Should we be De-Evolving?

No, because there's no such thing as "devolution"; evolution doesn't proceed towards a goal or in any kind of direction.As for natural selection, unfortunately, it's still at work for most of the human population. For us lucky few in the industrial world, the only selection we're likely to experience is sexual selection.

Yeah they do. Rape is commonplace in the animal world; some species more than others. Infanticide is common, too. Almost every animal will eat what is made avaliable to it. Obese pets are common. Wild animals don't tend to be fat because fat animals tend to get chased down and killed. We've observed hmosexuality in hundreds of different animal species. There's a pair of gay penguin parents in the San Diego zoo; two males who mate with each other and are raising a chick from an abandoned egg.Welcome to EvC, congratulations on your first post.

"Synonymous substitutions" was the term I used, and the figure was for mammalian nuclear DNA, from my wife's textbook on molecular phylogenetics. I believe it was about 3.5 per billion base pairs.

That's simply not true. House pets have exactly the same instincts as wild animals. They don't, however, have the same trained behavior. Animals in the wild will eat all that is avaliable to them. It's a survival trait, because an organism never knows if it's ever going to eat again. Humans have the same exact instinct - we eat more, way more, when more is put in front of us. I meant it as "sexual activity against the consent of the victim." That's the same meaning in humans as in animals. It's been seen in the wild, too, among certain primates. Oh, right. Because the only reason an organism might be gay is because they're a female trapped in a male's body.Grow up. What an immature sexual attitude. I had no idea how old you were until this very moment, when you just told me. I'm not correcting you because you're young. I'm correcting you because you're wrong. The only reason I would dismiss you as ignorant would be because you are ignorant. There's no shame in ignorance. But there is much to be ashamed of if one is too proud or confident to listen to those who are trying to rectify one's ignorance.

And that's fine, I guess.But it kind of weakens your central thesis, doesn't it? That humans are definately devolving because we do worse things than animals do? I mean, I'm pretty much proven that not only do animals do the same things we do, they do them for most of the same reasons we do.

I don't know that I believe that humans do, either. The evidence seems to suggest that rapists rape to expand their reproductive opportunity; rapists consistently report experiencing a deficiency between their sex life, no matter how frequent, and how much sex they think they're "supposed" to be having.It's a complex uestion and I don't know where I stand on it. But I don't think we can simply conclude, without discussion, that men rape for power over women. Without some evidence that's just a convinient excuse. If animals don't reason, then everything they do is without reason.