Open Thread: September 2011

Pavitra

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

If continuing the discussion becomes impractical, that means you win at open threads; a celebratory top-level post on the topic is traditional.

I feel like this needs to go in some high-level FAQ somewhere:

Genetic natural selection is done operating on people. There is no need to speculate about its future effects.

Genetic natural selection takes tens of thousands of years to operate, and it is incredibly unlikely, short of some planet-wide catastrophe that sets back technology thousands of years, that it gets tens of thousands of years to operate without our either starting to seriously re-engineer our own genomes, or abandoning the genetic game all together.

I feel like this needs to go in some high-level FAQ somewhere:
Genetic natural selection is done operating on people. There is no need to speculate about its future effects.

I think it is pretty obvious that natural selection is as we speak having massive effect on the frequencies of various alleles and consequently phenotypes. Among other things we are currently experiencing a massive genetic pruning comparable in scope to the Black Death in the form of exposure to modern contraceptives (as I mention elsewhere) .

Genetic natural selection takes tens of

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2lessdazed15y

This could be right or wrong, but is ambiguous. [...] Likewise, but probably wrong. Still ambiguous, you should put it differently.

0sam034515y

We will not be done with genetic natural selection till we give up the flesh, and perhaps not even then. In populations recently exposed to the modern diet, and ill adapted to it, there has been significant genetic adaption in a couple of generations. S. G.; Ewbank, D.; Govindaraju, D. R.; Stearns, S. C. (2009). "Evolution in Health and Medicine Sackler Colloquium: Natural selection in a contemporary human population". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 1787. Similarly, populations recently exposed to alcohol. There have been significant and substantial changes in skeletal structure over the last ten thousand years. One can reasonably define the white race in such a way that it is only ten thousand years old, that everyone before then was non white, not that we know what skin color they were. In Jamaica, we are arguably seeing sympatric race formation, as the upper classes develop a significant genetic difference from the lower classes. Ashekenazi Jews have evolved very substantial genetic differences from Sephardic Jews since the crusades, even though they have single culture, and no one discriminates between them, they have become two quite different races, a single culture, a single folk, yet two races.