Is humanity still evolving?

[Umbran]

Just out of curiousity, as we can breed dogs together to create basset hounds, has anybody formed a Eugenics Colony to breed an allegedly superior society of humans?

Well, dogs have a generation time of about a year, and have several pups at one time. Humans have a generation time over a decade, and typically have one baby at a time. Based on that alone, selective breeding of humans would take about ten times longer than selective breeding of dogs.

It is actually worse than that, in that dogs, as a species, are more genetically diverse than humans. So, trying to get exactly what you want from humans is more difficult, as you have fewer options to choose from. In an analogy - breeding is like cooking a gourmet meal. Dogs give you a supermarket to work with to get ingredients, while humans give you a 7/11.

 

[Zombie_Babies]

From what I can tell, most of the human eugenics programs- Sweden, the USA, Nazi Germany, Brazil, etc.- have focused on immigration restrictions, marriage restrictions, and forced sterilization of "undesirables".

Still, the Chinese ar supposedly giving it a go: http://explosivereports.com/2013/03...collects-genius-dna-to-breed-enhanced-people/

Actually, the Nazi stuff I was talking about didn't really care about weeding out undesirables. The goal was to achieve a perfect Aryan race and they did so by taking select SS members and pairing them with Scandanavian women who fit the profile.

yeah, I recall the Hitler Channel talking about that. And Jim Jones is also probably a lousy example

But I think you get my gist. I would think a bunch of academics would put that kind of project together, quite possibly in the hopes of scoring with super models.

I suspect you'd need isolation, so colonists don't go falling for the human from the next town over and contaminate the gene pool.

And you'd need a large enough starting set so there's likely amicable pairings going on so we avoid the ooky "arrangements"

In theory, screening for membership to people with good medical histories, appealing bodies (symmetric faces, no outward deformities) would presumably yield babies of the same. Just avoiding people with history of cancer in their family would probably cut cancer rates down.

Naturally, these kind of restrictions wouldn't be kosher in america. But I can imagine countries where they already regulate who has kids or arrange marriages, this could be implemented.

You can't just go for looks, though.

Aside from that the challenges posed are pretty daunting and you'd be asking the participants to give up a crapton of privacy. Just cuz someone is hawt and brainy doesn't mean they're a good genetic example. Sure, the odds point to it but there could be something sinister lurking in their DNA that you'd wanna know about before using them in a eugenics program. It would take quite a bit of research to determine a candidates true viability and it'll raise a lot of questions, too. Like what isn't good enough? They have a great family heart and cancer history, say, and their brains and body check out A spec but they're nearsighted. Is that enough to boot them? I think depending upon what you're looking for and how voluntary you'd like to keep it (sounds like you're at an admirable 100% there) you're probably gonna have a real small group of folks and the odds of them actually pairing properly at that point are gonna be slim.

Quite simply, people are squicky about this stuff and for good reason. Hell, it could easily be you that's left on the outside looking in at all that fine bodied, big brained action. And there could be other consequences as well. Purebred dogs, for example, have a lot of problems a lot of mutts just don't have - not that we're dogs. The thing is, our understanding of this, for the most part, isn't sufficient to avoid those pitfalls. Hell, if you really wanna do this voluntary pairing could be right out. Two otherwise perfect candidates both carry a recessive trait but are in love - then what? It's just not a good project.

 

[Janx]

Aside from that the challenges posed are pretty daunting and you'd be asking the participants to give up a crapton of privacy. Just cuz someone is hawt and brainy doesn't mean they're a good genetic example. Sure, the odds point to it but there could be something sinister lurking in their DNA that you'd wanna know about before using them in a eugenics program. It would take quite a bit of research to determine a candidates true viability and it'll raise a lot of questions, too. Like what isn't good enough? They have a great family heart and cancer history, say, and their brains and body check out A spec but they're nearsighted. Is that enough to boot them? I think depending upon what you're looking for and how voluntary you'd like to keep it (sounds like you're at an admirable 100% there) you're probably gonna have a real small group of folks and the odds of them actually pairing properly at that point are gonna be slim.

Quite simply, people are squicky about this stuff and for good reason. Hell, it could easily be you that's left on the outside looking in at all that fine bodied, big brained action. And there could be other consequences as well. Purebred dogs, for example, have a lot of problems a lot of mutts just don't have - not that we're dogs. The thing is, our understanding of this, for the most part, isn't sufficient to avoid those pitfalls. Hell, if you really wanna do this voluntary pairing could be right out. Two otherwise perfect candidates both carry a recessive trait but are in love - then what? It's just not a good project.

That's what I figured. We'd have to be evil to make it work, and we'd probably find every candidate has genetic flaws we wanted to avoid.

I reckon we won't get "superior" humans until we can alter DNA defects, probably during an IVF process (somewhere after extraction, before implantation) while there's still less than 20 cells to manipulate.

As it is, folks getting IVF learn an awful lot about the genetic defects they have (genetic testing being a precursor to IVF at reputable facilities).

Once we can get designer babies with minimal "bad" DNA, and some chunk of the gene pool is now "genetically unburdened", they might form a social culture of preferring others with equivalent clean DNA. I'm thinking these people would be a bit snobbish, but they'd have a valid point, why should they breed with genetrash?

Note: I'm just talking sci-fi BS. I suspect it'll be awhile before we can alter a bad DNA defect, whereas right now we can merely detect it and advise the potential parent of the risk. I am not sure if fixing a defect in an embryo merely fixes the actual person, or if it'll cover their descendants. But imagine the brave new world we could have if we could.

