Except that here in the United States, there definitely is a leftist agenda directed toward replacing the legacy white population with those considered to be more receptive to the Democratic Party’s agenda.
3 Likes
500 years ago, white europeans colonizers were a minority and they gained a majority by looting, bringing enslaved africans to work the fields while multiplying their numbers. And the natural course of society is to mix all those races, and it’s also a function of whites mixing with blacks and reds and asians. This mixed heritage on the long term will normalize all ethnicities. There will be no more whites, nor blacks nor asians, everyone in the long run will be just (surprise) humans. Now claiming that this natural evolutive fact is a political agenda, well, you can call anything you want as you’re entitled to your opinion, at least while the current democratic state of affairs lasts.
But this has not been the “natural course of society” since the emergence of modern humans and their migration from Africa starting around 70,000 years ago. Genetic evidence and the lack of genetic diversity among humans compared to other species suggests humans went through a population bottleneck around 75,000 years ago which reduced the human population to between 10,000 and 30,000 individuals, with all modern humans descended from this very genetically uniform founder population.
As human populations spread around the globe, the various environments they inhabited caused evolution to shape them to adapt and succeed in those environments, and isolation of geographically separated populations and genetic drift caused diversity among populations to increase, resulting in the major racial groups recognised today and smaller and less apparent differences now revealed by genetic analysis.
Thus, over 70 millennia of history, human diversity has increased, not decreased or become uniform. Humans tend to spontaneously self-segregate into like groups and distrust outsiders, leading to conflict among groups whose differences are, to those not involved, almost indistinguishable.
Now, perhaps the shining utopian future promised to us by the globalists will put an end to this history which is as old as our species, but I don’t think that’s the way to bet. In fact, if you look at the history of Lebanon, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia in recent decades, it appears fissiparous forces are more powerful than the urge to merge. Economics increasingly demonstrates that railroad-era, continental-scale, resource-extraction empires are impotent, obsolete, and uncompetitive against smaller, agile, self-assembled, and homogeneous populations. Thus I would expect these relics of the 18th and 19th centuries to increasingly dissolve into smaller territories in which human diversity will continue to increase.
10 Likes
Recessive genes tend to disappear with time. Sexual partners are most likely to find each other by their scent, that indicates that genetic differences increases immune system response in their offspring. Evolutionary biology predicts that in the future everyone will look Brazilian. With all that I tend to believe that in the long run, there’s no replacement, it’s just plain evolution. With every technological advance we decrease the distance between people and although I agree that genetic variability can increase, I still think that ethnically we’ll look more alike than not. Look at what’s happening in Japan, their population is decreasing in numbers and some estimate that the Japanese people will disappear, although their genes are less recessives, so their genetic contribution will live on. But it’s only my opinion.
2 Likes
It is certainly true that PAST technological advances have tended to decrease certain distances between people, thereby leading to inter-marriage. But it would be a bold transgendered single mother of color who would assume that technological advances such as horses, ships, canals, trains, planes will continue to occur in the future. In Western society, we have decided to employ unaffordably large numbers of well-paid overhead lawyers & bureaucrats to make sure no more significant technological advances get implemented. Technological advances will continue in places like China and India – places where we may be certain there is no desire to have everyone going Brazilian.
Socially, we may be at a rather unique point in history when it may be easier for a Japanese male to find a Ukrainian girlfriend than a willing Japanese female – which would tend to support the Brazilian hypothesis. But scratch the surface – that model works only for high-earning Japanese males and unusually attractive Ukrainian females. The great bulk of both populations will remain separated.
Think about how things have changed within living memory. Not so very long ago, smart attractive lower-class Western women would marry up, marrying the boss. Now we have assortive mating, where the children of the Beautiful People meet at exclusive colleges, marry, and send their children to the same exclusive colleges – the distance between the nomenklatura and the rest of the population is increasing. If the Ruling Class were able to build a sustainable society, perhaps we would end up with a Brazilian-looking Ruling Class directing “racially different” hoi polloi. But since the Ruling Class has already demonstrated their inability to run societies, that projection will not come to pass.
6 Likes
Actually, no. It depends upon their effect on the phenotype and the selective pressures in effect. For example, lactase persistence (the ability in humans to metabolise lactose into adulthood) is a recessive trait which requires inheriting two copies of the hypolactasia allele from one’s parents. There are six single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with this, all of which are recessive.
Nonetheless, in populations which developed dairy farming, lactase persistence has become overwhelmingly common (90% or higher in northwestern Europe), but rare in populations whose ancestors did not consume animal milk (less than 5% among Native Americans and most East Asians). This is a recent phenomenon: the most common allele for lactase persistence in the northwest European population is estimated to have appeared between 2450 and 2140 BCE.
This is an example of a recessive gene which confers an evolutionary advantage becoming dominant in the population (children who can drink animal milk into adulthood survive and have more offspring). Recessive genes which do not affect reproductive success tend to be neutral and are not selected out. Only those which reduce the number of offspring are eliminated. And this depends upon the environment. The recessive sickle cell anemia gene increases reproductive success among heterozygous carriers in regions where malaria is endemic and has persisted and been selected for among populations living there despite being deleterious to fatal to homozygous carriers of the abnormal HBB gene.
Genetics are complicated. Our genomes are in a continuous dialogue with the environment which itself is constantly changing, just as we are changing our environment.
10 Likes
It isnt t going to happen. That’s what people thought back in the 60s.
3 Likes
Does evolutionary biology have a track record of predicting things in the future, or is mostly about positing theories about why certain outcomes today are the way they are?
Or, as Mark Twain more eloquently put it,
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.
9 Likes
I don’t believe evolutionary biology predicts anything. Note that the famous finches of Darwin’s observations back in the 1800’s have been revisited. And they’ve all returned to their normal beaks.
