People don’t understand that fitness is related purely to the number of viable offspring, which isn’t a useful indicator of a person’s virtue. Anyways Social Darwinism is idiotic and a wonderful example of the appeal to nature fallacy. We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake, if we want to progress as a society we need to educate people.
We’ve become self-aware, but the evolutionary impulses persist. Ecological pressures don’t vanish because you begin to understand them. We can adapt rapidly - even within one or two generations - to enormous changes in the ecology. But these are still responses and they still exert evolutionary pressure on the population.
Nevermind that most people still don’t actually understand evolution in a manner that benefits them individually. The idea is only useful at the social level, via community-spanning collective actions and policies.
I meant that our goals aren’t aligned with the evolutionary “goal” of maximizing the number of offspring anymore. We are still deeply driven by evolved instincts, but we should recognize them as needs that our biology requires to be satisfied in order to achieve happiness, rather than goals in themselves. Of course we are still part of the biosphere and subject to evolution, but that evolution isn’t significant on our timescale or meaningful (in the sense that by our criteria of good people, we won’t evolve to be better). If we want to improve as a species, we should focus on a different, memetic, kind of evolution, passing knowledge and ideas instead of genetic material.
I meant that our goals aren’t aligned with the evolutionary “goal” of maximizing the number of offspring anymore.
More humans in one place have a real positive benefit. That’s why we congregate in office buildings and university centers, rather than spreading ourselves out as evenly as possible. And communities with large populations enjoy economics of scale that smaller that smaller, more diffuse populations can’t take advantage of.
evolution isn’t significant on our timescale or meaningful (in the sense that by our criteria of good people, we won’t evolve to be better).
Genetic drift isn’t significant on the span of decades or centuries, but it is still happening and will have consequences to population subgroups in tens of thousands of years.
And - as we’ve demonstrated with more manual efforts at selection - we can force the issue with technology. Modern corn and bananas are two classic examples of a species cultivated by human intervention. Modern methods of transportation and trade has given us record levels of miscegenation, producing enormous cohorts of the human population with combinations of biological traits heretofore unseen (mostly trivial and unremarkable in the moment, but wait another 10,000 years and we’ll see what we get).
The pressures we’ve placed upon the global ecology through industrialization are taking their toll as well. But these have feedbacks that shape our own populations. As the pressures we exert rise (via pollution, climate change, terraforming, deliberate scientific gene tampering) the consequences on our populations become more profound.
Even then, having said all of that, there is no real “better” from an evolutionary perspective. There is surviving to procreate and not surviving, but you’ll be hard pressed to name an existing species that hasn’t figured that out. What we have in cognition is the ability to evaluate the consequences of our actions. We don’t have any kind of measure for what direction we should aim, save in what we collectively choose to value.
Which, in the context of Social Darwinism, still puts the idea to rest.
People don’t understand that fitness is related purely to the number of viable offspring, which isn’t a useful indicator of a person’s virtue. Anyways Social Darwinism is idiotic and a wonderful example of the appeal to nature fallacy. We’ve surpassed evolution for fuck’s sake, if we want to progress as a society we need to educate people.
We’ve become self-aware, but the evolutionary impulses persist. Ecological pressures don’t vanish because you begin to understand them. We can adapt rapidly - even within one or two generations - to enormous changes in the ecology. But these are still responses and they still exert evolutionary pressure on the population.
Nevermind that most people still don’t actually understand evolution in a manner that benefits them individually. The idea is only useful at the social level, via community-spanning collective actions and policies.
I meant that our goals aren’t aligned with the evolutionary “goal” of maximizing the number of offspring anymore. We are still deeply driven by evolved instincts, but we should recognize them as needs that our biology requires to be satisfied in order to achieve happiness, rather than goals in themselves. Of course we are still part of the biosphere and subject to evolution, but that evolution isn’t significant on our timescale or meaningful (in the sense that by our criteria of good people, we won’t evolve to be better). If we want to improve as a species, we should focus on a different, memetic, kind of evolution, passing knowledge and ideas instead of genetic material.
More humans in one place have a real positive benefit. That’s why we congregate in office buildings and university centers, rather than spreading ourselves out as evenly as possible. And communities with large populations enjoy economics of scale that smaller that smaller, more diffuse populations can’t take advantage of.
Genetic drift isn’t significant on the span of decades or centuries, but it is still happening and will have consequences to population subgroups in tens of thousands of years.
And - as we’ve demonstrated with more manual efforts at selection - we can force the issue with technology. Modern corn and bananas are two classic examples of a species cultivated by human intervention. Modern methods of transportation and trade has given us record levels of miscegenation, producing enormous cohorts of the human population with combinations of biological traits heretofore unseen (mostly trivial and unremarkable in the moment, but wait another 10,000 years and we’ll see what we get).
The pressures we’ve placed upon the global ecology through industrialization are taking their toll as well. But these have feedbacks that shape our own populations. As the pressures we exert rise (via pollution, climate change, terraforming, deliberate scientific gene tampering) the consequences on our populations become more profound.
Even then, having said all of that, there is no real “better” from an evolutionary perspective. There is surviving to procreate and not surviving, but you’ll be hard pressed to name an existing species that hasn’t figured that out. What we have in cognition is the ability to evaluate the consequences of our actions. We don’t have any kind of measure for what direction we should aim, save in what we collectively choose to value.