This is thread an offshoot of the the aging theories thread which has recently focused on evolution of aging and rather than delete off-topic posts I wanted to start a new discussion. I brought up the idea that there are forces in addition to purely biological selection now at work in influencing the direction of human evolution. In this thread please post ideas about these forces (culture, technology, economics etc), what their possible mechanisms of action are in changing the biological nature of mankind. What is feedback of these forces on the biological form of Homo Sapiens (i.e. are they changing our genes?). Here is the conversation from the other topic:
My comment that started it:
Modern culture has completely thrown out all the rules though, so there is no longer any selection pressure for humans in the classical sense.
Doubting Didymus' reply:
There are always selection pressures. Modern culture has removed some of the more superficial selection pressures, but otherwise we are evolving today as much as we ever were.
My reply;
My comment about modern culture throwing out selection pressure in the classical sense didn't mean that there isn't any pressure at all, but that it is something all together different from purely biological evolution. It is cultural and technological selection layered on top of biological selection which has added a whole new type of complexity and which is just now starting to be examined - extremely interesting stuff! (another thread entirely) The mechanisms there are just starting to be worked out though and they apparently have emergent properties which in some ways are very different from the biological paradigm, that is what I meant by the rules are different now.
Doubting Didymus' reply:
Ah, my apologies. I thought you were repeating the common misconception that humans have somehow stopped their biological evolution, just because we don't die from quite as many ailments. I assume that your references to cultural and technological evolution refer to memetics? If not, then you are using 'evolution' in a way that doesn't gel with me.
My last reply before I moved this (and see Lazarus' reply to Didymus in the next post which was posted almost simultaneous with this reply, serendipity )
I defintiely don't think we have stopped evolving, just that the external environmental pressures have been to a large extent replaced with human created (cultural and technological) pressures (btw just as I started to write this this Laz's comment popped up, weird huh?). Memetics would be the method of transmission of the pressure for the cultural influences, and for the technology it is another story entirely which is off topic.