Oh yeah?
yes, women keep telling me that I am top of the evolutionary scale.
Remember too, that evolution is not always onward and upward. Because of government subsidies to broken familes and triple-generation unemployables, we are now experienceing a reverse evolution, or devolution, in the mind of at least one Nobel Prize winner. This is because the lower classes are breeding at a faster rate than the more educated and successful classes.
Oh yeah?
I only read the title.
But I know the story is BS.
Look who is in the White House.
And as long as people continue to favor various forms of slavery (all collectivist governments and those that use central management), humans are not evolving.
The researcher found earlier childbearing and larger families in an isolated population and stipulated a "genetic push."
Now if they identified a gene, and then found the same one in ghetto black populations with the same childbearing patterns, that would be scientifically interesting.
Here’s a handy test to determine if someone is evolved/evolving: ask them if they like karaoke.
Who says that’s evolution? More like changes in social behavior.
The conclusion is very probably correct, but the study in no way proves it.
First, the numbers are too small. They are not large enough to eliminate the possibility of random genetic drift.
Second, the study does not seem to look at any genetic change at all. So where is the evolution?
The change in time of first birth is well within the normal human range, and is very moderate. The change in age at first birth could easily be explained by a very slight cultural change. If stuck on an island, where choices are limited, what is to stop people from getting married earlier, and starting families? Presumably everyone has a job lined up, so there is no wandering around deciding on a career, or pioneering in a new region.
There is nothing to distinguish true evolution from societal pressures here.
If they could demonstrate something physical, like earlier puberty while controlling for nutrition status, that would be a little more convincing.
From what I’ve read about pioneer America, the age at first childbirth was lower than it is now.
One last critique, and that is that these researchers were looking at an island; conclusions made about an isolated population cannot be extrapolated to the entire population. They are only pertinent to the isolated population.
Oh, and I do not question that humans are continuing to evolve, nor that we are shaping our evolution. Every time someone has a kid through medical interventions (e.g. “test tube baby” or fertility treatments), they are contributing to decreasing the fitness of the human race. Eventually, we could reach a point where medical intervention for reproduction becomes the norm rather than the exception. There are many other examples about how we are preserving traits not conducive to survival, but to point them out would make me seem heartless.
This is news??? There are dozens of studies showing the same pattern of reduced ages to puberty and marriage, etc. in the last few centuries. Dr. Jack Cuozzo would hardly be surprised, he had extensive discussion of them in his creationist book Buried Alive.
Note that this is the opposite of Darwinian expectations. Evolutionists believe we evolved from apes with faster generation times, not slower. It is more consistent with the idea of degeneration from past times when humans lived much longer.
But more likely these kinds of changes have almost nothing to do with genetics at all. Simple dietary (adequate nutrition = no delay of maturation) and cultural changes suffice to explain modest shifts like this.
sad isnt it ??? Im not that old, but was taught that science involved experimentation to disprove your theory...
this new science seems to simply involve feelings and cherry picking unrelated information...
Wisdom teeth are leaving us. My mother only had two, and I had none. Yes, I suppose that does mean that I am highly evolved. Yet without wisdom.
These guys have obviously never visited Sand Mountain, Georgia.....
Future generations will be born with square eyes, huge thumbs, wide butts, and tiny legs.
“it is often claimed that modern humans have stopped evolving because cultural and technological advancements have annihilated natural selection”
What idiot wrote this? Darwin way back when already recognized a form of selection that wasn’t strictly “natural.” That is, sexual selection. You may have heard about it seconds after your teacher told you about natural selection. If sexual selection can control evolution, so can cultural selection, for lack of a better term.
Darwin, again, long ago recognized such, so as to explain why human populations don’t unavoidably push up against the food supply in the absense of plague, famine, and war, as he theorized all species should. The answer was, more or less, medicine, farming, contraception, and so forth. In short, civilization.
Oh well, much funner and more profitable to shock readers with things everyone already knows.
Oh there’s no doubt about it. And it’s not all positive. From 1945 to 2008 the average IQ of the U.S. population decreased from 100 to 70 or maybe less.