Worse off as a species?

[runedeadthA]

Oh, natural selection, I'm so sorry they killed you.

I agree, R.I.P. Natural Selection
Beginning of the Universe - Rise Of Man


I think what we really need is a good Ol' world war, not a nuclear one, but a nice big one that will help keep the population down, and maybe advance our sciences a bit (again). Of course, NZ (and maybe Australia) would probably gain a huge Boon from all the people dying to flee there from the war-torn places... hmmmm...

 

[RhusRadicans]

A. Humanity is not "just another animal". It is axiomatic fact that the complexity and profundity of human existance is far superior to that of any other animal due to our intellectual abilities and staggeringly complicated patterns of interaction. To say that people are "just another animal" and to evaluate us by the standards of wild animal species is like saying that any multicellular organism is "just another bunch of cells" and evaluating it with the standards one would use to observe and understand single-celled organisms. You cannot explain with this thinking why nerve cells, which, in the world of single-celled organisms, would die almost immediatley due to their lack of self-sufficiency, exist because, by your logic, they should be killed off by the natural selection which applies to lone cells. It fails to acknowledge the importance of the fact that systems of interaction between the composing entites has advanced on a fundamental level.

B. Although I agree that certain people are more talented or otherwise worthy of merit than others, you seem to think that the standard for this is objective and universal and that a person's success in society is solely due to this inherent talent. In reality, a person's worth is only relevant to the environment around them. The likes of Steven Hawking, referenced by another poster here, and John Nash, although near worthless in prehistoric society, have proven invaluable contributors to modern society due to their intellectual acheivements. A person's "worth" is only in respect to his or her surroundings
Also, you do not seem to recognize that in reality there is a great deal of luck which surrounds most successfull peoples' accomplishments. Inherent talent with literary critisicm will get you nowhere if you are never taught to read, nor will leadership skills help you if you are unlucky enough to be born into the lowest caste of a socially rigid society. Success in life is due as much to chance, if not more so, than to innate ability. A failure to recognize this and to belittle the unsuccessful because of the card they have been handed is ignorant and arrogant. I am not trying to call you names, but you should be careful to think things through before you suggest changes be made.

 

[Pimppeter2]

I knew it as soon as I saw a sign that said

"CAUTION: Water on road during rain"

U SO SMART

 

[Neonbob]

Natural selection is not dead. It will only stop when death does the same. I don't imagine that will happen any time soon.

Well, then humanity dies.
I don't have a big problem with that, either.

Let me get this straight, you want humanity to improve, but don't care if it dies. Is there some logic there that I'm missing?

Only if you have a degree in Max-Logic, and I assure you, you do not.

...and what's wrong with humanity going extinct? It's not like the earth would be doomed without us.

 

[Oldmanwillow]

A. Humanity is not "just another animal". It is axiomatic fact that the complexity and profundity of human existance is far superior to that of any other animal due to our intellectual abilities and staggeringly complicated patterns of interaction. To say that people are "just another animal" and to evaluate us by the standards of wild animal species is like saying that any multicellular organism is "just another bunch of cells" and evaluating it with the standards one would use to observe and understand single-celled organisms. You cannot explain with this thinking why nerve cells, which, in the world of single-celled organisms, would die almost immediatley due to their lack of self-sufficiency, exist because, by your logic, they should be killed off by the natural selection which applies to lone cells. It fails to acknowledge the importance of the fact that systems of interaction between the composing entites has advanced on a fundamental level.

B. Although I agree that certain people are more talented or otherwise worthy of merit than others, you seem to think that the standard for this is objective and universal and that a person's success in society is solely due to this inherent talent. In reality, a person's worth is only relevant to the environment around them. The likes of Steven Hawking, referenced by another poster here, and John Nash, although near worthless in prehistoric society, have proven invaluable contributors to modern society due to their intellectual acheivements. A person's "worth" is only in respect to his or her surroundings
Also, you do not seem to recognize that in reality there is a great deal of luck which surrounds most successfull peoples' accomplishments. Inherent talent with literary critisicm will get you nowhere if you are never taught to read, nor will leadership skills help you if you are unlucky enough to be born into the lowest caste of a socially rigid society. Success in life is due as much to chance, if not more so, than to innate ability. A failure to recognize this and to belittle the unsuccessful because of the card they have been handed is ignorant and arrogant. I am not trying to call you names, but you should be careful to think things through before you suggest changes be made.

