Has Human Civilization Turbo Charged Evolution?

[Judee]

Can you say Annunaki...? AKA 'They Who From Heaven Came'.



August 20, 2009
Has Human Civilization Turbo Charged Evolution?



“It was the failures who had always won, but by the time they won they had come to be called successes. This is the final paradox, which men call evolution.”

Loren Eiseley -The Immense Journey

According to most theories of human evolution, the species became “behaviorally modern” some 50,000 years ago and has not evolved much genetically since then. But according to a controversial new book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, human civilization has actually turbo changed our evolution.


Gregory Cochran and Henry dispute the late Stephen Jay Gould’s assertion that civilization was “built with the same body and brain” Homo sapiens has had for 40,000 years. Humanity has been evolving dramatically for the last 10,000 years, they say, spurred by the very civilizational forces launched by that evolution.



The 10,000 Year Explosion is a work of genetic history that gives full treatment to the evolutionary power of natural selection in shaping human history. For example, how did the Indo-European language family get to be so geographically expansive? There is the story of how lactose tolerant Indo-Europeans spread milk-drinking with blood and fire, why the Ashkenazi suffer from crippling genetic diseases at an unexpectedly high rate while winning 25% of Nobel Prizes in the last century, and how the Spanish destroyed the Aztecs and the Incas. The real accidents of history are matters of gene flow and chance mutation.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/08/has-human-civilization-turbo-charged-evolution.html

[Krepta3000]

I agree that human evolution has been affected greatly by our social interactions. Most species stay isolated in specific areas, or participate in mass seasonal migrations, but always go back to the same places they were born at. Thus most species gained genetic diversity, but also isolated themselves across the planet by not mingling with each other. But our race is different, individuals or groups have spread from place to place, and back again, so many times that we haven't remained nearly as isolated from each other.

I absolutely refute the concept of Races of humans, I believe it is a social construct, a lie based on superficial differences that are minuscule in comparison to the things that are similar or the same. No group of humans on the planet is genetically different enough from any other group for science to declare them to be a separate species, or, race. It is very evident that humans have been intermixing among various population groups often enough that diversity never becomes genetic isolation. Diversity is a good thing, it helps keep us healthy as a species, but isolation can cause serious problems, like diseases that only effect one population and not another.

I've lost my train of thought...

I want chocolate...

[VOguy]

Races were not as interbred as they are now because of the ability for us to travel. While there was some interbreeding, may races stayed fairly pure as they were isolated from one and another.

Basically we are like Roses. A rose is a rose as they would say, and at one point in history there was but one.

There are Tea Roses, Floribunda Roses, English (David Austin) Roses, and many other "races" of roses.

If you let them collect near each other for a long time, you start to get cross pollination of rose breeds, and you come up with new roses, such as the Hybrid Tea Roses. Those were a cross between Tea Roses and Perpetual Roses.

Humans, dogs, cats, just about anything on earth is different but same. Notice that I said, "on earth". ;)

And yes, it was important in our house that we learned the Roses. Grandma was an exceptional gardener of prise roses.

[Alpha]

Can you say Annunaki...? AKA 'They Who From Heaven Came'.

No doubt in my mind... ;)