Dead at 42

[KennyR]

Speel wrote:
Bad genes can cause evolution changes.
It's the experiment grounds.

Just by being there? No way. They've got to apply a disadvantage that gets the creature killed or unable to mate.

[KennyR]

Speel wrote:
I mean, producing 'bad' genes.

There is no evolution without need, regardless of mutation present in any population. Not now, not in the future, not ever.

Take a million pigeons and let them loose on a planet with robotic systems to keep them fed, kill any disease or viruses, and to give them contraceptives when the population gets too high, and ten million years you'll come back and find they're still pigeons. Maybe 100, even 1000 million years.

But release pigeons on a planet with none of these protections, and 10 million years later you'll find a biosystem full of different kinds of life form evolved from pigeon - birds of prey, land animals, aquatics.

[KennyR]

Speel wrote:
The more a specie experiments with it's genes, the more it is likely that it adapts more quickly to it's environment. I think that can be seen as necessary.

What changing environment?? We live in heated homes, drink purified water, eat sanitised energy and nutrition rich foods, we deal with sickness with antibiotics and surgery, we have few parasites...

So what, exactly, is changing that we need to evolve to meet?

Our bad genes are not being pruned off, and are remaining because the people who carry them are not being killed off by harsh nature. We're becoming slower, weaker, dumber. And eventually, we'll start to devolve, rather than evolve.

[KennyR]

For instance, the black death was a 'cultural disease'. And it had a great influence on culture either, because according to some historians and scientists, this event has led to enlightment.

No it didn't. Just a big bunch of people died and they went back to throwing crap out of windows for the next 200 years. What the plague did in a cultural sense was nothing.

What it did in an evolutionary sense is to prune off all the members of our species with weaker immune systems.

[KennyR]

1/3 of the population from western Europe to India died of the plague. That has some impact on both economy as well as lifestyle.

Anything that kills or maims most of your workforce will have social effects. But they were not lasting. As soon as the socialogical effects due to loss of population wore off, India went back to its evil, inhuman caste system (which it still has today) and Europe went back to Christian dogma and living in its own filth.

And what you have to realise is, that, ultimately, lifestyle and society has little to positive impact on evolution. This isn't evolving towards the rubbish scifi spouts like "godhood" or "perfection". There is currently only one driving force in evolution still available to man, and that's sexual attractiveness. And that doesn't evolve towards superiority or perfection, ask any peacock.

There was only one civilisation that had its polices rooted in evolution, and that was the Third Reich. And we never want to go back there, regardless if we all do devolve into dumb, timid, inbred couch potatoes that can't survive without their technology. The price of perfection is too high.