Have humans stopped evolving? If not, how are we evolving?

[Torgny]

There is still no evidence at all that the 'higher mental faculties of humans' have a non-natural origin. In fact, all the evidence gathered so far points towards a strictly natural physical origin for all life on Earth.

What we know from facts is that we can find old fossiles from animals showing that they have developed slowly through the years. Both Darwin and Wallace developed the same basic ideas at the same time, and these theories were very similar. They also influenced each other and had a lot of correspondence between them. However their conclusions are somewhat different.

Wallace could find no evidence that the ideas of Darwin could explain the emergence of human genious, such as Beethoven, da Vinci and others. He could see no other explanation that a facility outside the human brain. "that natural selection cannot account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical musings, and wit and humour."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace

 

[Torgny]

Are you sure you really understand the theory? Do you understand how species slowly change over time - a process that *never* stops?

Yes I have understood it, I have studied both Darwin and Wallace (although not as a specialist in biology). It is a gradual biological process, that however is not liniear but now and then takes big jumps forwards.

I have no problem with biological development, but in my experience this is not the only development. We also have to understand the energies that are above and below the spectrum of "visable light" that influences us.

 

[peter grimes]

Wallace could find no evidence that the ideas of Darwin could explain the emergence of human genious, such as Beethoven, da Vinci and others. He could see no other explanation that a facility outside the human brain. "that natural selection cannot account for mathematical, artistic, or musical genius, as well as metaphysical musings, and wit and humour."

I don't know if you're characterization of Wallace views is accurate or not, but, assuming they are accurate, then there's a simple explanation. Wallace didn't have all the evidence available to him that we have today. Back when they were working on this stuff - remember that a lot has happened in the last century and a half!! - there was no known mechanism for encoding and transmitting genetic information. That discovery had to wait another 100 years. I imagine that if Wallace were alive today he'd be pretty comfortable with the idea that the full range of humanity's abilities is the result of nothing more than regular biological evolution. Of course, I could be wrong.

In discussions like these it's not wise to rest your case on the views of someone who's been dead for a hundred years. Science moves on, the dead rest in peace.

...but in my experience this [biological development] is not the only development.

What other development have you experienced?

 

[Torgny]

I don't know if you're characterization of Wallace views is accurate or not, but, assuming they are accurate, then there's a simple explanation. Wallace didn't have all the evidence available to him that we have today. Back when they were working on this stuff - remember that a lot has happened in the last century and a half!! - there was no known mechanism for encoding and transmitting genetic information. That discovery had to wait another 100 years. I imagine that if Wallace were alive today he'd be pretty comfortable with the idea that the full range of humanity's abilities is the result of nothing more than regular biological evolution. Of course, I could be wrong.

In discussions like these it's not wise to rest your case on the views of someone who's been dead for a hundred years. Science moves on, the dead rest in peace.

What other development have you experienced?

I have experienced the rapid development of the mind. People in general are thinking much more than a few hundred years ago. And I have experienced a development of consiousness, people identify with something greater than the small village, and are generally starting to understand themselves.

I see universe as energies of various vibrations, not a mechanichal universe. My view is that everything is energy. Much of these energies we can not (yet) perceive. We know for example that high vibrations like x-rays are much more powerful than visable light. electrons are particles but also vibration. Could it be that vibrations we can not perceive are also particles, that there exist forms of "unseen" energies we can not yet perceive? Could unseen vibrations/particles build unseen forms as the soul? I can say that I have experienced what I perceive as the soul, but since modern science does not regard own experiences being valid, I have to refer to people like Wallace and Einstein (who said that everything is energy). I start from my own experiences, not the theories of others (although I like to listen to them).

I don't say that I am right in all and that all others are wrong, but I think that all various explanations have to be viewed as long as they are not against logic, observations and experience.

 

[Olleus]

I don't say that I am right in all and that all others are wrong, but I think that all various explanations have to be viewed as long as they are not against logic, observations and experience.

