Are we going backwards in evolution?

[pawsies]

When I think back to human history we have made some incredible feats. From the discovery of various things to inventions and architecture.
It seems like the modern day and future will be not as impressive as we rely so much on technology and the practical skills are being lost in future generations. How many of us Google 'how to..' or look up YouTube for how to do something?
Whereas the ancient Greeks and other ancestors managed to invent or build things without resorting to technological means.
Technology is of course an incredible feat in itself but are we relying on it too much to teach ourselves and our family things that a community would do together in the past? Or is it just a new form of community?
Then we have social media which is creating a whole new generation of people obsessing over appearance and what people think of them. Very few practical skills being learnt there.

It just seems like we are going backwards compared to the previous feats that our society has accomplished.

What do you think?

You what?

You can't separate them. Makes no sense.

You what? [] You can't separate them. Makes no sense.

Ah, you are talking of human evolution ? Bit poor you expect your reader to guess what on earth you are on about, if you ask me. (I know you didn't, but you get my answer anyway).

Is civilisation an inevitable product of human evolution. Or hominid evolution ?

I don't know ... despite going to see Prof. Alice Roberts give a talk on it once.

I still not sure what you're on about.

We are hominids and this thread is about human evolution.

Anyway, where is the dividing line between human evolution and civilisation?

Clue: there isn't one. It's the Neanderthal problem demonstrates this.

Humans didn't need more than what was available at the height of the industrial revolution.

Well, I don't know about that. It is debatable that we need anything more than a cave, access to a stream and some method of killing animals for food or foraging.

It is just that life gets a bit easier with other stuff. Just like it has got easier since the Industrial Revolution due to advances in science and technology.

I think these big achievements were actually only made by a very small select group with very specific backgrounds.

There was always a huge population of underlings. Ancient Egypt, for example, ran on slave labour. At least now those people would be paid and have access to the internet to know about other opportunities if they were driven to do so.

It's not you everyday Joe/Joanne who is at the forefront of evolution though. It's scientists and techy people. Whether we're all addicted to social media or not, there are still boffins making breakthroughs and discoveries, as there always have been.

Well that’s a Whig interpretation of evolution if ever I read one!

Ancient Egypt, for example, ran on slave labour.

and yet the Great Pyramid was built by volunteers ...

*reverse Whig I mean. As has been pointed out, evolution has no normative direction.

There is no direction.

People think the industrial revolution was inherently good. Yes it did improve people's lives in the long term, it probably made them worse in first hundred years ago.

Hmm, interesting Seredipity. My education taught me that they were built by slaves but a quick Google tells me that history changed in the early 2000s. That's actually quite scary, that things I was taught as absolute fact can change.

And the idea that evolution is bound up with civilisation is some very dodgy social Darwinism that, ironically, I thought we had progressed beyond

In what way?

Civilisation is a result of evolution.

I have never been able to see a dividing line.

Hmm, interesting Seredipity. My education taught me that they were built by slaves but a quick Google tells me that history changed in the early 2000s. That's actually quite scary, that things I was taught as absolute fact can change.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

Try and learn a new fact a day. It's a great way of keeping your mind in check.

And on the pyramids, I am of the belief that if it's the monument that impresses you, you lack imagination. The far greater achievement was the organisation needed to oversee 35,000 workers. Feed and house them. Arrange the work so there was a pipeline of stones going up the building. A series of workshops ensuring masons had sharp bronze chisels (no iron yet). And all in fits and starts over 10 years as people returned to harvest the crops. All known about since we could decipher hieroglyphs ....

But I am a but girlyswot.

It’s true that I tend to look up how to do various tasks on the internet these days. For instance, I wanted to use the buttonhole stitch on my sewing machine, so I fired up YouTube and could do it there and then. Before the internet, I’d have probably consulted a library book, when I could get to the library and assuming they had the right book available.

Before that I guess I’d have asked someone I knew, and hoped they knew. It’s just that with the internet, we all have access to a larger pool of someones. People are social creatures, we’ve always asked each other how to do things and shared information and opinions - we just use a different medium to do that these days.

