where to from here: evolution.

Dreamer

Argument Topic: Yes, humans are evolving.

Genetically the difference between a great ancestor 10,000 years ago is minimal. Wisdom teeth are a good example of evolution in humans. Our mouths have gotten narrower.

In the far future there is only speculation. One possible future is that advanced aliens use as a livestock and we are all extremely obese and very few of us make it to adolescence. Only the most fat are allowed to breed in a form of artificial selection. 

maxx

i can not see being obese as part of evolution; unless we get to the point where we are born as such. @Dreamer

Swolliw

@maxx If you sit around long enough you will see paint dry.
If you sit around a bit longer you may notice that the hour hand on the clock has moved.
Sit around for a few days and you will see the grass grow.
Sit around for say, 5 million years and you will have noticed an appreciable difference in humans.
In our current form, we have been around only a million years and we still need to devolve many redundant features such as unused organs; appendix, gall bladder etc. And our spine will take another couple of million years to adapt to primates.
In about 100 million years time it is predicted that the human body may adapt to eating large quantities of garlic without getting poisoned. But then that feature will probably not be needed since stu-pid-ity, mysticism, and spiritualism will probably have all been evolved out of humans by then.

maxx

Aside from your flippingmouth and insults, why don't you  actually attempt to debate the issue as written?  Why will humans change. For what reason, and how? What will change in this world for us to evolve and into what? Technology? Sudden climate change? Give reasons. Just debate the topic and keep your snide remarks in your pocket. @Swolliw

MayCaesar

Philosopher John Vervaeke in his work emphasizes the concept of "psychotechnology". The concept refers to the result of integration of technology into one's life where they essentially become merged with it, leading to a unique behavior and outcomes. For instance, someone who grows up using a smartphone since they were 3 becomes a different being than someone who has lived in a society with no smartphones. Nobody living 200 years ago would even conceive of living in a world where they can get a very precise map of the area they are in with a couple of taps on a tiny handheld device, and the few world maps that did exist were clunky, had low resolution, were enormous in size, highly inaccurate, and unaffordable and rare.

I see no reason to limit evolutionary considerations purely to what is inside our bodies. Sure, our cardiovascular system has not changed significantly over the past 2,000 years. What is more impactful on our life though: the fine details of how that system works, or, say, introduction of the Internet? "Evolution" is simply a process of changes in the species' life; it does not have to necessarily involve direct biological alterations. Humans have gone further over the past 6,000 years than they had over the previous 5 million in terms of how they live, even though biologically the changes have been significantly less noticeable.

We are at the dawn of a cardinal change in how everything in human life works: we are about to start incorporating direct collective intelligence (natural language machine learning models) in all areas of our life. What this will do to the life and the function of the average human organism is hard to predict; suffice to say that a human 50 years from now will have very little in common with a human even today, let alone 2,000 years ago, let alone 200,000 years ago. If anything, evolution today is happening on a much shorter time scale than before.

maxx

Very well. However,  technology has and is changing almost faster than society itself can keep up witn, let alone any kind of biological or mental change in humans that will actually show any kind od evolutionary change. We cannot even tell if technology has even made us smarter, for we allow it to do most of our physical work, as well as our mental. Spell check,  grammar corrections alone keeps many from learning proper writing.  We no longer have to spend long hours at research.   In who knows how many decades,  we will have implants rather than phones
 Humans are only trying to keep up with technology and unless technology stagnates for a few hundred years, there will be no actual evolutionary changes ib our brains @MayCaesar. 

MayCaesar

@maxx

I do not know what it means for a society to keep up with the changes, but as an individual human being, I cannot say that I am having any difficulties adopting the novelties. And even if I did, they would still influence my life and change who and what I fundamentally am. The fact that someone does not understand all the details of how artificial intelligence works and never trains neural network models himself does not shield him from all the ways other people using artificial intelligence change the world around him - and change him as a consequence.

As for being "smarter", from this perspective, humans certainly are. If smartness is to be measured in terms of what insights a human can come up with using all the available tools at his disposal, then the average elementary school student today can be far smarter than Einstein was 100 years ago. The fact that a lot of this smartness is outsourced outside the human body hardly changes anything.

Swolliw

@maxx ; Give reasons. 

My omission; also I seemed to have left that out.
Many experts in their fields have claimed that the human brain has evolved way past its ability to keep us thriving and you only need to look at the advancements in AI to realise that in future times, complex calculations and decision-making will no longer be needed for humans to survive. Many psychologists assert that we are "too smart" for our own good and with a reduced brain size, we can still enjoy life without having to "overthink" our day to day travails and ponderances.

So, yes I may be wrong with my observance above and I certainly did not intend any insult. For example, it could be that the appendix may in fact start to re-evolve and there will be a noticeable "hump" on the abdomens of the next race of human beings. This would coincide with the significant loss in intellectual capacity of humans and the side-effects such as lack of reasoning and sanity resulting in consuming copious quantities of garlic. So, the enlarged appendix would be able to reasonably break-down the dangerous levels of disulphide toxins produced by the breakdown of a very unstable compound known as allicin.

