I for one am glad that now people can have a healthy serving of cheese without the side effects.

Do you think we will become more and more tolerant? like with the happy people? One day maybe we can drink only milk and eat only cheese, even on the sweltering summer heat. For me those days i still struggle and sometimes reluctantly find myself reverting back to greens

also, technology largly exists to remove the discomfort of evolutionary pressure. This doesnt mean the mutations that give rise to evolutionary changes in the population, but it does mean we've removed or mititaged many of the mechanisms which would select for specific traits.

Again, we would naturally still change, but not in the the way or at the rate otger organisms continue to or at which we would sans technology.

Or when they develop a society which removes all evolutionary pressures.

Evolution isn't magical, it's purely probabilistic. You can drive the probabilities down real low and then genetically engineer the rest away.

Evolution is surprising and complicated enough that that might not be the full picture.

People have relatives and relatives have many genes in common.

If there are genetic traits that predispose people to remaining childless, it could wind up that populations with those genes end up with larger branches on their family tree.

It's been a while since I read the Selfish Gene, but its central point is that natural selection is about genes, not individuals.

Why did you just assume there are genes that predict "not wanting children"? It's happening uniformly all around the world, and is much better predicted by things like wealth and freedom than anything else: cultural reasons, not heredity.

True, and here's an interesting twist: as you wrote, this is mainly happening due to "I think", so it's primarily on a memetic level. Humans also pass on lots of thought/behavioral aspects to their children (memes). Therefore I'd expect that selection on the behavioral level is happening much faster than on a genetic level.

Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.

Could also well be that natural selection will rear it's ugly head again first. I previously thought that people rejecting the evolutionary theory (creationists etc) were just backwards and anti-science. But I've realized since that this is a too simple judgement. The ethical implications of evolution are dark. Humans have had a word for selection since the dawn of language - "death".

A bit sad that paraphrasing Paul Watzlawick in this context fits very well: one cannot not participate in evolution.

I have definitely run into the belief that humans aren’t evolving anymore (though not among scientists). I think people with an incomplete understanding of evolution look around, see most human beings survive to adulthood, and assume that there must be no more evolutionary pressures on us (perhaps with the phrase “survival of the fittest” tinging around inside their head). I honestly don’t blame anyone who hasn’t been exposed to the concept of e.g. sexual selection for making the assumption.

There are a couple of species that remain essentially unchanged for the last couple million years. Why can't humans become one of them?

Perhaps it was not a widespread belief among scientists, I don't know, but if you were to posit in front of polite company that humans are today and always have been under evolutionary pressures that select for certain traits you would have gotten some odd looks. The implications are possibly a little uncomfortable, especially if what this article suggests is true and the pace of evolution is accelerating.

This is certainly not what I learned to be the definition of evolution in my biology classes.

First, the article is not just proposing genetic drift, which is the change in allele frequency by chance. It is arguing that change in allele frequency is due to natural selection pressure, and that most certainly is evolution. Copied from the Wikipedia entry, because I think it's simple and clear:

> Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations.

That is exactly what the article described.

I believe the traits for humans you should look at are not physical like strength, but social. People with poor social skills are less likely to reproduce in our society. Likewise, culture (and hence memetic evolution) influences birth rates quite a bit and is passed on from parents to children.

Well notably the loss of skin pigmentation evolved in two different ways after migration into Europe and separately into East Asia. There is strong selective pressure in Africa so pigmentation remains there.

And lactase persistence is quite recent. Some people say that Tibetans and some S E Asians are particularly adapted as well to their local environment of high altitude and sea diving but I don’t know anything about that.

Genetic drift is essentially random. Alleles at loci more than a few hundred thousand base pairs away are unaffected.

In contrast, an allele under selection pressure drags along large chunks of the chromosome on which it occurs. Statistically, the effect is different. You start to see long-range correlations across the chromosome.

The MHC region, which contains genes that govern many functions of the immune system, has been under continuous selection pressure resulting in extraordinary variability, but also very strong long range correlations spanning the region. It's unlike anywhere else in the human genome. This is a clear signature of evolution.

>> might win competitions and make a bunch of money

You mean, they might be more likely to have lots of offspring than someone who was disabled and living on government assistance?

Or 500 years ago, be more likely to slaughter the men and rape the women of a neighboring kingdom, than those who stayed home?

Or for a trait closer to my heart, be adept at handling the intellectual requirements of surviving exile and persecution?

You know it's the success they confer toward reproduction that causes traits to survive or not, right? Without reproduction, of course one generation's genetic noise is just noise. And longevity traits don't survive if they hamper reproduction. Just the opposite: Lots of traits that succeed because they improve the chances of breeding are the worst possible things you would want for longevity. Risk taking behavior and all manner of psychoses have survived and thrived for millenia not because the individuals with them live long, but because they breed prolifically.

It is far more complicated than you might gleam. Why don't cheetas run at 300mph right now? They'd catch everything in the bush right? It is a dance of course. Once you go so fast there's probably diminishing returns of what you'd additionally catch. There is also the additional caloric demands to support that top speed. Plus whatever other changes have to be made to hit that speed, e.g. maybe lighter but weaker bones. Surprising to say, a 300mph cheetah might actually be less fit than one at typical speed.

This is certainly true for humans as well. Does being faster, stronger, better vision, better hearing, necessarily mean you will beat a "worse" human for calories to survive and also mating opportunity? Nope. And that is why we aren't all 9 foot tall space jam monsters. It isn't about being a perfect specimen, but a good enough one to keep on a little longer.

