ex lux ad cardo [dream]

[Godmy]

This myth annoys me to no end! Specially since movies pretend it's true and never make any effort to educate people.

Exactly! It's the reverse of what a good sci-fi movie should do. I can forgive some old shows like Stargate Atlantis, but today the science education thanks to the Internet is much more widespread and there is no excuse for it.

It's possible, though, to optimize the way our brain works. Evolution always finds a way, but not necessarily the most efficient. Our knees bend the wrong way and there are blood vessels in front of our retinas (which have to be edited out by our brains). So I'm optimistic that we haven't yet achieved the full potential of our brains. But sadly, like career athletes, whatever we discover we'll probably have to work very hard to get results.

Who knows, what the evolution is going to bring. If you want to talk to the nature.... if you want to speak with the evolution, you have ask the females (cough... Pacifica ) since they are the ones who ultimately make the natural gene selection and in the past they obviously selected for higher intelligence (=large brains / their function must have been attractive) for us to end up with his ridiculously large and power hungry brains (in the mammal kingdom). But, what they select now for, I don't know, but ultimately it's in their collective hands

 

[asmello]

Who knows, what the evolution is going to bring. If you want to talk to the nature.... if you want to speak with the evolution, you have ask females (cough, Pacifica ) since they are the one who ultimately make the natural gene selection and in the past they obviously selected for higher intelligence (=large brains / their function must have been attractive) for us to end up with his ridiculously large brain (in the mammal kingdom), what they select now for, I don't know, but ultimately it's in their collective hands

I actually think we're mostly done with natural evolution - what I meant was that we can improve our cognition by better understanding how to operate our machinery. But point taken! And there's also cybernetic augmentation.

 

[Godmy]

I actually don't agree with this stance most people have Our whole intricate civilization is just another extended phenotype (like dams for beavers), but ultimately we are still directed by irrationality and instincts when it comes to selection and reproduction and basic ambitions (the evolutionary psychology) and even in the cases if you select for something totally superficial and artificial: it has some real function! Nothing is "supernatural", hence it is natural The high intelligence and developed civilization is just a facet... like an ant-nest, but we still work according the program, it just looks differently : ) A different facet.

 

[Godmy]

And also let's not forget that visible changes take hundreds of thousands of years often to take place ; )

 

[asmello]

I actually don't agree with this stance most people have Our whole intricate civilization is just another extended phenotype (like dams for beavers), but ultimately we are still directed by irrationality and instincts when it comes to selection and reproduction, even if you select for something totally superficial and artificial: it has some real function! Nothing is "supernatural", hence it is natural The high intelligence and developed civilization is just a facet... like an ant-nest, but we still work according the program.

The issue is, in my view, that instead of selecting out the more disabling genes, we've reached a point where we can work around them most of the time. For instance, despite being disadvantageous to the species, there's not much reproductive penalty to being myopic - some cultures might even favor it . It's not a problem, diversity is good, but it spells that the selection pressure is quite arbitrary and subject to ephemeral trends instead of suitability to survival - which is how natural selection is defined. So technically I think it would be better to call it artificial selection, even if it's not guided by a method.

 

[Araneus]

With regards to evolution, I've read that the brain evolves so 'slowly' that there is almost no difference between our brains, and the brains of people living 10 000 years ago. Which means that mentally, we're still best fit for hunting/gathering on the savannah. Modern life, then, is in many ways the opposite of what we are 'programmed' to experience, which accounts for a large portion of the mental health issues people are struggling with today.

 

[Godmy]

asmello: maybe artificial selection but done by natural creatures still quite strongly abiding to their evolutionary programming in many basic aspects (the things you call arbitrary trends) => so still pretty much natural and in that sense biologically somehow predictable. I always wonder whether one would call the ant reproduction system or bee reproduction system a natural or whether is it an artificial selection too: making a bee queen by giving feeding her specific hormones by other bees, etc.. I think that as long as we are the ones who make the selection, it's still natural. We haven't escaped our evolutionary programming. It doesn't matter how we do it or with which speed. I wouldn't separate civilization and technology from nature as long as we are developing and directing it.

 

[Godmy]

I suppose we would have to take some specific cases in order to argue about this effectively. It's an interesting discussion, but I suppose we can't say much more about it further. I'm just sometimes skeptical when people suddenly wake up and think they outgrew the nature, sometimes that itself is being myopic : ) There is always some bigger picture they don't see.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion. I hope to see you in some other thread : )