First off WE ARE JUST ANOTHER ANIMAL. We are nothing more than a series of cells that has formed into a very complex organism. I can say that our ability to reason and to suppress are own natural instincts is what makes us superior to the rest of the animal kingdom but it doesnt make us any less of an animal. FOR THE 100TH TIME I AM NOT SAYING ROUND PEOPLE UP AND KILL THEM I AM SAYING LEAVE THEM TO THERE OWN DEVICES.

Again if you read my argument carefully you should understand that i said its a problem that we tell our children when we are raises them that they are all equal, and uses are education system to support this. The only way to make things fair is to get rid of private school only have public school set it up for when all people go into that school initially equal and then they all compete from there. Naturally there will be winners and losers but it will all happen within the school not at there home. So it would be absolutely fair but survival of the fittest.

There is a great deal of luck in any part of our lives. To feel guility about it is foolishness, to say that it isnt fair is true but life was never meant to be fair. If it was there wouldn't be a need for winners or losers.

 

[Lord Monocle Von Banworthy]

Natural selection is going just fine. If you think it has stopped, you have two problems:
1. You are looking at such a tiny span of time that you can't see any effects because there hasn't been enough time to see them.
2. You think you know what fitness is. Fitness is defined very simply as the ability to produce produce reproductively viable offspring. The end. Maybe being strong and smart and healthy correlates with fitness, maybe it doesn't. Look at say longevity, which most laymen think constitutes fitness. Honestly, living longer than it takes to rear your children is wasteful. You're competing with your own children for resources, and might end up actually adversely impacting the number of copies of your genetic information that make it into future generations.

That's the real problem with eugenics. "Fitness" is defined retroactively by looking at results. It can only be described, not prescribed. We don't have enough information to decide whether a given group of humans is more or less fit just by looking at them.

 

[CipherMachine]

A. Humanity is not "just another animal". It is axiomatic fact that the complexity and profundity of human existance is far superior to that of any other animal due to our intellectual abilities and staggeringly complicated patterns of interaction. To say that people are "just another animal" and to evaluate us by the standards of wild animal species is like saying that any multicellular organism is "just another bunch of cells" and evaluating it with the standards one would use to observe and understand single-celled organisms. You cannot explain with this thinking why nerve cells, which, in the world of single-celled organisms, would die almost immediatley due to their lack of self-sufficiency, exist because, by your logic, they should be killed off by the natural selection which applies to lone cells. It fails to acknowledge the importance of the fact that systems of interaction between the composing entites has advanced on a fundamental level.

B. Although I agree that certain people are more talented or otherwise worthy of merit than others, you seem to think that the standard for this is objective and universal and that a person's success in society is solely due to this inherent talent. In reality, a person's worth is only relevant to the environment around them. The likes of Steven Hawking, referenced by another poster here, and John Nash, although near worthless in prehistoric society, have proven invaluable contributors to modern society due to their intellectual acheivements. A person's "worth" is only in respect to his or her surroundings
Also, you do not seem to recognize that in reality there is a great deal of luck which surrounds most successfull peoples' accomplishments. Inherent talent with literary critisicm will get you nowhere if you are never taught to read, nor will leadership skills help you if you are unlucky enough to be born into the lowest caste of a socially rigid society. Success in life is due as much to chance, if not more so, than to innate ability. A failure to recognize this and to belittle the unsuccessful because of the card they have been handed is ignorant and arrogant. I am not trying to call you names, but you should be careful to think things through before you suggest changes be made.

I love these discussions. Anyways. I Disagree with you on A. We are comparing multi-celled organisms to other multi-celled organisms. That's the same. Also, without a government to stop us from killing each other for land and food we'ed pretty much be animals. Just really deadly ones. However, with B I wholeheartedly agree. Your position in life is completely serendipitous really. That's why I hate people who say stuff like "I'm active in my school! I care!" When their parents pushed them into doing clubs and stuff. We are a product of those around us.

