Could Technology Spark Evolution?
After committing hours to the various BBC documentaries about the evolution of our planet and our species I wondered about this.
It has been assumed any further evolution in the human species is probably unlikely. Previous changes in our evolution (ie biological) might have been forced by drastic changes in enviroment. Our enviroment for dated civilizition has been stabble. Could this new world of Technology spark evolution? The changes that caused evolution before was changes in enviroment and the evolution took millions of years. All of our technology has been invented in the last 100 or so years. That to me seems like a very drastic change in a very short time.
Watch a 50-year old try to play with a gameboy,
and watch 7-year old master the computer.
This gap in comprehension is huge in only one generation.
Could Technology Spark Evolution?
The Darwinian, and most excepted theory, of evolution proposes that traits are passed from parent to child. Thereby ensuring that the best member of the species for surviving are the ones that pass their genetic material on. Dawin also proposed that the population of a species will not exceed what its environment can support. Because our species is aided in its survival by technology, it is only when the environment is no longer able to support us and there is a mass decline that we will be able to see what effect the technology has had on our species survival.
When I say that our species survival is aided by technology, what I mean is that our %26quot;survival of the fittest%26quot; is no longer reliant on what our bodies are capable of.
Evolution does take a very long time to occur. The ability to digest dairy is a %26quot;recent%26quot; addition to our biological repotoire. It is unlikely that the technological advances in the past century have had any effect on our evolution.
Using technology is a learned behavior. When the brain is young, it has an amazing capacity for learning new skills. As the brain matures and ages, the ability to learn decreases and slows. This is why a 7-year-old can easily master a computer, and a 50-year-old has trouble with a Gameboy.
This also holds true for languages. Although it is not impossible to learn a language after adolecense, it is easier to learn it before. A 7-year-old would learn a new language more quickly than a 50-year-old too.
Could Technology Spark Evolution?
Yes indeed, it has already happened. eg) genetically engineered tomatoes that grow bigger and taste the same, etc, (pretty much all fruits). Another is desert plants which retain water enough to produce a fruit while in the desert. The next step is taking genetic engineering to animals. Yes, this is possible. Its all genetics, you have heart talks of super humans with no deceases, smarter we are bigger than we used to be.... this will happen for sure.
You do not understand evolution, as is common among social scientists and humanities scholars.
Evolution, the change in allele frequency over time in a population, is not directly dependent on technology, but on the size of the gene pool. It is posited that our rate of evolution is increasing over the last ten thousand years and this is statistically obvious, as the populational gene pool is enormous.
Now, natural selection pays in the coin of reproductive success and sexual selection really ups the playing field to those who procreate successfully.
The 50 year old man, trying to play with a game boy, who has 5 grandchildren is way ahead of the 7 year old who is only a potential breeder.
All evolution is %26quot; reproductive. %26quot; You do not understand evolution if you do not understand this. And whoever assumed that further evolution in humans was unlikely was probable talking about speciation and sounds in advance of the data.
No, it is you who are confused. 10,000 hours, or 10 seconds of guitar hero will not spark evolution. Populations evolve; not individual guitar heroes!!! What you propose is Lamarckism and quite refutable.
Sorry, no sci fi channel here!!!!!!!
I don't think that it is evolution or a gap in comprehension per se. It is more a case of what one person is used to. I mean would you be able to study without the aid of the internet and stuff or live by the light of a candle, no airconditioning? The answer is probably not. If we threw out the TV and the comp tomorrow, my mom wouldn't miss anything. She'll just find a book and relax. But my brother would go mad cos he would have absolutely nothing to do. And who knows, at the rate global warming's going, we just might have a chance to prove the theory of evolution and learn to live underwater or we'll go the way of the dinosaurs.
Sorry, probably not the answer you're looking for but the question really got my brain cells tweaked.
I first have to say that jonmcn49 is completely right about evolution being linked to reproductive success. What technology has allowed us as humans to accomplish which separates us from all other animals is the ability to store and recall information. This ability is a major reason we are able to adapt so quickly to new environments and even create rule sets that help us cope when exploring the unknown. Even with technological help, there is still a disparity in the frequency of alleles that is passed on to the next generation. That disparity is the very process of evolution for any time one particular group of alleles if more dominant in a population than another, there will be a shift in the phenotypes expressed in said population. Your assumption that the world has been stable for the past 10 000 years or so of human civilization and that technology miraculously appeared during the Industrial Revolution is also incorrect and kills your theory that drastic environmental change has not effected human evolution or will not continue to do so.
There may be a change in social evolution but not in biological evolution.
Give the 50-year-old seven years to master the gameboy and, unless he has a physical problem, he should be able to give your seven-year-old a run for his money. I also doubt that a seven-year-old has mastered the computer. He may be able to play games and use the internet. That's only a small part of computer technology. When he can create those games, I might be impressed. Even you -- you are older but I'm guessing that you have never programmed in DOS, Unix, or CP/M, let alone machine language. You can probably beat me using Windows but that is several removes from the computer itself.
I think it is very possible that technology has already made us evolve into what we are today. Using tools and clothing is technology (albeit primative), and I'm not sure we could survive in nature without those things. That's why we have hands instead of claws. Once our evolutionary predecessors gained the ability to manipulate its surroundings in different ways, it altered the course of our evolution. Mental ability and dexterity became more important than brute stregnth and speed.
As technology develops, those things that made us viable in the past may no longer matter. Physical stregnth may further deteriorate. If people shifted more towards cyber-communication, you may see the tools of verbal communication drift away from our genetic blueprints over many, many generations. There will be skills that made people more viable historically which no longer matter, so people who lack those traits by chance will still be able to reproduce, and those traits will begin to fade.
For species-wide changes to occur, typically there has to be some kind of catastrophic event that simply wipes out anyone who DOESN't have certain traits. If you study evolution, you'll learn that scientists have acknowledged evolution is not the slow, gradual process many think of it as being, but rather something that happens rather quickly and sporadically following mass extinctions. So 10,000 years from now, there may be all shapes and sizes of people due to lack of environmental pressures. SOme may be very big and fat, some tiny and small. Some brilliant, some completely devoid of thought. Suddenly, an asteroid hits, and we're all struggling for resources sufficient only to support 1% of the world. Who will win? That will determine what the next phase of human evolution will look like... and technology could very well effect that. It may allow for weaker but smarter people to rule over the big strong dummies.
But keep in mind that true evolution doesn't happen until some force splits up a species between survivors and losers, and does so based on some trait that distinguishes the two. Then the losing trait disappears and the winning trait multiplies and flourishes.