But Occam's Razor says that they should nevertheless be ignored if they make more assumptions and/or a more complicated explanation than another theory. Otherwise, I could make up another theory that has yet another level of energy which rotates (on the spot) and this rotation of energy has many applications but they all happen to cancel out in every single experiment and observation ever made. Unless a new concept is needed to explain a phenomenon, it should not be used.

 

[Torgny]

But Occam's Razor says that they should nevertheless be ignored if they make more assumptions and/or a more complicated explanation than another theory. Otherwise, I could make up another theory that has yet another level of energy which rotates (on the spot) and this rotation of energy has many applications but they all happen to cancel out in every single experiment and observation ever made. Unless a new concept is needed to explain a phenomenon, it should not be used.

You are right, it should be simple. Everything is energy, can it be expressed more simple? E=mc2. Matter is energy, thoughs is energy, soul is energy, light is energy, sound is energy. The idea that everything is energy is in tune with modern science.

There are many phenomens that in my view needs to be explained. One of them is that since the Big Bang universe has expanded. Astronomers have up to now believed that thew speed of this expansion is decreasing due to the law of gravidity. But in the last years it has been found that the speed of the expansion is increasing. How do we explain this, could it be some energy or law that is unknown for us yet?

 

[peter grimes]

Everything is energy, can it be expressed more simple? E=mc2. Matter is energy, thoughs is energy, soul is energy, light is energy, sound is energy. The idea that everything is energy is in tune with modern science.

No quarrel there, except that energy mat not be the highest common factor... but that's not important to the point of this thread: whether or not Homo Sapiens is still subject to evolutionary pressures.

There are many phenomens that in my view needs to be explained. One of them is that since the Big Bang universe has expanded. Astronomers have up to now believed that thew speed of this expansion is decreasing due to the law of gravidity. But in the last years it has been found that the speed of the expansion is increasing. How do we explain this, could it be some energy or law that is unknown for us yet?

It's pretty obvious that current cosmology is in a state of uncertainty - it's one of the most exciting developments of the last 50 years! To think that when I was in school the Inflationary Big Bang model was pretty much accepted only to be quirked by Dark Matter -- and now Dark Energy!! -- in my own lifetime is pretty awesome. These are exactly the sorts of scientific paradigm shifts that make history, and we're living them
But back on topic: None of this has anything at all to do with human evolution. Biological evolution is dependent on nothing more than chemistry and physics, but you seem to be arguing that because cosmology (the solutions to which determine the chemistry and physics in our universe) isn't fully solved biological evolution isn't fully explained either. The two are not quite so correlated.

EDIT:

...could it be some energy or law that is unknown for us yet?

Rereading your post, it appears that you're trying to connect uncertainty in cosmology with uncertainty about the fact of biological evolution. There is simply no connection. Biological evolution is a fact. There is no uncertainty regarding it. The mechanism is known, the rate has been measured, experiments have born out predictions. To put it simply, IT IS KNOWN. However, there is indeed still much we have to learn about how our universe is put together; but there simply aren't the same sort of gaps in our understanding of evolution - including the evolution of human beings.

 

[Torgny]

I used the example of cosmology since I am convinced that science is in the middle of a shift of paradigm, and that nuclear physics and cosmology are the frontrunners of this shift of paradigm. I have said before and repeat again that I also think that biological evolution is a fact. But I also say that I don’t think it can explain all of it.

Wallace was convinced that the sudden emergence of genies in a family could not be explained by the very, very slow development of biological evolution, that is why he said that there also must be some other factor involved. Near-death experiences where a person can see what is going on in the room while out of consciousness can in my view not be explained by biology. Healing (when people are cured by laying hands on people) that now is becoming accepted by some hospitals in Britain, can in my view not be explained by biology, only that the healer is using some energies outside the traditional concept of biology and chemistry.

 

[Perfection]

Wallace was convinced that the sudden emergence of genies in a family could not be explained by the very, very slow development of biological evolution, that is why he said that there also must be some other factor involved.