 

[supermaster1337]

You know what this sounds alot like Natzism. Hmm very similar. Or it can be just me (which i know its not)

Lets go kill the weak and make sure the genes dont get passed down because they are inferior (Jews).

im just saying this sounds alot like he wants an aryan race.

killing off the weaker people is wrong letting them die isnt (ok not so much) what I think he is saying is the best way to improve humanity is to allow the idiots to die off let them fall into to poverty just fall away from the public eye, like what the spartans did if the child is weak deformed well it gets drowned it sucks but there civilization was fairly pure

Im not saying this isnt brutal but if we want a great human culture brutality is key if you cant survive you dont deserve to live..

Very well said. If even you disagree with it its my point exactly.

not really, the spartans killed the people, not let them die. and the spartans were crushed by the Ottomans. and the ottomans were one of the most civilized people that just roamed.

What may be idiotic for you may be smart to somebody else.
What defines an idiot?

letting people fall into poverty which hurts the country and thust hurts the strong. Its economics.

Im not bashing you im just making an arguable point.

 

[Valiance]

snip

Agreed 100%.

Hopefully I will get to reboot the human race on the moon, with only scientists and engineers.

I was typing a longer, more coherent post about how technology slowly stops everyone from dying, and perhaps as our technology and tools advance, that is our method of evolving.

But then I realize that when the population of the earth hits 7 billion, perhaps there -is- a better way.

If over thousands of years we breeded ourselves to not have to eat as much, to survive more diseases, we would rely less on outside materials, and rely more on our own abilities as a race.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Do I have to point out how _incredibly_ weak an individual human is?

A tiger, bear, or even a gorilla could tear us to shreds in a few seconds.

We are physically weak in pretty much all areas.

What do we have going for us? Stamina, versatility, intelligence, and sociability.

1 person is not much, by comparison to a typical animal of comparable size.
100 however, is another matter entirely.

And evolution hasn't stopped. It's merely shifted. Our species evolves as a group, and you can hardly call us weak in that regard, since we totally and utterly dominate life on this planet...

As a side note, cooperation is better than competition as long as you can avoid cheaters.

100 people working together can accomplish more than 100 people competing with eachoter to be the best.
However, 100 people that work together, but have 50 people in the group who aren't pulling their weight is not good for the group.
This has nothing to do with competition.

So you have to be clear in your goals: Do you want to improve society as a whole? Or do you want to improve the individuals within society?

Society as a whole benefits not from 'brilliant' people, but from everyone in it contributing as much as they are able.
Put another way, even if you were doing research, 1 'brilliant' researcher may be 10 times better than a normal one, but 100 normal researchers would still produce better results...

We don't need more competition.
We need to give people a fairer start in life.
Find ways to get everyone to contribute what they can, because very few people are actually useless...

 

[CplDustov]

Fair enough makes more sense; though unequal doesn't necessarily imply superior/inferior so much as incomparable.
And while we're on the topic Gandhi has a great pro Hitler quote something along the lines of not being so bad after all because of his bloodless victories: read "annexing". Would that make him pro greater good? Though this was 1940 some I'm unsure to what extent people were or weren't aware of the Hitler administration's activities.

Hitler, after a fashion, did a very good job of increasing the quality of life for the "greater good" (as he defined it) of one part of his society and, had he gone much further they would be all that's left and so his actions would pass onto what I'm going to call the greatest good, being as there would be no minority to differentiate from and not many left to protest the fact.

As for different types of education I couldn't agree more. Academic subjects are not for everyone and I have seen a fair number of people who had no interest in learning chemistry and economics and as such had a crap time of it and, being bored of the whole system, find ways to disrupt the class. Many, I'm sure, would have been far happier learning things like plumbing which are in fact skilled jobs that we are in need of and [understatement] don't pay all that badly [/understatement]. Jobs that I would probably be fairly useless at.

 

[Leorex]

Do I have to point out how _incredibly_ weak an individual human is?

A tiger, bear, or even a gorilla could tear us to shreds in a few seconds.

We are physically weak in pretty much all areas.

What do we have going for us? Stamina, versatility, intelligence, and sociability.

1 person is not much, by comparison to a typical animal of comparable size.
100 however, is another matter entirely.

And evolution hasn't stopped. It's merely shifted. Our species evolves as a group, and you can hardly call us weak in that regard, since we totally and utterly dominate life on this planet...

As a side note, cooperation is better than competition as long as you can avoid cheaters.

