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?

We've used technology to invent a global communal prosthetic memory. I consider that a step forward not a step backwards.

All lost if civilisation collapses though.

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.

Agriculture was a bad move (or was it leaving the oceans in the first place?). There was loads more leisure time before agriculture, iirc in some areas agriculture was developed then abandoned again, presumably on the grounds it was too much like hard work...

Agriculture was a bad move (or was it leaving the oceans in the first place?). There was loads more leisure time before agriculture, iirc in some areas agriculture was developed then abandoned again, presumably on the grounds it was too much like hard work...

However, hunter gatherers have no time or resources to develop metalwork. Jacob Bronowski in "The Ascent of Man" shows how nomadic societies are technologically stagnant and primitive. Moreover the development of agriculture leads to the necessity for defence. No point in tilling the land just to have a bunch of nomads wipe you out and eat your stuff.

Agriculture was a bad move (or was it leaving the oceans in the first place?). There was loads more leisure time before agriculture, iirc in some areas agriculture was developed then abandoned again, presumably on the grounds it was too much like hard work...

It's such a fascinating area of theory and research. There's huge amounts of evidence that humans benefit physically and mentally from directly:

• being involved in the means of food gathering/catching/killing
• being outside
• being physically active a lot of the time
• being centered around their primary familial/social groups

It's hardly rocket science. And yet we're all haring through the world, large swathes of us selling our sedentary labour to work inside, buy food, and spend a lot of time away from our families.

The trade off is basically medicine and light entertainment as far as I can see (I discount security, because I think that once you've eliminated resource competition of other humans, a bit of being chased by tigers probably counts as entertainment). Really the world would be a better place if we stockpiled medicine for a few hundred years and reduced the global population to a few hundred thousand living hunter-gatherer style with no nation boundaries whatsoever.

(getting to that scenario from our current one is admittedly a hiccup)

It's hardly rocket science.

Which, ironically, you won't get without farming

Really the world would be a better place if we stockpiled medicine for a few hundred years and reduced the global population to a few hundred thousand living hunter-gatherer style with no nation boundaries whatsoever.

I doubt there are many modern medicines that would last more than a decade or two at the most before they become chemically ... questionable.

And the up and down of human development through the past 100,000 years and assorted ice ages doesn't really sound aspirational right now.

Of course extra terrestrial expansion might open up some vistas. At least we'd have some respite from the flat-earth-moon-hoaxer thickies for a bit. That is until our descendants start arguing that "Earth" was a hoax and never existed.

Advances in medicine mean that in 200 years time with continued development, many current treatments will appal our descendants for their crudity. "What, you mean the treatments weren't tailored to an individual's genetic makeup back then?"

@SerendipityJane

Ahh, more hiccups. But consider this - in this bizarro-utopia, all diseases of society will be largely forgotten. Smoking, pollution, obesity etc. So humanity would mainly have to work out the ailments that are most likely to prevent reaching adulthood (after which most medieval etc people actually typically reached a decent age), how to preserve those medicines only, then crack on with it.

I'm talking here about a model under which most humans could live biologically-sensible, planet-holistic, wellbeing-centered lives, after all. Not about achieving anything more than that - life expectancy, government etc.

I'm not saying it's perfect (or indeed without literally billions of casualties! ). But the current system is hardly brilliant. High mortality rates in some areas, overbreeding in others. Overcompetitions for resources, a looming environmental crisis, human populations living under arbitrary governments, some good, some bad. Super wealthy living the highlife of the grind of millions.

It's hardly a system anyone would pick from the outside, not knowing where they'd end up in the global pecking order.

Advances in medicine mean that in 200 years time with continued development, many current treatments will appal our descendants for their crudity. "What, you mean the treatments weren't tailored to an individual's genetic makeup back then?"

Of course you only have to go back 200 years or so to an age when doctors were convinced that everyones reaction to disease was unique. Maybe we should have stuck with that

But what's the point of medicine from an evolutionary point of view (returning to the thread title) ? How does keeping organisms alive to consume limited resources - organisms that may not be able to play a part in adding to those resources - feature in the genetic imperative to reproduce and descend into the future ?

But what's the point of medicine from an evolutionary point of view (returning to the thread title) ? How does keeping organisms alive to consume limited resources - organisms that may not be able to play a part in adding to those resources - feature in the genetic imperative to reproduce and descend into the future ?

There's more to survival of the species (and even your own genes) than ones own reproduction. Humans and I think whales are almost unique in having adults surviving past fertility and contributing to the care of (and knowledge transmission to ) to younger generations.

There's more to survival of the species (and even your own genes) than ones own reproduction. Humans and I think whales are almost unique in having adults surviving past fertility and contributing to the care of (and knowledge transmission to ) to younger generations.

Oh, undoubtedly ... the more genes in play, the less chance of a single disease wiping us out (even if that is at the cost of human misery).

And human female longevity only really makes sense if it's a net addition to the system.

Genetic altruism is fascinating, and poorly understood. Well, by me leastways.