 

[Nellisir]

Note: I'm just talking sci-fi BS. I suspect it'll be awhile before we can alter a bad DNA defect, whereas right now we can merely detect it and advise the potential parent of the risk. I am not sure if fixing a defect in an embryo merely fixes the actual person, or if it'll cover their descendants. But imagine the brave new world we could have if we could.

I don't think it'll be as far in the future as you think. Genetic manipulation is getting more and more "garage-scale" - essentially, something you could do in your garage. I'm not really familiar with the technology, but I imagine it'll basically be a computer program that you input what you want, and it'll spit out a virus tailored to go in and tweak the genes - or maybe it'll just spit out a whole genome. Not sure (though I could probably find someone to ask; Cornell is pretty big into animal science and biology. I'm sure I know someone...).

The price will be cheap too, and if you can get a virus to act as a carrier, you can make it infectious. You could turn the whole world blue-eyed. People might want to keep the technology exclusive, but there will always be people who want it to be free as well.

I think, if you tweak the genes early enough, they'll breed true. I mean, if you're talking a real early embryo, the eggs aren't yet differentiated from other cell types, so there's not an "early" genetic sequence to fall back on.

 

[Nellisir]

Interesting articles:
This one talks about lactose tolerance, which was one of the two most recent widespread mutations I could think (the other was blue eyes). Interestingly, it's not known exactly why lactose tolerance was/is so beneficial, and spread so quickly. It would seem that it confers some kind of clear advantage, but milk is a pretty specialized food, and as the article points out, it's not all that hard to get a low-lactose product (basically, yogurt.) It wouldn't seem all that hard to live life just fine without ever having milk.
http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...lerance_why_do_humans_keep_drinking_milk.html

And here's one about our rate of mutation. It's not slowing down; it's accelerating.
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/ju...-are-recent-and-probably-harmful#.Uov_TsRJN8E

And other recent/recently known human mutations. All would seem to fall under "harmful" except for hypertrichosis, which might be useful in some situations.
http://io9.com/10-unusual-genetic-mutations-in-humans-470843733

 

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

You see if it art, where future humans have small, anemic bodies and huge heads. We will evolve into a race with naturally wi-fi receptors in our brains but no genitals.

 

[Libramarian]

As long as reproductive rates are nonrandom, we're evolving. People generally underestimate the impact of sexual selection (genes that make you more sexy rather than necessarily better adapted to your environment).

Blue eyes, for example, probably became widespread in some populations due to sexual selection (natural mascara) rather than for any adaptive benefit.

Probably also our intelligence evolved mostly by sexual selection rather than because it allowed us to "outwit predators"*. It's not like human ancestral predators were setting Jigsaw-style traps or something. You don't need to be that smart to fend off a tiger. You need a few pointy sticks and a group of people sticking together, but you don't need complex symbolic language or musical ability. Women appreciate those things though.

*quoting the guy who wrote the article mentioned earlier who says people are getting dumber because we no longer have to outwit predators.

 

[Grydan]

As long as reproductive rates are nonrandom, we're evolving.

This, basically.

Any living, reproducing, population that is using a method other than 100% perfect cloning (no errors, no matter how small, ever, or at least none ever allowed to be passed on to successive generations) to reproduce is evolving.

It's important to keep in mind that evolution is simply change. It's not progress. There's no devolution. There's no evolutionary ladder. We, as a species, are not 'more evolved' than any other species on the planet: every branch of the tree of life has the same trunk, at least in so far as we've been able to determine. We're all the same number of billions of years from that same starting point.

Another thing to keep in mind is that simply because a trait is found in abundance, doesn't necessarily mean it was selected for (that having it made an individual more likely to be able to pass on their genes): it can also simply mean it was never strongly selected against (having it never significantly lowered your chances of passing on your genes).

Our being smarter than the average bear doesn't necessarily mean there was some great selective advantage to brainpower at any point. It could be a coincidental side-effect of something else that was being selected for or against. Genetics is complicated: a tiny change in the right place can have ripple effects that result in significant differences at the macro scale, while much larger changes, if they happen to fall into a section of the code that's labelled 'junk', have no noticeable effect at all … until one of those tiny changes comes along and changes a label from 'junk' to 'read this'.

Now, that said, it's likely that at some point, yes, having more brainpower did provide a selective advantage: the human body simply devotes too much resources to our brains for it to have always been simply incidental.

But to the extent that intelligence (if we can ever figure out a satisfactory definition) depends on genetics, it's clear that there's no particular reproductive advantage these days to being the smartest guy in the room. Einstein had three kids. Hawking has three kids. Feynman had two kids. All pretty decent numbers … but there's people far less bright than those guys who've had far more children. Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar are neither of them Einsteinian in their intelligence (I've never met them, never watched their TV show, and for all I know they're fairly bright individuals … simply not geniuses), and they've got 19 kids. The chances of their genes getting passed on are rather higher. Especially if there's a genetic component to their enthusiasm for having so many kids.

There's an upcoming movie, Delivery Man, in which through an error at a sperm bank, a man becomes the genetic father of over 500 children … the technology is certainly around by which one individual could be the father of millions, all without having to have any particular genetic advantage. It's a little bit more difficult (he says, putting it mildly) for a woman to similarly be the genetic mother of such vast numbers, but given that we live in a day and age where it's possible for one woman to carry another woman's fertilized egg to term, it's not impossible (though the ultimate upper limit is still lower than it is for men).