Survival of the average
2008.10.15 00:25 by Leo Antunes - 0 CommentAfter reading these news of a halting human evolution and John Hawks’ deconstruction of it (shamelessly found in the feed of a good friend whose intellect I admire) I remembered some old and not directly related thoughts on the effects of culture on evolution.
I wondered for some time what sort of effect our relatively recent tolerance toward disabled people could have in the mechanics of evolution. I don’t mean to make neither a moral nor a qualitative judgment and anyway the impact is probably statistically very small, but I’m left with the impression that our subversion of the normal (as in “naturally occurring up until a few tens of thousands of years ago”) natural selection scheme could have some interesting long term effects. Not so much in terms of a dystopian future where everyone is blind, deaf and has just one arm (no offense, just some randomly selected traits that would probably make life harder in the Savannas), but instead in terms of the opportunity this might create for the survival and further development of mutations through paths that would otherwise be blocked by the ruthlessness of nature.
I don’t think this reasoning has any influence on the claim about slowing human evolution and in fact I’d dare say it’s a totally orthogonal phenomenon to the quantitative amount of mutations per generation, but it got me thinking again and I feel it could be an interesting research. Beats some Ig Nobel contenders…
Also, I consider this line of thought particularly interesting, since I’m completely aware I wouldn’t last 5 minutes in a place where I was left to fend for myself or where my inability to hunt, fish or otherwise lure the ladies would render me completely useless and disposable, and therefore would mean the certain demise of my genetic line. Lucky world that would be.
