I agree. How can a clueless person ramble on so long?
Unlike plants and wild animals, human evolution is not a natural process. It occurs mostly during war. During the 20th century 180 million people were killed in 165 wars, about 1 in 10 people. Usually it’s the smartest that survive. That's why modern man developed intelligence far beyond that needed to find food. Most human genetic traits are all about winning at war.
Compared to natural evolution, war is very high speed. Genetic mutations in the wild can take 100,000 years to vet, while war can dramatically change the human gene pool in a few years. This high speed evolution is the reason humans are the most genetically advanced animal ever, even though we are relatively new on the scene.
War is also the reason there is little genetic variation among humans. We've killed off all competitors, such as the Neanderthals. This is very different than plants and wild animals. Monkeys have many genetic variations. Humans do not.
Fifty years ago 50% of the Jews in Europe were killed. What genetic impact did this have? Many of the Einstein types survived. The Jews have been the target of many mass killings over thousands of years. I suspect that is the reason that the average Jewish person alive today, in general with many exceptions, is smarter than average.
With a few exceptions wars have only killed off a vanishingly small portion of the population to cause much of genetic impact. Any impact it has will pale in comparison to the effect of the tendancy that those with a PHD tend to have far less children then those who dropped out of high school.
I made an almost identical statement to a woman I worked with about 20 years ago, she went over to the temple on station and laid a curse on me, or so she said.
I disagree with this point. Due to military conscription in WWI, WW2 and other wars, intelligent and unintelligent men within the selected age range were just as likely to end up in mortal combat. Possession of an above average intelligence wouldn't have done much to stop you from being mowed down by a German machine gunner at the Battle of the Somme and if you had "broken the line" or refused to go "over the top" then you would have been shot for cowardice. That's just one example of a 20th century war scenario, but there are plenty of equally dangerous and arbitrary ones.
Intelligent men may also have felt morally obliged to volunteer for active service during WWI and WWII, in order to preserve their freedom and way of life. One case is that of the brilliant physicist H.G.J. Moseley who discovered that each element has a unique atomic number. He volunteered for military service during World War I and became a signal officer in the British army. He was killed in action in Gallipoli in 1915.
The effect of wars in the 20th century was probably to make the population less fit. This was because the physically fit males were more likely to be killed in the war before they could reproduce, (since they were drafted first), whereas those with genetic disorders, physical and mental disabilities etc, were not drafted and so were never in harm's way. In wars before the advent of machine guns, poison gas, aerial bombing, tanks, artillery etc, the evolutionary effect of war might have been to select for the more physically agile/powerful and intelligent individuals. But in most 20th century wars those traits would probably have been less helpful to an individual soldier's survival than luck.
Well, we probably couldn't interbreed with Neandertals anyway, so they never were human, and peaceful coexistence with them wouldn't have added to our genetic diversity.
Chimps also have much more genetic diversity within their species than humans do in ours. But both species wage war among themselves. It's just that humans migrate all around the world, while chimps stay in their own isolated regions. IIRC there are at least 3 separate areas in Africa where you find chimps - one of which was only discovered a couple years ago. And this is not counting bonobos, who split from regular chimps into their own species.
If a human generation is 20 years, then for a human population to be genetically isolated for 50 generations that would take 1,000 years! I don't think that any group of Homo sapiens were ever isolated from their neighbors for that long. So any mutations that took over a single population would eventually find their way into many other populations before enough mutations were able to build up between any two populations to make them separate species.
Think about the deaths in WWII.
Don't think in terms of which side they were on,
Whether American, British, German, Jewish, Russian, Japanese, or Chinese...
think instead of what % of the alpha males were
destroyed prior to having a chance to pass on their genes.
Add to that WWI, Korea, Vietnam, and every other war.
Agressive males have been killed off prior to reproduction
in great numbers for thousands of years.
This is but one aspect of our current evolution.
There are many more.