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brazil84 comments on Is Kiryas Joel an Unhappy Place? - Less Wrong
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In that case, I would say that the answer is clearly "yes," in the sense that significant natural selection is taking place at a rapid clip in the present day. For example, the percentage of people in the world with blue eyes has surely dropped significantly over the last 100 years.
Technically using my odd definitions the debate on blue eyes is irrelevant because:
Blue eyes do not shift the fundamental values of the human race. I think.
Fine, but now you need to specify what you mean by "fundamental values of the human race." :)
(By the way, I recall that there are studies out there corellating eye color with personality traits. I'm not sure if this affects the example I gave, but surely there are other genes which affect personality traits in subtle ways. And it seems likely that some of those personality traits affect a person's fertility given that a lot of people in the West flat out decide not to reproduce. So it's reasonable to suppose that natural selection, as you have defined it, continues in the present and affects human attributes less superficial than eye color.)
Because blue eyes are recessive and blue and brown eyed populations have mixed more than they used to? How is that an example of natural selection in progress?
Because blue eyes are found mainly in people of European descent and the percentage of world population of European descent has dropped quite a bit with the population booms in Asia and Africa.
Ok, but that's mostly because you use that particular cutoff point, European decended populations just have gone through the demographic transition earlier and their share of world population is similar to what it was in 1750. It has nothing to do with any selection against blue eyes in the usual sense.
Well that brings us back to the question of what you mean by "natural selection" which you defined earlier as
It sounds like you are limiting natural selection to frequency changes which are a direct result of the effects of the genes in question. Is that right?
That wasn't me, and I said "in the usual sense" specifically because the context was Will's (unusual) definition.
I differentiate between selection and genetic drift like usually done and the case of blue eyes would be an example of the latter. I think the difference is normally described as selection being a consistent non-random effect. Personally I'd describe it as an effect on the relative frequencies caused by the presence of the gene.
I apologize for confusing you with him.
Okay, well I would still guess that natural selection is going at a good clip these days. For example it seems pretty likely that the gene for twinning is spreading pretty fast.