Ummm, Wallace died in 1913. His opinions (provided you don't have a misconception of them, which could easily be the case) don't carry much weight. I am aware of serious modern biologist who would make that claim.

Near-death experiences where a person can see what is going on in the room while out of consciousness can in my view not be explained by biology.

Except for one problem: they don't actually happen.

The reports are mistaken, and no study with good research methodology has confirm their actual existence.

Healing (when people are cured by laying hands on people) that now is becoming accepted by some hospitals in Britain, can in my view not be explained by biology, only that the healer is using some energies outside the traditional concept of biology and chemistry.

I'm not sure which brand of flim-flam this is, because there are so many variations on the idea, but they all are crap.

 

[Torgny]

Perfection
Wallace
Ummm, Wallace died in 1913. His opinions (provided you don't have a misconception of them, which could easily be the case) don't carry much weight. I am aware of serious modern biologist who would make that claim.

What matters for me are not the opinions of Wallace – but the questions he put forward. Is there any modern biologist who can answer the question of Wallace – if biological development is so slow, how can the emergence in a family of a genius be so quick? I would like to hear what the explanation would be.

Near-death
Except for one problem: they don't actually happen.
The reports are mistaken, and no study with good research methodology has confirm their actual existence.

Yes they do happen. People can describe what happened to them, and eight million people in USA say they have experienced it according to Gallup, this is a fact. What may differ are the explanations of these experiences, some doctors say that these experiences are genuine, others are openminded, still others call it hallucinations.

What people in near-death experiences often say is that they can experience leaving their physical body and see the whole room as the doctors and nurses are working. They can in detail afterwards describe what happened in the room when they were out of consciousness or more or less clinical dead. How do we explain this? 25 UK and US hospitals are at the moment in a project examining near-death studies in 1,500 heart attack patients-survivors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_death_experience

Healing
I'm not sure which brand of flim-flam this is, because there are so many variations on the idea, but they all are crap.

Have you done some research on this? How do you know that they are all crap? And if they are crap, why are they working on hospitals in Britain? About ten years ago I had severe gall-stone attacks about every second months. The doctor wanted to make surgery, but instead I went to a healer (spiritual healing). After a couple of years the symptoms were gone, I can now eat all food such as boiled eggs as you normally can not with these problems and have not had any attack for several years.

What I say is based upon facts, research and reasoning. My conclusions may be different from some other people. And I think that I have been met with much respect on this tread.

 

[Perfection]

Perfection
Wallace
Ummm, Wallace died in 1913. His opinions (provided you don't have a misconception of them, which could easily be the case) don't carry much weight. I am aware of serious modern biologist who would make that claim.

What matters for me are not the opinions of Wallace – but the questions he put forward. Is there any modern biologist who can answer the question of Wallace – if biological development is so slow, how can the emergence in a family of a genius be so quick? I would like to hear what the explanation would be.

Oh! GENIUS. I was wonderin' what the hell you meant by "genies", I thought you were misspelling "genes" or "genus".

So, first off, you gotta realize, you're getting into a very complicated issue here. What makes someone a "genius" depends on social and genetic and environmental stuff here. It's not some simple characteristic; so any explanation I give is going to be incomplete. However that doesn't mean it's incompatible with evolutionary theory, it just means that we haven't figured out how exactly it works in this particular instance.

However, I'll give you an idea of how it probably works, with the intricate details left for the biologists.

There's nothing in biology that says that an inherited trait must be similar to your parents. Albinism is an inherited trait that can be traced to a single recessive gene. A person with only one copy of this recessive gene will have normal pigmentation, whereas one with two copies will have no pigmentation. So in a family of ordinary pigmented people, out can pop a surprise albino! That trait was hidden in their genes, unseen to the outside world, waiting for the right combination of other genes. We could say the same for the capacity for high intelligence, though it would be a complex polygenic trait. The parents of the genius already had the genes for it in them, they just didn't exhibit it.

