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?

@serendipityjane i'd like to think there are species elsewhere in the universe that might invent something akin to the internet and then use it for something more noble than porn, lies and slagging people off.

Can you actually name a civilisation that didn't use slaves?
Difficult. The Aboriginal people, I think - & some e.g. rainforest tribes.
But it's horribly hard to think of many - the whole of europe was built on slavery really, & if not legally defined slavery, terrible working & domestic conditions for the masses.

messolini this is the joy of looking at other cultures throughout history and thinking ‘what if’. If the Incas or Mayans had had the wheel; if Alexander had survived...

But even within our own times we’ve had huge political debates that, if they had gone the other way, could have resulted in different economic structures, different values and stronger senses of public spaces, while still having the same technology. The cultural environment that launched the Voyagers was very different to what we have now. So there is wriggle room I think.

@ThrowingGoodAfterBad thank you for finding the joy in taking this perspective :)
I possibly read too much Iain M Banks ...

Well, for joy, read shrieking ‘you f’ing greedy shits, what you have lost for all of us’ about the conquistadors.

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.

No other species is single-handledly bringing down countless others & polluting the cradle like homo sap though.
In the last 3 decades alone, insect population alone is down 75%.
75%!
And we have caused extinction to such a crushingly large number of species, many have disappeared before I had ever even heard of them ...
We will consume until there is nothing left - a bit like the Easter Island legend (caveat - I believe it was an island visited for its resource, rather than lived in/off ... but even so. A species that is so intent on not letting another human grab the last tree that it forgets to reseed & repopulate the forest to benefit all, let alone take an overarching interest in maintaining the balanced habitat, has not got "survival" writ large on its brow.)

Many of the ills people have mentioned aren't down to technology as such (and certainly not current vs classical era technologies) , but systems of power and control. Restrains self from mentioning patriarchal religions....

Like the boneless blobs in Wall-E? But seriously OP the way we're going in the event of any loss of power, it wouldn't take much for society to crumble. Zero survival skills, little need to deep think, no idealism to push artistic endeavour only reflective navel-gazing. We are in the Age of Meh.

—Restrains self from mentioning patriarchal religions....—

I do admire restraint. In others. Bloody book-burners and destroyers.

Restrains self from mentioning patriarchal religions....

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?

Isn't it just!

Some mammals happily kill their young, for example. Which appears not to be a human trait.

No, infanticide is the norm in human societies, especially those without access to safe abortion.

Something I have been wondering about is how this 'technology is all bad' argument stacks up against disability. There are lots of ways in which technology has made life much more liveable and humane for people with disabilities, in the past few decades.

Animals dont generally "happily kill their young". Any gene that coded for that would be wiped out very quickly for obvious reasons.

Some animals will eat their young in times of extreme stress/starvation (genetically it's better for the mother to survive and breed again than waste her resources trying to keep young alive against overwhelming odds,).

Some animals will kill young of their species that are (and this is important) not their own. Lions are a good example of this. Males taking over a pride kill the young of the deposed male so the females come back into season quickly.

It's all about gene flow through time.

Sharks eat each other in utero

Survival of the fittest starts then.

Savage

Animals dont generally "happily kill their young". Any gene that coded for that would be wiped out very quickly for obvious reasons.

Granted a poor choice of words. I was trying to highlight it's not uncommon in some species, whereas it's uncommon enough in humans to be classed as aberrant behaviour, rather than instinctive.

But either way, nature isn't some sort of idyllic paradise where all beings play happily with one another before settling down to watch "Life of Humans" after teatime. It's a dynamic process with no sense of ethics, morals or deity. And humans are part of that, not outside it.

In fact one of the greatest conceits of our species - possibly it's Achilles heel - is this idea that we are somehow ringside spectators to nature. Talk about delusions of grandeur !

The difference with humans is that we can see 'natural' behaviours and decide they are unethical and implement justice systems. Of course this doesn't always work but we have the potential to think and organise ourselves beyond the imperatives of biological instinct.

On the flip side of this, other creatures may display altruism, but we don't know if they're conscious of what they're doing. Humans can decide, as an act of will, to behave altruistically. We have that potential, and we can create societies where that operates.

uncommon enough in humans to be classed as aberrant behaviour, rather than instinctive.