Instruction manuals have been around for De architectura - for example, I Quattro Libri - a set of instruction books from 1570 on how to build the ideal Roman-style villa, based on turn of the works of Romans such as Vitruvius and his work De architectura - a treatise on Roman architecture and technology. Writing things down to tell other people how to do things for themselves is hardly a new thing - it’s not like the Romans were all carefully working out for themselves how to build each aqueduct from scratch. They had instruction books as well! The YouTube tutorials of their day

Can't help but think we're on our way to being like the humans in Pixar's Wall-E

Terrible postures, overweight, physically unable, low bone density and muscle mass. Tech will do everything for us.

Any city centre in the UK will confirm that. Rest of the world is still growing and developing nicely except China.

The incredible pace of change in technology is the latest stage in evolution. It is science-fiction level technology.

The fact you think it's us going backwards show how used to everyday technology you've come and how little you know about how it works.

The brilliant minds writing code, researching disease etc could certainly rival the Greek philosophers. You don't hear much about the average Greek man who would be just as useless as modern man... just without technology to help him.

I'm 24, most of my skills are in language or technology. But, luckily I can research how to wire a plug, patch up a wall, create a lever system. And if all technology suddenly fails then we will relearn these skills ...

I think you just hold the youth in disdain because they don't make sense to you

• I think these big achievements were actually only made by a very small select group with very specific backgrounds.

There was always a huge population of underlings. Ancient Egypt, for example, ran on slave labour.*

Quite. Actually, there's a good case that technological progress was quite slow in the ancient civilisations because they had slave labour (and then after that peasants). The Greeks had some cute inventions including a sort of steam engine (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) but it was basically a toy. Why harness steam if you've got men and beasts?
There's a great museum in Heraklion which I highly recommend (kotsanasmuseum.com/our-museum-in-crete/?lang=en) - some really fun stuff but some of the the applications were limited. And modern man had no difficulty recreating these devices.

Today there are loads of scientists, engineers of all sorts with skills both intellectual and practical. Many of those have forebears who'd have been trapped as slaves or peasants - or by being women. And if some of the rest now have the leisure to spend their spare time on social media rather than exhausted after a day of manual labour (or fighting ... that's what a lot of the non-slave Greeks were skilled in) that's not a bad thing.

I feel like people have been saying we're getting stupider for a long time now; is is actually true or is that just something every generation says? Genuine question.

Xposted with some previous ... if not slaves in Egypt then certainly loads of manual labour. And Athens was funded off the backs of slaves in their silver mines.

But I am a but girlyswot.

The very existence of 'girlyswots' who can actually do something with their brains is surely one of the things our era can be massively proud of. Part of the reason it's possible is because of labour saving devices, mass production of clothes etc.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Socrates.... complaining about the youth of today is not a new thing

if not slaves in Egypt then certainly loads of manual labour

I didn't say Egypt didn't have slaves, which have featured in human civilisation far longer than they haven't (and I write that aware that there are places in the world where slavery is still extant).

I just said they didn't build the Great Pyramid.

An awful lot of religions around the world have slavery baked in. Which is one reason for not really thinking much of them.

Maybe the OP would like to consider whether slavery is part of human evolution too ?

Can you actually name a civilisation that didn't use slaves? Wasn't just Egypt...

The very existence of 'girlyswots' who can actually do something with their brains is surely one of the things our era can be massively proud of. Part of the reason it's possible is because of labour saving devices, mass production of clothes etc.

There's a limited study into evolutionary divergence in the past century based around female education.

The theory being that with women being selectively filtered into education (far more selectively than men initially, because it was harder to go), academic men were more likely to marry a woman who were their intellectual equal by meeting like-minded women of intelligence at university. Instead of marrying a woman for her looks, social standing, or money. Therefore inadvertently creating a self-selected 'breeding' programme for intelligence.

(And before anyone shouts, 'eugenics' - well, no, this isn't a eugenics plan. It's a theory postulated on evidence of intelligence as an inheritable trait and a societal shift.)

Of course it's incredibly hard to study, because there were always intelligent women who couldn't be educated as much but who still passed on their genes, and uneducated men funnelled into university because it was the expectation of their families. Still, an interesting theory.