Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
I'm sorry, Satch. I didn't quite get your point. What do you mean by adaptation vs. natural selection?
Our environment is changing very fast because of technological achievement so that affects human evolution to some degree. Perhaps the invention of the computer has made it a tiny bit better to be smart and a little less important to be socially intelligent. Who knows? The driving force behind human evolution is still essentially who gets laid and who don't. Any preference doesn't have to be big. If there are two versions of a specific gene and having one version makes you 1% more likely to be chosen as a sexual partner, over the course of a million years, that 1% can make a huge difference in the human gene pool. Of course, sometime during that million years, environment could also change so that it favours the other version of the gene.
In the end, evolution generally operates on a large timescale and it's not something people should concern themselves with. To care about that sort of thing instead of just letting it unfold naturally leads to eugenics and thoughts of human breeding and so on.
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What I'm saying is that it's not strictly biological evolution which has a tremendous influence on the direction in which we travel as a species. You can look at a timeline of human evolution from human prehistory to the present and see one thing, and conversely look at the history of human adaptation which has largely manifested itself through the use of technology and see something completely different, perhaps not contradictory, but different. Has the speed and complexity of our rate of adaptation not increased progressively as we've evolved as a species? I'm asking literally, because I'm assuming and I don't have any hard factual evidence to assert that claim.
What I'm throwing out there is this: We have come to be able to manipulate the way our species evolves through technology and the interconnectedness of our awareness that things like the internet provide, this process of adaptation through technology has grown at an ever increasing rate since the beginning of the species. Our growing rate of adaptation and it's increasing influence on the course of human history makes the influence of biological natural selection less relevant and influential as our history progresses.