2 Likes
I share this belief and I am willing to change my mind if evidence to the contrary can be presented.
2 Likes
“ I share this belief and I am willing to change my mind if evidence to the contrary can be presented.”
Sure. But present the evidence. So far I’ve seen nada. The ”newly discovered” microbiology of the single cell makes creation from the proverbial “soup” pretty much impossible.
If you’re interested, Stephen C. Meyer has a new book out called Return of the God Hypothesis that tackles just this question. Plus there are two or three Uncommon Knowledge discussions including Meyer, on this subject.
5 Likes
I agree with this. Here is my “real world” evidence: small animals killed in roads. We have had fast moving vehicles for well over half a century. We have had paved roadways for well over half a century. And small animals have been run over by cars on those roadways for well over half a century. At some point, if evolutionary biology (and maybe I am thinking of something else here) were a thing, wouldn’t these animals have evolved to connect the types of surfaces they are encountering with extreme danger? I mean after 50 freaking years, wouldn’t the older squirrels be telling the younger squirrels that the solid, black earth is where giant metal beasts roam at high rates of speed and to avoid trying to cross the roads?
2 Likes
Also wasn’t it Bill Buckley who said that he found it highly improbable that the writer of Hamlet would have the same evolutionary background as a ham sandwich? I find that to be the shortest and yet most powerful refutation of evolution as an explanation for origins of life that has yet to come down the pike. And of course he is correct. What are the probabilities that people like Aquinas, Jefferson, and/or Churchill would eventually have the same biological heritage of a grasshopper? That just doesn’t add up to me.
5 Likes
There is no question that under severe artificial selection pressure, species evolve quite rapidly. Almost all domestic animal breeding is exactly this. Dog breeding, in particular, is a great example since it shows how big a gap in breed can be obtained in a relatively short period of time. Most of the outcomes are robust and if propagated at scale, they can maintain the sought after characteristics over time.
Another example is rat/mouse breeding for various biomedical experimentation. Under pressure from artificial selection, widely disparate outcomes are possible, again in the span of relatively few generations.
When you look for examples of evolution in response to natural selection pressures, the situation is more complicated. The only example I am aware of is antibiotic resistance. I thought there had been examples of natural evolution with fruit flies, but I could only come across examples attributed to 1950s Soviet scientists.
When it comes to roadkill, is it that the lack of adaptation indicating evolution under natural selection pressures is due to insufficiently large samples? Too few animals in any population coming in contact with cars at a frequent enough rate? Or selection pressures leading to behavioral changes (don’t cross the road anymore) that do not affect the animal’s genome?
3 Likes
The famous example is the English moths which went from light-colored to dark colored as pollution increased in England. The interpretation was that a dark moth was less obvious when sitting on pollution-darkened English trees & other surfaces, and thus less likely to get eaten & more likely to breed successfully.
3 Likes
An excellent example of evolution by natural selection is lactase persistence in humans which I discussed in comment 19 above. Human populations who adopted dairy farming as a lifestyle saw the spread of a rare recessive allele which causes the ability to metabolise lactose in milk to persist into adulthood. In ancestral human populations, lactose metabolism ceases in childhood after the age of weaning. But once dairy farming becomes a significant food source, those who carry the gene that allows adults to extract the energy in milk have more children and, before long, that gene will become dominant (more than 90% in northwestern European populations), while it remains rare among those who never domesticated milk-producing animals.
This is a case of natural selection driven evolution having occurred in historical times among human populations.
6 Likes
It doesn’t matter who said it, or how clever it is, it’s wrong. Genes are the template which specifies the proteins from which all organisms on Earth are assembled, and there is a high degree of commonality among the genes of all organisms, notwithstanding their large differences in form. Humans share 98% of their genes with pigs, so the difference between the author of Hamlet and the insides of the ham sandwich is, from the standpoint of evolutionary biology, just 2%. Humans share 80% of their genes with cows, 65% with chickens, 61% with fruit flies, and 60% with bananas. There is 26% genetic commonality between humans and brewer’s yeast, and hundreds of yeast genes are nearly identical to those of humans and if a human gene is spliced in to replace one of the yeast, it works just fine. The last common ancestor of yeast and humans is estimated as having lived around a billion years ago.
8 Likes
Is it possible that some humans, with all that gene similarity with other organisms, also have the same mental capacity? Think Maxine Waters. Now as you say, she shares 61% of her genes with a fruit fly, but do you think she might also share similarities in intelligence? Something to ponder…
4 Likes
On a serious note John. I will not attempt to wade into a serious debate of evolution on the merits because I would be woefully inept and provide nothing to the conversation. All I can say is that, despite all of these seemingly rock solid physical similarities between organisms, that I will never conclude that the whole of humanity (even in its current state of stupidity and debauchery) deviates by a mere degree or two from fruit flies or bananas. To think that an individual such as yourself, one who I find to be very, very intelligent, is physically, if the blocks are rearranged a certain way, nothing different from a piece of fruit, is not only dehumanizing of you but also depressing in general terms.
4 Likes
I don’t see why this should be depressing. Well below the level of genetics, all living things are mostly made (almost 97% by mass) of four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which are among the eight most abundant elements in the universe. As a software guy, I believe it’s not the hardware but the information—the software, if you like—that makes the difference between things. Just because two organisms are made of the same parts, whether chemical elements or mostly common genes, doesn’t mean they are equivalent, as it’s the way they’re arranged that makes all the difference.
Given the overwhelming evidence that all existing life on Earth is descended from a last universal common ancestor it would be a great surprise to discover there weren’t large similarities among the fundamental components of organisms descended from that progenitor.
9 Likes