Posts by doorknobus

Re: Natural Selection vs. Evolution

>I would agree that natural selection is no longer the driver of evolution.

Yeah, right.

So stuff that we - a current product of natural selection - do isn't natural?

What is it then?

Are our brains not natural?

>Genetic engineering of humans will fix this very soon. Not soon on a personal scale,

>possibly not soon on a historical scale, but definitely soon on an evolutionary scale.

>Unless we all die first, of course.

But, Shirley, that *is* the fix. (Dying).

>evolution driven by natural selection... is not a process which is happening all the time.

Actually, it isn't a process at all. It's a retrospective abstraction.

The process (which happens much of the time) is random genetic damage, aka mutation.

Later, we look back and call the long-term change 'evolution'.

(Maths people and 'hard' scientists get this. 'Soft' scientists / general 'ologists' often get confused at the basic linguistic conceptual stage).

Yep.

But I remember reading a Stephen Jay Gould book that pointed out, eloquently, that humans, rather than being at the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, are an aberrant side-branch, which might survive for a while, but probably won't.

Dinosaurs dominant: 150 million years.

Cockroaches doing well: 200 million years and counting.

Homo sapiens: 1-2 million years, and struggling (mostly to kill each other or dismantle their habitats).

I've never seen a cockroach smile, but I'd love to be a [whatever]-on-the-wall a few millennia hence...

C1: Remember those human thingies?

C2: Yeah. Wierd things. Prattled about a bit for a while then self-destructed, poor bast***s.

C1: Bet they'd have made good pets, though.

C2: Dunno. Bit stupid, really.