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To: anymouse

It is pretty insane of people trying to argue that human evolution has sped up when humans have short circuited natural selection by discovering medicine, caring for those with genetic defects, etc. If what you theorize is happening, evolution, speeds up when your mechanism, natural selection, is short circuited by human action, you need a new theory.


5 posted on 12/11/2007 12:59:17 AM PST by JLS
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To: JLS
humans have short circuited natural selection by discovering medicine, caring for those with genetic defects, etc.

Nope. It's still selective pressure and selection, no matter who or what changes the environment. And we human beings are no less "natural" than any other organism on the planet.

15 posted on 12/11/2007 1:42:33 AM PST by Rudder
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To: JLS

Since medicine has made ANY difference to survival only since 1920, and a great difference only since about 1940, that leaves more than 10,000 years of civilization in which crowding, new diseases, etc., have introduced greater natural selection effects, not less.


18 posted on 12/11/2007 2:41:25 AM PST by Arthur McGowan
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To: JLS

That apparent short circuiting also allows mutations to survive that may weaken the individual in some areas, yet strengthen them in others. IOW the gene pool is getting bigger.


31 posted on 12/11/2007 4:43:57 AM PST by From many - one.
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To: JLS

There has always been a circularity about natural selection as an explanation of evolution., Anyway, given the obvious role that culture plays in the cnages that have been observed, determinism and chance both seems to have been overemphasized, and human intellligence and morality played down. In any case, the whole effort to connect us with chimps seems odd. The more they learn, the more they find out how relatively fixed human nature is. The course was set and what they call evolution is more like the development of an individual human. You are what you think and do:


32 posted on 12/11/2007 4:50:45 AM PST by RobbyS ( CHIRHO)
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To: JLS
Natural Selection is your basic demigod ~ feet of clay, inappropriate answers to the supplications of men, and so forth. To wit, NS is a "false god".

So, how does evolution really work? Maybe there are other answers.

38 posted on 12/11/2007 5:48:47 AM PST by muawiyah
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