messy said:
FROGGEman2 said:
messy said:
FROGGEman2 said:
We aren't going to get any more evolution, now that natural selection is dead.
Unless there's a technological apocalypse so we have no medical care. Possibly caused by resources running out with no adequate replacement. All those with more basic cultures would survive with large proportions of the west I imagine damaged and devoid of human life allowing selection to occur
And that's going to happen... how? o.0
Well oil won't last for ever, the amount of wind farms require (and solar panels) would be a massive undertaking, one which really should be happening now however Oil makes too much money. And consider all the environmental opposition to wind farms (ruining country sides). Nuclear fission has loads of opposition form environmentalists so there's a chance that won't reach the desired levels (although not as many plants would be required. Nuclear fusion is still in it's earliest stages so still not entirely variable. I suppose you could suggest biofuels but that'll take up massive amounts of land, the effects to wildlife huge and be very expensive so that too we face opposition. Now with no electricity the health systems will fail along we pretty much all of western civilisation
Now this is no guarantee this will happen but it's fairly plausible because if its life or death environmentalist will still protest the building of power plants.
I don't know where to begin with this post so I suppose I will start off concerning genetic engineering. Speculation is pointless, if we can design people, it will go through a bit of flux before petering out with us realizing its a bad idea, and then we will just stick to superficial changes like making sure everyone has the most desirable sex traits at the time so all the lovely engineered genes can be passed on.
Second of all natural selection in humanity isn't occurring anymore, we are two damned advanced. There are virtually no penalties attatched to any mating choice, since no matter how inept an individual is at surviving the government will take care of them. So even if we there are two groups of people in todays society that difference isn't going to get more pronounced because even if two A's mate, there is a very good chance that their offspring will enjoy the company of a B more, so they will have an AB hybrid. There are no definite survival or reproduction benefits anymore, the only person who doesn't have a decent shot at passing their genes on is sterile.
Now off topic for a moment you attempted to argue that if humanity got boned up the ass thanks to its love of petrofuels the environmentalists would argue against building nuclear power plants, even in a life or death situation. Well okay maybe one or two people in a thousand would, but thankfully their opinions would cease to matter because a majority of people would realize that in a life or death situation 99% of the population would go with the option that would meet needs and only possibly go haywire if someone was operating outside of the safety parameters (Done once) or deliberately sabotaging the place (Not done) as opposed to the one that leads to the collapse of their world order, and would most likely mean they would have to start working to stay alive.
Finally the last point you mentioned was that if our society was destroyed we would go back to a more primitive state so evolution would rampant, and my answer to that is that first of all the farthest we would go back to would be Western world circa 1750 a.d. although as at that time water and wind power existed, and most likely we would still get some elictricity from them, so I suppose a more logical guess would be Britain during World War II, not much electricity but we can still meet our needs. So either way I highly doubt a major world collapse would send us back that far, and even in a worst case scenario humans in isolated and primitive places like Australia and New Zealand managed to survive for 40,000 years in a void, and tada they still remained distinctly human.
Finally this thread suffers from a strangely twisted concept of evolution, to ask what the next step in human evolution is is to imply that Evolution has a plan, when it is based off of reaction and mutation. For instance if a new gene mutated and allowed a person to mate merely by laying hands on a person that trait would take off in the gene pool because it would make sex a hell of a lot easier, and in a few generations a majority of the population would have that traid, and evolution works to replicate genes and its modus operandi in most mammals is to make sure they have a nice niche in their environment. (Humanity being an exception as we can make sure our environment fits to our will, and yes I am aware that I engaged in some personification of evolution, but it seemed simpler to do that than to say that genes do best that make their host organism survive in their environment and mate better.) So I suppose that about wraps it up, I probably missed something but it is late and if need be I will edit tomorrow.
