Evolution Question

In Adelman I trust.

 

The older the man, the less far back you'd have to go. Stuff that I remember doing in K-12, like learning instruments, conjugating foreign verbs, memorizing lines for a play and as of late reading an entire book; seem implausible and unpleasant at 30.

 

I'm guessing as long as there's written history, a time traveled baby should be fine. Maybe 10k years max. A little further and you get IQs of certain ex-presidents and CEOs.

This article suggests how we are still evolving at a faster rate.

So maybe in a thousand years, that threshold for their standards will be a lot thinner.

 

/fail

He means in terms of evolution. Is it 'man' from 5000 years ago? 10,000? Cro-magnon man? Neanderthal?
That's a pretty interesting thought. And I have no idea the answer.

 

There are like 10,000,000 things all acting in unison. It wasn't like some prototypical cavemen's child just mutated into doing calculus the next day.

So to answer your questions, it would be a series of incremental steps going back. You couldn't find one specific point. And I don't know that they believe that they have it all mapped out.

My guess is that with each individual genetic change, variance within any one post-mutated group would be much larger than the difference between the mean values of the before mutation population and after mutation population.


But I guess in terms of specific genetic markers, I've read several times about this one from 5,000-6,000 years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPM_(Gene)

As I understand it, the appearance of the modern form of this gene roughly coincides with written language, etc.

 

A few months, I would guess.

 

I'd guess you could educate and socialize any infant Homo Sapien since they are defined by their bigger brains.

So 200,000 years or so.

It sort of humbles me to think that there were people over 1000 years ago that were smarter than I am today. Pythagoras, Archimedes, Copernicus, Newton. Hell, I can't even understand Shakespeare without the Cliff Notes.

 

You could argue convincingly that ancient people's were at least more clever in general. Think of these questions:

1. How much intelligence does a human need in 2009 to live to be 30 years old and have raised a couple of offspring? Infinitely little brainpower. Just stunningly little intelligence.

2. In 500 B.C., how much intelligence did a human need to live to be 30 years old and have raised a couple of offspring? I don't know the answer, but I bet they had to be more clever than buying potato chips and watching TV and getting fat.

We support all genetic lines now (not talking about race -- each and every genetic variation that can breathe and chew food is supported and usually given the chance to pass on those genes.) There's zero selection, and if there's selection, it isn't for brain power.

 

A few days is more like it.....

 

that's an interesting perspective

 

Evolution is always in the direction changes that increase the chance of you making babies.
A long time ago that meant living long enough to make babies or learning how to grow enough food to feed all of your babies.

Evolution going forward will be kind of weird because people we consider 'intelligent' have fewer babies than people like the octomom for example.

Also it is hard to say I am more intelligent than someone 200 years ago because I know chemistry and physics and stuff. Human knowledge builds on previous generations so the human race will always be getting more and more 'knowledge' but maybe less intelligence.

 

RR,
What do I know, but...
1. Yeah, with a lot less environmental pressure for surviving, I'd guess we are evolving much slower now.
2. This question is interesting too, but I am reading some "value" judgment in it. As yaoluv said, evolution has no real good/bad judgment beyond what strain makes babies versus what strain fails to make babies (e.g. fails to survive long enough to have babies.)

Maybe, since reproduction rates tend to decrease with education level, we are slowly selecting against book-bound insufferable pseudo-intellectuals. Would that be all bad?

And it's obvious you are interested. Cool thread.

 

As I have stated in other threads, evolution has no agenda; there is no plan for improving the species. Changes just happen ( cross breeding, inexact genetic duplication, and environmental influences on the genetic code like cosmic rays or chemical reactions). Some generations have radical changes, some minimal and some are stable, for many generations. (all relatively). The rates of change and consequences of change are totally unpredictable.

You can 'future shock' all you want but you won't be right. One thing that seems like it might be true though is that the larger the interbreeding population the more stable it is from genetic change. The deviations of singular units would has less effect on the popualtion as a whole. So one or two genetic supermen will not effect the general population of humans much, and less so as we grow to 10 or 12 billion that breed less locally.

I think the reason we have Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, Aryans and Africans was their tendency to breed locally. That's still true and will be , but less so. Maybe in the year 2525, if man is still alive, there will be a more generic human that is sorta Mocha Almond.

 

I'd venture to guess that a man from ancient egypt might be much smarter than the average man today. There are some pretty astounding accomplishments in astronomy engineering and human preservation in ancient egyptian times given their technology.

 

Yes, it would be bad. Very, very bad:

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Brain power does not necessarily = intelligence. We can manipulate our environment and leave artifacts of information/knowledge for ourselves and others to refer back to without actually having to retain that information in our brains. The internet is a great example of this. In a sense, we are inversely evolving--changing our environment to adapt to us.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_mind

 

Jerrod Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel ask essentially the same question when wondering why for instance the people of Paupau New Guinea didn't become as technologically advanced as the people of Europe. The New Guineans aren't less intelligent since their environment has a lot of challenges that they deal with daily. Dumping a modern day Westerner into the jungles of Papau New Guinea they are likely to die, watch the Survivorman on New Guinea, but at the same time a New Guinean tribesman dumped into the middle of Manhattan is probably going to have a very tough time too.

I'm guessing that Homo Sapian brain capacity and intelligence probably hasn't changed much in the last 100K just what we use it for has. Consider does it take more intelligence to make a flint knife versus driving a car?

My own guess is that we would probably have to go back to our pre-sapien ancestors like Homo Erectus to find a per capita drop in brain capacity. We can certainly tell from fossil evidence that earlier hominids have a smaller brain case and short of finding an actual homo erectus that is probably the best we can go off.

 

I don't think the question was about dumping an adult into these situations. The question was how far back in man's evolution could you pluck a baby and raise it in modern times and it grow up normally.

That's probably a good guess. So, in your opinion, do you think we can pluck a Cro-Magnon baby and raise it to be a neurosurgeon?