But that is just one random example of how evolution can sometimes go backwards in order to march forwards.

Let's look at say, as a random example, the vesicular monoamine transporter 2 gene which scientists have attributed to those having the gene to succumb to delusional illnesses; hence the nickname, "the God gene". With reduced ability to think too much about everyday phenomena, such an undesirable trait would gradually mutate out of the gene pool altogether.

maxx

I can agree up to a point. Yes, humans are getting to the point where so many complex problems are solved for us. However i am not certain  that brain size itself will diminish. At least not because of us no longer needing to solve many problems. I think our mental capacity may change. Implants in the future can give us all the sudden knowledge that we desire, yet will that make us any more smarter? It is kind of like giving people all the food they can handle, yet they no longer know how to cook. We would have the free knowledge with out the ability to actually learn it on our own. Perhaps in the far future as long as the status quo does not change, we may lose the ability to learn many things as humans used to do. A college professor recently told me that so many first year students find it difficult to even spell complex words or solve math with out help from the web. What if AI moves into other areas of our lives and begin doing tasks for us? We already have robotic vacuums and lawn mowers. HUmans may get to the point where we have little at all to do around the house. Drones deliver our food. perhaps our muscles will diminish. lack of proper foods may change our entire biological system due to lack of nutrients. We may be looking  at where humans have most everything done for us. If we get to that point, and then nothing changes for for thousands upon thousands of years, we may become small under developed people with a large brain to hold all the knowledge we no longer have to learn or lack the ability to learn. @Swolliw

maxx

i disagree. having knowledge with out the ability to have learned that knowledge only means you have that knowledge available  to you. you did not learn it nor researched it. If one can not spell without spell check or looking it up, or solve basic math, or use proper grammar or any other mundane activities then it is simple, one is not learning. he just has the knowledge. It is like having the answer sheet next to you as you do a test. read my reply to swalloiw as well. @MayCaesar

jack

maxx said:

What do you see for humans for the far future? 

Hello m:

The Borg.

excon

MayCaesar

maxx said:

i disagree. having knowledge with out the ability to have learned that knowledge only means you have that knowledge available  to you. you did not learn it nor researched it. If one can not spell without spell check or looking it up, or solve basic math, or use proper grammar or any other mundane activities then it is simple, one is not learning. he just has the knowledge. It is like having the answer sheet next to you as you do a test. read my reply to swalloiw as well. @MayCaesar

It is not clear to me what exactly you disagree with, since what you wrote here bears no relation to my comment. By what exact mechanism one has come to being able to do certain things is irrelevant as far as the impact of their ability on their biological organism is.

Human brain always works actively; the question is merely what it works on. In the past, when even something as simple as storing food for a few hours involved a lot of deliberate actions, the brain was preoccupied with such mundane tasks; nowadays such tasks are mostly automated and human brains focus on more intricate things. Our current conversation involving very complicated concepts by the average peasant from the 14th-century Europe's standards would not be possible at that time: you would most likely be plugging the fields right now, and your mind would be preoccupied with such thoughts as, "I am tired", "I am hungry", "F this life", and "I hope our next child does not die".

Whether you learn or not does not change; what changes is what you learn. Would you rather learn how to manually compute something that your computer can do in a nanosecond, or how to utilize your computer's high-level operations to be more productive than a million people working together 200 years ago were?

Swolliw

@maxx ; If we get to that point, and then nothing changes for for thousands upon thousands of years, we may become small under developed people with a large brain to hold all the knowledge we no longer have to learn or lack the ability to learn.

You are probably right there if that is how we develop as a purely biological species.

I think that, given the rapid development of technology and in particular, AI we may get to the stage whereby beings will be purely electro-mechanical. Before that, I have no doubt that we will be hybrid beings.

maxx

what i am saying, having the knowledge does not equate with learning it. relying on crutches so tp speak will eventually stem your ability to walk correctly. The same with relying on given knowledge from a computer. Eventually if the status quo remains the same, in hundreds of thousands of years we will lose the ability to learn many things. Why? simply because certain learning is no longer needed. The majority of humans could not live the way our earliest ancestors did. we no longer have the hands on approach to do so, and in the far future, we will lose the basic skills that schooling once taught everyone. The same with automation. we already have automatic doors, escalators, elevators, toilets, sinks, lawn mowers, vacuums, and so on. In the far future who knows? moving walks, devices to float us along, teleportation, bionics to lift heavy objects, robots to do everyday chores( they already have auto-dog walkers), and so on. So again, we are evolving to the point where we no longer have to learn, and having everything done for us; which can eventually change humans with a larger brain to store knowledge we did not learn, and under developed bodies from having everything done for us. @MayCaesar

maxx

and what will that do to human evolution? @jack