From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Tue Jul 20 1999 - 22:12:07 MDT
> Don't get [phil osborn] started. Most women seem to have an
> underlying...[snip]
> ...rant, rant, rant - you can fill in the blanks from here, as I know that
> most
> men have had these experiences...
This whole thread went off in a direction I never intended. Ah, the magic
of a web discussion! {8^D Perhaps I should have specified I meant
chimps. Less emotional baggage [that we all carry] from unsuccessful
relationships, broken hearts, etc. Humans are too complicated.
That said, what I am really looking at here is the implications of mating
behavior to evolution, the future of the race, etc. Consider the first
humans vs the very similar chimps. The first humans likely had the
mutation of a straight leg: they could lock the knee and walk on two
legs much more easily than the chimps. This mutation freed the hands
to manipulate objects. The critical factor is that being able to manipulate
objects caused the smarter protohumans to have a survival advantage
over dumber protohumans, whereas it is not clear to me that the smarter
chimps have any real reproductive advantage over dumber chimps.
I am way out of my field here, so biologists, please help me out.
This factor would cause the humans to gradually become smarter,
as a group, whereas the chimps went right along eating termites
and doing their chimp things. Isnt that kinda the way it works?
Nowthen, fast forward to present day. Humans have been intelligent
now for at least 50k years. We have developed the technologies
critical to our survival. What I am driving at with the whole brains
vs buns thing is that there may have been subtle influences that
slightly favored brains, but this influences were subtle indeed.
Now however, it seems society has created a system which gives
an *enormous* reproductive advantage... to being stupid! Our
welfare system encourages overbreeding by those who cannot
take care of themselves, overbreeding by those who put their
faith in a church that urges them to be fruitful and multiply,
overbreeding by those who are drug addicts, etc. [Natasha
*almost* went here I think with her carefully worded comments
on teenage pregnancies.]
Those who you and I might agree are the most fit for the future
reproduce only modestly, if it all. My burden is this: all those
influences that shaped humankind in past millenia were subtle.
Modern influences by comparison are overwhelming and the
implications to our species profound. spike
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