, things seem to get worse and worse. If the philosophers have it right, the human race is in decline - social, moral and, in the end, biological. Now science can test at least the last of those claims.
Because we understand how evolution happens, we can also guess where it will go next. It is, in Darwin's words, "descent with modification" - genetics plus time. The process turns on differences: in genes themselve, and on natural selection - on inherited variation in the ability to copy them. Isolation helps changes to build up and, in time bears, Bushmen and Britons evolve from a common ancestor. Human diversity is so great that every sperm and egg ever made is unique.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:52 AM | Permalink
Comments
huh? is this like the "end of history" argument from the 90s? we're aware how that has gone, right? if evolution is "over" the only reason is that humans have intervened to an extent that it will take a catastrophe for it to play the dominant role that it does...and even then, our intervention has only truly been a blink of an eye comparatively. It's a major tension to think about, if all our theorizing and medical progress is correct: have we altered natural selection? will Malthusian population dynamics come back to haunt us, a la Cormac McCarthy's The Road? where do we go from here except towards the fulfillment of science fiction? (not to sound like a dork, but) who has it right? The Matrix, Terminator, Star Wars or Star Trek? or perhaps Wall-E?
Posted by: sps | Oct 9, 2008 7:40:59 AM
Strange--the article is so limited in what is considered "evolution."
What about the evolving mind?
Posted by: missvolare | Oct 9, 2008 8:45:47 AM
I would say Jones is right, but only under these rather fragile and temporary conditions we are now living under.
The feed back loops may favor genetic isolation as we overrun out ecosystem, and survival of the remaining individuals present different conditions.
But who can really know? So many directions a dynamic system can take.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Oct 9, 2008 10:34:09 AM
I think the idea that human evolution is complete and humans will become a uniform light brown is ridiculous and unfounded. It's Lamarckian misunderstanding and specious armchair biology.
Actual evidence points in the opposite direction, the human genome is increasingly diverse and this process is accelerating.
The commenters at the Sandwalk seem to handle the article well (http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2008/10/steve-jones-says-human-evolution-is.html): It seems the good professor has confused real, unguided evolution with the teleologic, public (mis)conception of evolution in which the weak are supplanted by the strong, and the ultimate goal, as it were, of evolution, was biological "perfection".
Posted by: Jesse | Oct 9, 2008 10:58:29 AM
I'm with Jesse on this one. Evolution happens despite one thinking it's over or not. Jones' arguement is , at best, a throw back to a very shop-worn image of the evolutionary process.
Posted by: PeteChapman | Oct 9, 2008 1:53:45 PM
Pete-
I am not arguing with either of you, but the conditions that accelerate genetic differences (isolation and boundary instability) have been diminished, but agreed, the process continues, and as the apparent future looks very challenging, will almost certainly accelerate.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Oct 9, 2008 2:06:54 PM
Dave,
Wouldn't isolation and boundary instability play more a role in selection leading to cladogenetic speciation? Genetic differences accrue and shift in frequency due to environmental variations making certain traits more favourable. Cultural evolution, by necessity, changes the game; the selective pressures change. Evolution is still occuring, just as much as ever.
Posted by: ngd | Oct 9, 2008 5:05:23 PM
ngd is right, this article confuses evolution and speciation.
I think the article does a decent job in arguing that the chance of the homo lineage branching into distinct species seems to be reducing, but that does not mean that humans are genetically frozen.
Posted by: j | Oct 9, 2008 5:14:48 PM
we understand how evolution happens
Read these words. Stopped reading.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Oct 9, 2008 6:01:57 PM
Most of the commentors have correctly dismissed this claim of evolution "ending" or "slowing down".
The key here is the confusion between what we call evolution, which is the situation of having gene-bearing reproductive organisms in an environment (which is really just saying, gene-bearing organisms exist), and the various processes that occur when reproducing organisms interact with their environment over time. That is, the processes that occur once this situation is put in place. You can quantify these processes all you want using various methods and speak (mostly) reasonably about which are playing a greater or lesser role, i.e. mutation rates, selection pressures, population sizes, etc. As well as how they interact, though this is a bit trickier. There are also many factors that you cannot model since they are not predictable processes, i.e. natural disasters. However, one cannot quantify evolution itself, since this is simply the condition of having gene-bearing organisms that reproduce. As long as reproduction is occuring, evolution is occuring, period. (some might even say that all you need are the organisms, not necessarily reproduction, i.e. gene-swapping bacteria)
Posted by: mentalelevation | Oct 9, 2008 6:23:42 PM
ngd-
I agree, although much of the cultural acceleration may be meme based, and part of another replication system just using humans as hosts.
But it embeds itself in the algorithm, with no bias.
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Oct 9, 2008 6:41:15 PM
Fifty Euros to the first graphic artist who designs a not-racist "evolution" graphic that doesn't shade from black (far left) to white (far right)... because that fully-evolved human on the far right could just as rightly be black (and female), no?
(Some habits die hard, I know)
Posted by: Steven Augustine | Oct 9, 2008 8:01:56 PM
this is my favorite website, that being said, its sometimes wholly intoxicating to thread a days worth of posts into the dominant ideology (if such a thing could be done). The metanarrative would be so bleak not even Fredric Jameson could find its strains towards utopia. Death is death, we are at the end, of evoulution, of believing there is anything to know outside our pithy 200 years of science, automons marching to the brink of a void we've already measured, recreated, and tested, whereby your very experience of it is just a pile of projections whereupon you will most obviously draw the wrong experience. We have become the elongated and bitter opposite of the self help silliness that pervades less intelligent discourse. Whoops, my experience of this just misfired, I should really get my graybulb tuned, anyways, can everything in science be so godawefully materialist, smug, and declarative, its amazing that the religion of observable matter has become so pervasively dark in recent years - evoulutionary biology, psychology and their ilk. The god delusion is actually a god complex, filled with vitrolic knownothings carving out a space of nihilistic fantasty. Its much too much on a day when the markets closed 14 thousdand, one year ago.
Posted by: jeff | Oct 9, 2008 8:27:07 PM
this is my favorite website, that being said, its sometimes wholly intoxicating to thread a days worth of posts into the dominant ideology (if such a thing could be done). The metanarrative would be so bleak not even Fredric Jameson could find its strains towards utopia. Death is death, we are at the end, of evoulution, of believing there is anything to know outside our pithy 200 years of science, automons marching to the brink of a void we've already measured, recreated, and tested, whereby your very experience of it is just a pile of projections whereupon you will most obviously draw the wrong experience. We have become the elongated and bitter opposite of the self help silliness that pervades less intelligent discourse. Whoops, my experience of this just misfired, I should really get my graybulb tuned, anyways, can everything in science be so godawefully materialist, smug, and declarative, its amazing that the religion of observable matter has become so pervasively dark in recent years - evoulutionary biology, psychology and their ilk. The god delusion is actually a god complex, filled with vitrolic knownothings carving out a space of nihilistic fantasty. Its much too much on a day when the markets closed 14 thousdand, one year ago.
Posted by: jeff | Oct 9, 2008 8:29:10 PM
Currently Smoking--
I have a genetic of San Pedro from Northern Chile that is scary!
The machine elves show up every time almost!
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Oct 9, 2008 10:23:22 PM
Disregard the above post--
It was aimed at someone on a financial analysis blog I frequent-
Sorry!
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Oct 9, 2008 10:25:28 PM
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