100 people working together can accomplish more than 100 people competing with eachoter to be the best.
However, 100 people that work together, but have 50 people in the group who aren't pulling their weight is not good for the group.
This has nothing to do with competition.

So you have to be clear in your goals: Do you want to improve society as a whole? Or do you want to improve the individuals within society?

Society as a whole benefits not from 'brilliant' people, but from everyone in it contributing as much as they are able.
Put another way, even if you were doing research, 1 'brilliant' researcher may be 10 times better than a normal one, but 100 normal researchers would still produce better results...

We don't need more competition.
We need to give people a fairer start in life.
Find ways to get everyone to contribute what they can, because very few people are actually useless...

this, we have not stopped evolving, we have slowed down, due to the mass of our gene pool ( so many diffrent genes, that need to be consolidated into less genes ) a species with less numbers evolves faster, because it needs to.

 

[jodko]

Competition is what brings out the best qualities in people as well as the worst.

 

[Danny3005]

suicide is this guys only option, bye

 

[FluffX]

Sorry if this has been said before, but Darwin did say that a species will stop evolving eventually. We've reached that point. It's not a very glorious point, and it's kind of gross and disgusting, but all in all we could be worse off.

 

[CrystalShadow]

Darwin also once said something that some people would do well to consider:

Paraphrasing here, since I don't have an exact quote:
"The species that survives is not the one that is the strongest, fastest, or most intelligent. It is the species that can best adapt to change.".

This is something people seeking to 'improve' a species don't really seem to understand...

 

[saxist01]

The only competition that occurs in natural selection is competition for resources. Every since the agricultural revolution (some 8000 years ago), there have been more than enough resources for everyone so natural selection stopped. Competition for jobs does nothing more than stratify the society still leaving males and females on every level to mate. More successful males and females will mate together, while less successful males and females will also mate together (most of the time more so). But until we reach a point where the amount of resources is below our need, natural selection simply will not happen. And personally, I believe that this does not happen soon, there will be a huge disaster for the entire human population. Every forest needs a purging fire otherwise the whole forest burns.

 

[Insanum]

i dont think we have stopped evolving. But thats me.

Granted natural selection has stopped.

i think your arguement is flawed. everyone normal person is born the same, As a baby, What happens after that is all cause & effect. So Ghandi & hitler where both pushed out of the velvet tardis & away they went.

When it comes down too it, Humans have dexterity & Intelligence on theyre side, And the fact that we tend too stick together as a species.

I prefer the "adapt or die" mentallity - thats KIND of a form of natural selection - and we're soon about to find out if the scientists where right about global warming.

If you want too feel better about the human gene pool, check out the darwin awards, Avoid unprotected sex & one nighters, And keep an eye of for someone with strong genes.

Ahh i love genetics

 

[thedailylunatic]

Mostly I found the post tl;dr, but I'd like to note two things:

1) Yeah, you're somewhat right in theory,

2) But, no, this doesn't matter in the long run.

This is because the advance of technology is moving in exponential inverse proportion to the dilution of the human gene pool. The more we advance technologically, the less the lack of evolutionary rigor will matter.

Take me, for instance. I have and have suffered from chronic asthma, a hernia, appendicitis, ingrown toenails, impacted wisdom teeth, and a variety of colds and flus. Every one of those things would have killed me in a state of nature and, without the advances of modern technology, most of you would probably be already dead at your ages from similar circumstances. Regardless, I believe that most of us deserve to live despite our physical frailties, myself in particular

Your argument, in essence, is the basis for the philosophy of genocidal white supremacy which lead to Nazism and, on a less horrifying note (depending on your philosophy), to the pro-choice movement. Take it easy, the world isn't all that grim; think of it less as the absence of natural selection and more as the shift of the emphasis of natural selection from the absence of physical weakness to the primacy of social and intellectual skill. In other words, evolution isn't controlling us now by rewarding us with genetic immortality for not dying but rather by getting us laid when we do awesome things (hint: we call it capitalism).

In a few decades, technology will turn us all into Nietzschean ubermenschen as far as our physical bodies are concerned. The next level of evolution will not be physical, it will be psychological: it will be involved in getting us to use our nanotech-enhanced super-brains to do something other than sitting around the house pounding away at our portable blowjob dispensers.