> > just an elaborate mating ritual.

You might find the book Blindsight interesting, since... Well, to avoid spoilers, I'll just say the story doesn't put our concept of intelligence on the usual top-of-creation pedestal.

also, women and men mostly have the same genes. Anything that affects one affects the other, by default.

This fact is itself subject to evolution. (In birds, it's the women who have the different chromosome.) Mammals may have evolved to share most genes between sexes because that allows either sex to benefit from traits evolved by the other one, and not solely because it's the easy way to store genes.

Did you know men have a genetic breast size?

> I can't prove, but strongly suspect that this is the case.

I think you can benefit from reading Franz de Waal works. He was a primatologist and he had a similar ideas. Though according to him intelligence was (is) not just a useless "peacock feather", he adds one more block in your feedback loop: hierarchy. Intelligence is used by males to play political games to raise their social status. Social status influences frequency of reproduction for males, so there is a natural (?) selection for political success which depends on good looks, physical fitness and intelligence.

It works for a lot of species but higher primates somehow got enough intelligence to make it dominate good looks and physical fitness and then the positive feedback loop led to evolution of Homo Sapience.

I especially like this theory because it explain why people lose all their pretense to be rational when it comes to politics: human mind is political first. Language, logic, rational discourse are later inventions on top of a political mind. They can work in a neutral environment but when it comes to politics Nature gets the upper hand, and the cultural intellectual sediments of rational thought are wiped instantly, and people's intelligence drops to levels of chimpanzee's: keep alliance with the strongest alpha if you can, rational discourse be damned. One needs a very strong mental discipline to resist it.

> Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.

This idea doesn't explain how intelligence became so important for females. Your idea is like chicken-and-egg problem, you can explain how chickens and eggs let each other to exist, but not where did the first chicked (or egg) come from. And the idea relies on the assumption that female's opinion matters. It matters for some species and doesn't matter for others. It matters in some societies and doesn't matter in others.

> It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection.

When I read this I thought you'd go about role of sexual dimorphism in evolution and Vigen Geodakyan evolutionary theory of sex[1], but no. Still you may be interested, though I want to note, I don't know if the theory is "scientific" or not. I'm not a biologist to judge, and I didn't have luck to find some kind of a scientific debate about it. Some objections to the theory, but not full-blown attempts to dismantle it. And I think the theory is not politically correct: it implies that roles of males and females in evolution are different. It is not bad per se, but you know how (most of) people think (with their political mind borrowed from chimpanzee): if roles are different in evolution, then you can argue for a society change that would mirror it and would give you some privileges and raise your social status against some others, and then you would get new kind of Nazis trying to genocide half the population of Homo Sapience.

[1] https://www.evolocus.com/textbooks/geodakian2011.pdf

Evolution doesn't find a solution to a problem. Instead, it finds all possible solutions. Ones which don't fit through the problem are culled.

During happy times, mutation creates a variety of individuals. During stressful times, individuals who happen to have traits that help them weather the stress are the ones who survive more. Sometimes much more. That's when the evolution happens.

Both parts can happen concurrently and gradually, like those butterflies who turned black to hide in coal smoke.

Maybe so, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? We're trying for something a bit different here.

Traditionally, harming other people and the environment has made it easier to feed your own children (or at least the children of your tribe) and have more of them.

Evolution does not necessarily mean getting smarter or better in any way other than more adapted to the environment (natural and artificial). We could be getting stupider and more violent if that leads to hoarding more food and reproducing more in the given context. It's also not evenly spread throughout the species, some could be evolving various abilities while the rest are stuck in a plateau or even regressing.

Similarly with social progress. There is a common myth of linear progress through history, where humanity now is better than we were a century ago, a millenium ago, and ten thousand years ago. In some ways we're better, in other ways we don't even know what we've forgotten and lost.

What we want is conscious evolution, where we shape the direction that we wish to evolve towards. Unfortunately with the state of politics we've lost decades of progress in a very short time.

We are parasites in a sense. Parasites are far more common than symbiotes. It is much quicker evolutionary speaking to up and have a parasitic relationship than to have the far more many step changes to actually taper that parasitic relationship into a symbiotic one that doesn't kill the host off. Doesn't bode well for ourselves though, as this implies we need to get decimated by the climate crisis to pare down our population to the small subset that gives a shit about it and also is smart enough to adapt to or slow the process, and things would only get better once this population reseeds the planet.

Because we became an incredibly successful species doing just that.

I think that that might be an aspect of the reproductive fitness of the 'hive' (or meta-organism) of all humans, rather than the genes in any individual or population.

I agree individual humans mostly seem to behave more like single-celled micro-organisms and it's a stretch to call it a collective-organism, but it's also not impossible to see the relevant analogous aspects though I think! (like, the internet could be one example?)

It's an interesting question whether the human species (or life-as-a-whole?) viewed as a single-system will be able to reproduce itself. Sounds like the question only makes sense when talking about settling elsewhere than Earth.. Mmm, reminds me of the Fermi Paradox. Will we make it through this!?!

Because it's game-theory-optimal to kill everyone unrelated to you, but not too much.

Because that isn't what evolution does. Evolution is the process whereby traits that make reproduction more likely under selective pressures become more common. There is nothing in that process that necessarily implies a lack of harm to each other or the environment.

Wars did become less violent, but the on scales of several hundreds of years. I'm not talking about industrializing death, but about desire of violence (civilian suffering, genocide). Evolution is very slow.