Edit: I meant specifically humans.
It’s been long enough, but we’ve kept it from happening as much as it would in nature. By keeping people who have genetic traits deemed “undesirable” alive and breeding, we’re effectively keeping those traits which would otherwise die out with the carriers of those genes.
Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer having a society that doesn’t just let people die from diabetes or refuse to have offspring with dyslexic people or any such eugenics cruelty! 😂
This is a common misconception. These traits are not likely due to modern medicine (which is very, very new compared to the scale of human evolution). The environment plays a big role, but there is always a distribution of traits in a normal population, some good, some bad. Not to mention that what we might be self-selecting for must change very rapidly as civilizations rise and fall, preferences shift like the winds, and ethics rapidly evolve. I think this misconception can be dangerous, because of what you mentioned. Eugenics.
Again, I specifically said that I prefer to have a compassionate society over a (maybe) genetically superior one that practices eugenics. The tradeoff is unquestionably worth it and you’d have to be very callous to disagree.
Also, I never said that medicine was the sole reason. On the contrary, I said that it’s social society (which medicine is one of many results of) as a whole and a general disposition towards keeping your loved ones alive even if they can’t hunt. That’s much older than medicine. It’s literally a cornerstone of what a society is.
I hear you, but genetic change at the level of these diseases and traits can take on the order of hundreds of thousands of years or more to accumulate into meaningful trends. Social society is a part of that process, in the way it might be for other social animals. If social dynamics tend to result in communities harboring vulnerable individuals, then there is probably some selective advantage to that behavior, not the other way around.
Prominence of lactose tolerance maybe? Most animals are lactose intolerant and countries that produced a lot of dairy, the people became tolerant of it.
“Evolution” is a broad term, and human evolution definitely includes cultural evolution — the evolution of Richard Dawkins called “memes.” A meme (in that sense) is anything that is taught to others or learned from others: how to make a musical instrument from a read, how to play some particular tune, how to dance a particular dance, and so on. Obviously, there are MANY things one can learn/teach in a community, so natural selection enters the picture, with some ideas/skills becoming prevalent while others wither away. Evolution of cultural knowledge is so rapid that it can be observed: evolution in clothing style, music, language, ways of organizing, and so on.
But I think you are talking about the evolution of our physical bodies. Lactose tolerance seems to be a recent evolutionary change, still not well distributed among humans.
Booze.
Origins of Human Alcohol Consumption Revealed
One model for the evolution of alcohol consumption suggests that ethanol only entered the human diet after people began to store extra food, potentially after the advent of agriculture, and that humans subsequently developed ways to intentionally direct the fermentation of food about 9,000 years ago.
OTOH, I’ve watched videos of monkeys supposedly drunk on naturally fermented fruit from the first floor. It’s not the same level of alcohol or anywhere near as regular, but alcohol is a thing in nature.
I’m probably just being pedantic and you meant calorifically significantamounts of alcohol on a regular basis.
Yeah, exactly. From the article, it’s theorised that we got some tolerance early on, like ape ancestors, and then selected for higher tolerance along the way post agri. Interestingly, and somewhat intuitively, there are some papers examining the opposite now, that people in the last 200 years are evolving to lack the gene that allows us to processes acetaldehyde (drinking byproduct) specifically because too much drinking is harmful (and can harm reproduction).
Watermelons used to be only 50mm in diameter and tasted very bitter. You had to hit them with a hammer to crack em open. Circa 3000 BC
It is, if you count humans as part of nature, which they are in respect to natural selection.
Flowers and blossoms are selected by their attractiveness to bees and other insects. Apples were selected by their attractiveness to bears (yes, bears where the first to domesticate apples). And watermelons were selected by their attractiveness to humans.
Only GMOs don’t fall into the category of natural selection.