Near-death
Except for one problem: they don't actually happen.
The reports are mistaken, and no study with good research methodology has confirm their actual existence.

Yes they do happen. People can describe what happened to them, and eight million people in USA say they have experienced it according to Gallup, this is a fact. What may differ are the explanations of these experiences, some doctors say that these experiences are genuine, others are openminded, still others call it hallucinations.

I do not deny that near death experiences happen. That most certainly is a fact. People really do experience weird things under near death conditions. This of course stemming from the fact that your brain chemistry is severely altered in these states.

What doesn't happen though are "Near-death experiences where a person can see what is going on in the room while out of consciousness". No study with good research methodology has confirmed the existence of that.

What people in near-death experiences often say is that they can experience leaving their physical body and see the whole room as the doctors and nurses are working. They can in detail afterwards describe what happened in the room when they were out of consciousness or more or less clinical dead. How do we explain this?

Experiencing leaving one's body is a pretty common experience (I've personally experienced it), you of course don't leave your body, it's just a illusion and one that can be chemically induced. As for details attributed to people when they were unconscious/clinically dead, there are plenty of explanations that don't involve them actually leaving their body. They generally are:
1. Not actually being completely unconscious. I'm sure you can remember occasions where what you hear enters into your dreams. Same thing can happen in near death experiences, and note that people will often say they see things that they hear: one might hear a squeaky wheel and imagine oneself being wheeled around the hospital for example.
2. Filling in obvious details. Let's say I go in for open heart surgery. After the surgery I recall seeing them cutting my chest with a knife. Does that I actually saw them do that? Maybe not! Maybe at some point during the procedure, I imagined/dreamed that I saw it.
3. Distorted memory. Memories are not immutable, suggestions can implant details that the person might not have actually experienced? "Did you see me to the left of the surgeon" might be implanted into the memory as the NDE experiencer tries to recall his experience.
4. Outright lies. Certainly the majority of people who have NDEs are telling the truth to the best of their ability, but that doesn't mean that there those out there who would take us for fools!

25 UK and US hospitals are at the moment in a project examining near-death studies in 1,500 heart attack patients-survivors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_death_experience

NDEs should be studied! They're an interesting phenomenon. But, there's no reason to think that these have any particularly profound implications. The brain just does some weird stuff under the extreme conditions.

Healing
I'm not sure which brand of flim-flam this is, because there are so many variations on the idea, but they all are crap.

Have you done some research on this? How do you know that they are all crap?

Well, the one I've researched were debunked by an 11 year old girl. Now, I obviously can't go and debunk every version out there, but I can say that I've found no compelling evidence to support any of them. Plus, if any of these practitioners actually could do it, why haven't they proved it scientifically and earned their cool million dollars?

And if they are crap, why are they working on hospitals in Britain?

Because they say that they work and some people believe them. There's an astronomical amount of therapies out there that have no scientific backing.

About ten years ago I had severe gall-stone attacks about every second months. The doctor wanted to make surgery, but instead I went to a healer (spiritual healing). After a couple of years the symptoms were gone, I can now eat all food such as boiled eggs as you normally can not with these problems and have not had any attack for several years.

Just because you got better doesn't mean that the healer made you better.

What I say is based upon facts, research and reasoning. My conclusions may be different from some other people. And I think that I have been met with much respect on this tread.

I certainly don't mean any disrespect to you personally, but I do believe that your beliefs are in conflict with scientific evidence.

 

[peter grimes]

Tonight's episode of RadioLab on WNYC touched on the topic of this thread. I'll offer a brief summary, since I can't figure out a way to link to the end of the program where the precisely relevant bits are discussed:

There is reason to believe that humans have been domesticating themselves [ourselves??] for the last 30k years. The same sorts of changes that we see in the domestication process of wild animals -- smaller teeth, juvenile features, gracile bones -- are found in the Homo fossil record.

 

[Perfection]

I dunno about that though, because some things went in opposite directions, for example, domesticated animals are generally dumber than their wild ancestors.

