We are too humane.

Definately not true. Even overlooking sexual selection, not everyone lives in the conditions you're thinking of. Unfortunately, the vast majority of human beings still live in situations where they face mortality literally every day.Selection still operates on the human species, and we're still evolving. Well, everybody dies. The "requirement for evolution" is that environment exerts influence on allele frequencies, and that's absolutely still the case with the human species. Particularly in the presence of disease.

I dunno. I'd say the largest selection factor at work on the human species is sexual selection, so we'll probably have more promounced sexual characteristics, if you follow. No, "changes in allele frequencies = evolution." There's no such thing as "macro" or "micro" evolution. These are made-up words that don't reflect any fundamental dichotomy that actually exists in biology. How would they? Perhaps at random, through genetic drift, but the power of that mechanism to exert real genetic change is still under heavy debate. What's unnatural about using our minds and culture to cure disease? No, it's not anti-evolutionary. Even in the presence of medical science we still see anti-disease genes spread throughout the population; for instance, the human gene that provides resistance to HIV.Evolution isn't about death and the elimination of the weak. The weak don't have to be "culled" for evolution to occur; they just have to be less successful at reproducing. Evolution is about sex, not death.

Er, not really. The majority of Earth's species are still extremely simple organisms. If there's any direction to evolution, it's a steady march of increasing diversity, not increasing complexity. Complex life is still the exception, not the rule. Well, we're all getting fatter, because of what we eat. Presumably our genetic future will take this into account. Of course, we may soon hit the point where we determine directly our genetic future. Probably what will happen will be a decline in genetic diversity.

I'm not sure what you think my "view" of evolution is, since I'm largely just repeating things from biology texts. I don't think there's really a "view" to be had about what evolution is, there's just lesser or greater understanding of the theory as currently worked out by scientists. What promotes speciation is divergent allele frequency changes between two reproductively isolated populations. Without isolation there can be no speciation. Darwin was right to propose that natural selection causes populations to change; what he didn't know about was genetics. Darwin did not formulate evolution in terms of changes in allele frequencies, but he did understand that it involved changing trait frequencies. I think you're looking at it entirely the wrong way. It doesn't matter who lives or dies if nobody reproduces. You could live to be a ripe old age but until you can attract a mate, you're as great an evolutionary failure as your conspecific who was killed by predators, or whatever.Most selection pressures aren't quite the life-or-death struggle that you're thinking of. It's really a more prosaic matter of mating, and who has more children and grandchildren than the rest. Then you're not even looking, because that's exactly what happens. But everybody dies. Does that mean no one is fit?

Um, Syamsu, selection has to be selective.A random instance that has nothing to do with an organism's traits is not a selection pressure. Absolutely anyone can fall of a cliff and die, regardless of the contents of your genes.That's not selection, and you should know better after 3 years of having this pointed out to you, over and over and over again....

When I said "evolution" I was referring to the theory, which I don't think there can be different "views" of. What I guess you're going to make me come out and say is, if you disagree with me that this is what the theory of evolution says, you don't really understand the theory. They don't, though. Not every organism mates, and it's not because they died before they had a chance. Organisms are selective about who they mate with. Exactly my point. It's not about who dies; it's about who doesn't reproduce. To get back to your point, under our medical technology, ebola might not neccessarily kill you, but who's going to mate with you? Or AIDS? These people are kept alive when, perhaps, they would normally die; what I'm saying is that it doesn't really matter to our fitness because they either choose not to mate, or can attract no mates in their condition. It's the same either way in regards to our gene pool. I thought my point was clear. In populations, certain genes often come to be "fixed" throughout the entire population, not because the gene caused the death of all its competitors, but because organisms with the genes had more children than those that did not have the gene. In other words, what you say you're not seeing is literally what is happening. It's really not that hard to understand if you remember that most populations are at a stable value (called "K".) If one group always has twice as many children as the other group, that group will come to completely dominate the population. You can even model it mathematically. We didn't get into it the first time, because you did not refute the point. You merely dismissed it. Well, that doesn't make it go away. It's still true that human populations continue to evolve, because our allele freqencies are changing over time. That's evolution. Just think about it for a minute. If evolution relied on death, then why does everything die? If evolution relied on death, how could anything be alive to evolve?Evolution relies on reproduction, because evolutionarily speaking, there's no difference between dying and not reproducing.

And one of the problems with the alternative is basing conclusions on things we can't know exist. I don't know that. How do you? Oh, sure - I mean, I know that we think love exists, and we certainly act out behaviors for which we use the term "love" to describe, but to go from that to saying that "love really exists" is quite erroneous.So too with consciousness. We engage in behaviors that we label "conscious." But the thing is, so do animals. There's absolutely nothing that you can see humans doing that animals don't do too, albeit on a smaller scale. Well, you can't even prove that you are either of those. There's absolutely no reason not to explain your behavior by the same means. How can you prove you are conscious? How can you prove that you're not simply responding to stimulus?You should be very doubtful of the things you "just know are true"; these are usually the things that are the least true.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 02-02-2005 16:24 AM