Someone at work was discussing this the other day. Their theory was that we were entering a period of reverse evolution as people on benefits were now more likely to have kids, and more kids, than professional couples, meaning that future generations would be more stupid on the whole than previous ones.

Led to a pretty awkward atmosphere all round!

Someone at work was discussing this the other day. Their theory was that we were entering a period of reverse evolution as people on benefits were now more likely to have kids, and more kids, than professional couples, meaning that future generations would be more stupid on the whole than previous ones.

But that's almost always been the case ... society as a pyramid, with the masses (clue in the name) at the bottom rising through middle class to aristocracy.

It's why the people at the top are so terrified of revolution - they are outnumbered many times by the layers below them.

Ken Livingstone did suggest that one of Mrs Thatchers mark of genius was to make people view that version of society as an egg, with the middle classes bulging.

Of course there's been no proven correlation between intelligence and social class, in much the same way there's no correlation between intelligence and sex, intelligence and race (whatever that means), intelligence and nationality, intelligence and geography, intelligence and political views, intelligence and sports support, intelligence and music tastes ....

And that's before you suddenly remember that "intelligence" itself is so poorly defined as to be pretty useless in any real application. Generally intelligence tests reveal far more about the setter than the respondent.

theres a film with exactly that premise - a really stupid man is frozen and wakes up in the future but because stuipd people had lots of kids and intelligent people only had 1 or none the world becomes populated with stupid people so when he is woken up he is the most intelligent man in the world!

I do feel that all the advancements in science and tech are going to be our downfall. our population is rising so much and where in the past pandemics and natural disasters would have culled humans to a more acceptable population level, we are now able to overcome it/create a vaccine etc

I think YABU

theres a film with exactly that premise - a really stupid man is frozen and wakes up in the future but because stuipd people had lots of kids and intelligent people only had 1 or none the world becomes populated with stupid people so when he is woken up he is the most intelligent man in the world!

The plot of "The Time Machine" explores similar themes ...

HG Wells had an even more chilling idea of divergent evolution in The Time Machine.

I do feel that all the advancements in science and tech are going to be our downfall

I don't understand the logic of that at all, in terms of survival of the species. Yes, our excessive breeding and overconsumption may well lead to a crash in population and a lot of misery. However, the distinguishing trait of Homo sapiens is our adaptability, intelligence and ingenuity.

Throughout history people have been whinging that we have too much technology and we're losing all of our practical skills/ruining our memories/becoming overly dependent on prosthetics/substitutes.

I bet people in 100 or 1000 years time will look back and, some will wonder how on earth people in 2020 coped without modern technology, and others will say, wouldn't it be better if we were back in 2020, when we didn't have modern technology and life was simpler?

(And btw, I think 'human history' is a much shorter timeframe than we could usefully understand in terms of evolution.)

I wonder if there are likely to be any discernible effects due to more genetic mixing thanks to transport - remember the geneticist Steve Jones who said that the bicycle was the greatest invention to combat genetic disorders, on the grounds that it resulted in more genetic mixing as a result of marriages between people living in different towns.

I wonder if there are likely to be any discernible effects due to more genetic mixing thanks to transport - remember the geneticist Steve Jones who said that the bicycle was the greatest invention to combat genetic disorders, on the grounds that it resulted in more genetic mixing as a result of marriages between people living in different towns.

Isn't the human genome ridiculously uniform, compared to a lot of species ? Suggesting a shrinking of the gene pool in recent history (down to a few thousand if not hundred individuals) ?

It's just a shame it's genes that are physically expressed ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy I think this is the film.

Too many misunderstand evolution to mean some kind of meaningful, continuous improvement of design.

Of course it is possible to deliberately misunderstand for comic or electoral effect.

Hiya @Sparklesocks
well yes but with that argument you’re suggesting we also don’t ‘need’ things like cancer drugs, vaccines or women surviving childbirth.
Yes, this occured to me too, even as I was posting :)

But isn't it a lovely daydream to imagine that we could have developed medical science without also having the giant, globe-consuming military-industrial complex that sits alongside it?
That we could have been a society that promoted human & animal welfare without having to dedicate such a disproportionate volume of natural resources, as well as human labour, to producing - essentially - a load of tat that we simply do not need?
Let alone a pyramid system of economics predicated on the 'top' 1% commandeering vast piles of resource & cash, which filters unreliably & unfairly down the rungs of a feudal system that still leaves a huge proportion of people without the necessities of food, clean water & shelter, let alone access to some of the marvels of medical science.

But no matter what pride humans take in their 'evolution', & whichever way that process is headed now, it has not advanced us sufficiently to ensure that every human has a 'fair-enough' share of what the planet, & our 'progress', should be able to offer all of us, not just the more fortunate.
So on that count, I don't rate our human evolution very highly. We can fly to the moon, but we can't be arsed to co-operate well enough to ensure no child goes hungry. We're a horrible species! - no matter how highly we think of our own 'evolution'.

We're a horrible species!

Only by our own arbitrary standards. Nature red in tooth and claw is a real thing. Some mammals happily kill their young, for example. Which appears not to be a human trait.