It's not, though. Infanticide is a norm in human societies.

If you were to ask the pro-lifers, they'd claim it still is. I disagree, but I think if you're going to get into questions of relative social morality, it's a fair point to consider (ie., plenty of societies have defined 'personhood' differently from our own, and therefore don't have an issue with infanticide. Foetal personhood is a cultural construct; so is the personhood of a neonate).

It's not, though. Infanticide is a norm in human societies.

Care to name a few ?

How do you mean? The Romans killed their children. The Vikings killed their children. The Anglo-Saxons killed their children. The Biblical Hebrews killed their children. The Merovingians killed their children. The Carolingians killed their children. The medieval English, German, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese peoples killed their children. The Aztecs killed their children.

Do you want me literally to go through every civilization picking out the ones that didn't?

Seriously, it is A Thing. It's not at all unusual.

Even if you think about relatively 'close to home' scenarios, you will find infanticide considered socially acceptable. I have mentioned abortion; if that makes you squeamish (and it does me, too), then think about babies with serious disabilities being quietly left to die in hospitals in England in the 50s and 60s, or parents being encouraged not to offer treatment to babies with conditions such as Down's, in the expectation those babies should die.

I'm sorry, it's a horrible subject, but I don't think you can insist that 'infanticide' is something rare and horrible, just because our society has drawn the diving line between 'acceptable infanticide' and 'unacceptable infanticide' differently from some other societies. Yes, we no longer sacrifice our two-year-olds in wells. But we do make determinations about what kinds of foetal and infant life will, and will not, continue.

(I think I need to stress I am not remotely pro-life and I don't have an agenda here.)

Traditionally most/many human societies contained an element of infanticide, with weak, or disabled and sometimes surplus babies, exposed or taken to the forest. Tdoay, termination has replaced infanticide in very many societies.

In general though, babies are generally offered care and protection as doing so promotes their survival and so the spread of genes of the people doing the caring/protecting.

YY, @porcupine. But most mammals do that too, and on the whole, the level of care/protection seems to correlate with the number of babies a female in a species can have, and how easily she gets them to survive, rather than being something that distinguishes humans from animals.

I think @errol is right about that particular distinction.

I'm sorry, it's a horrible subject, but I don't think you can insist that 'infanticide' is something rare and horrible, just because our society has drawn the diving line between 'acceptable infanticide' and 'unacceptable infanticide' differently from some other societies. Yes, we no longer sacrifice our two-year-olds in wells. But we do make determinations about what kinds of foetal and infant life will, and will not, continue.

"Sorry" has no place in science. Facts are what they are. There's scope for discussion over the presentation and interpretation.

I guess we are straying into nature/nurture where human behaviour intersects with instinct ?

Many, many years ago I got into discussion with a geneticist who felt that Nazi-type eugenics were really the result of dim thinking, as genetic mutations would always outpace anything humans might think they could achieve by selective breeding and extermination. Which means that as a process, eugenics is inefficient and the totalitarian equivalent of painting the Forth bridge. I suspect economists would draw the same conclusion. Although it will have come to a pretty sad state of affairs when you need an economist to tell you that eugenics is a bad idea.

Thankfully, I'm not a scientist.

It is a fact that infanticide is a norm in human societies. It can't be one of the things that distinguishes us from animals. I don't think it's a nature/nurture debate, just more evidence that neither individual human decisions, nor large social mores, really have a lot to do with evolution. We might like to think we've 'evolved' to be superior to animals who kill their young, but 1) we haven't and 2) evolution doesn't work on such a small time scale.

wee add on (damn MNs 1980s vibe)

The Spartans practiced (male) infanticide to keep their fighting stock strong. They still lost eventually to the hairdressers, artists and poets of Athens. Despite their voracious love on man on man action they were finally subdued in a stunning display of interpretive dance upon the Acropolis.

I adore the image of 'hairdressers of Athens'. FWIW the Athenians thought particularly well-dressed hair was an effeminate practice, associated with Them Foreigners.