 

[peter grimes]

And humans also lost cranial capacity over the last 100k years....

 

[Perfection]

And humans also lost cranial capacity over the last 100k years....

You wouldn't happen to have a source for that, would you?

 

[peter grimes]

OK, Perfection - you caught me

I'm reading a book right now that has mentioned this 'fact' several times. So upon your prompting I opened up to the bibliography... and it wasn't there. No bibliography at all. The author is a science writer, so I can't believe he didn't include one. Scanning his website I came across this:

On their way to becoming the lords of the earth, our ancestors went through countless disasters and cataclysms. Many times they had to change or die. But the last great critical event was the end of the ice age. Almost everything in the environment changed, and changed fast. That was the date of the appearance of the first true humans, or at least that’s what my research led me to believe.

Consider, for example, the matter of the brain. The big human brain is the hallmark of our kind. It seems to be unique in nature. And the whole rise of the human race, if you want to call it a rise, involved incremental changes in the size of our brains. But at no point did evolution remove humans from the natural environment. We were just one of the animals. Talented, yes, but one of the animals.

Then, twelve thousand years ago, humans lost between five and ten percent of their brain mass. This is a little known fact. I’ve found that even most archaeologists don’t know about it, but it’s a solid fact. A few years ago an Australian scientist was asked to look at the totality of the evidence, the collected measurements of the skulls of ancient humans and their predecessors, and there was no doubt. Remarkably, the human animal lost significant brain mass at the Holocene horizon. Maybe as much as ten percent.

No one knows why, but it was a dramatic change in direction from past evolution. For a million years and more we were made increasingly remarkable by the growth of the size of our brain. And then, suddenly, we lost a significant chunk of that brain and at the same time we stepped out and began to take command of the earth.

This is quite a scenario. We lost brain mass . . . and we got smarter?

I'll try to find this Australian source, but I'm feeling pretty skeptical.

EDIT:
Perhaps it's this abstract? It notes that cranial capacity diminished 10%, along with a general 10% diminution of body size.

 

[Perfection]

OK, Perfection - you caught me

I'm reading a book right now that has mentioned this 'fact' several times. So upon your prompting I opened up to the bibliography... and it wasn't there. No bibliography at all. The author is a science writer, so I can't believe he didn't include one. Scanning his website I came across this:



I'll try to find this Australian source, but I'm feeling pretty skeptical.

EDIT:
Perhaps it's this abstract? It notes that cranial capacity diminished 10%, along with a general 10% diminution of body size.

Do you have to log in or something? The link doesn't work for me.

 

[civ_king]

OK, Perfection - you caught me

I'm reading a book right now that has mentioned this 'fact' several times. So upon your prompting I opened up to the bibliography... and it wasn't there. No bibliography at all. The author is a science writer, so I can't believe he didn't include one. Scanning his website I came across this:



I'll try to find this Australian source, but I'm feeling pretty skeptical.

EDIT:
Perhaps it's this abstract? It notes that cranial capacity diminished 10%, along with a general 10% diminution of body size.

skull size =/= intelligence

 

[peter grimes]

Here's the link again... and a screenshot of the abstract.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119121825/abstract

Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology
Volume 25 Issue 9, Pages 745 - 749
Published Online: 28 Jun 2007
EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN BRAIN: IS BIGGER BETTER?
Maciej Henneberg
Wood Jones Chair of Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy, Department of Anatomical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Correspondence to: Professor M Henneberg, Department of Anatomical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia. E-mail mhennebe@medicine.adelaide.edu.au

 

[peter grimes]

skull size =/= intelligence

I'm not sure I agree with this. Afterall, there is an undisputed correlation between cranial capacity per body mass and more complexity in the neuronal connections. It's fair to say that it's tough to characterize a measure of intelligence, but it's not fair to say that there's absolutely no relationship.

The largest mite in the world just doesn't have enough room for the neurons that fit into the smallest cat.