Tuesday, November 15, 2005

It has stopped

Just yesterday, I was watching some program on The Animal Planet... and they mentioned that most species change themselves to better suit their environment. Man is perhaps the only one that changes the environment to suit his needs. This led me to think, and since it is a rare occurrence I might be a bit rusty here. But hear me out... what is evolution? If by some mutation, a particular group of animals in a species, get better adapted to the environment than the others, it leads to a higher probability of that animal's (and its progeny's) survival. Eventually, since more animals with the new strain will survive and reproduce, we have (over a few millennia, perhaps) a new species. Consider man...In our new environment; is there anything that will give one of us a better chance at survival? I don’t think so. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection does not apply to the humans any more. The weak ones do not die young and the strong ones do not live longer. The strong take care of the weak (yeah, right!). Evolution, for the humans, has stopped. We don’t adapt ourselves to become a better fit into our environment, we build fire places.

In fact, since there is no advantage in being stronger, and no huge disadvantage in being slightly weaker, I would guess, that we have begun, for lack of a better word, de-evolving. We are becoming a weaker species every century. Just count the number of allergies we have these days.

I know this is an over simplification, but it does kind of make sense.

2 Comments:

Blogger Adam_Y said...

Hi there,

What an interesting point you've raised, about evolution...

I think it's fair to say that everything is constantly evolving, even us humans. It's all to do with the evolutionary pressures that puh us in one direction or another...

For example, soldiers; some types of people are more likely to become soldiers because of their education and background... and because they are soldiers, they run a slightly higher risk of dying without producing children, therefore the evolutionary pressures appear to select against these soldiers.

Also, there is some evidence that people in general are becoming more dextrous with their thumbs. It is thought that this might have something to do with the advent of computer and video interfaces becoming more popular, but it is difficult to say if there is a genetic part to this.

Sorry for the essay, but it is a really interesting concept, thanks.

7:34 AM, November 21, 2005  
Blogger Don said...

Interesting comment up there above mine. Waste of your time and mine.

I would tend to agree with you in the de-evolution process we are going through, to an extent. In that we have built up to the point of building a fire place to protect us, and we are helping our weak (like you, yeah right), etc, we have evolved quite far. With our tech advances we could be evolving still, but I'm not so sure at times.

7:43 AM, November 21, 2005  

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