Humans Evolving Faster Than Ever

It's only evolution if there's a reasonably clear link between your genetic makeup and your ability/probability to reproduce.

Two errors here. First, you mean fitness, not evolution. Second, only the charismatic megafauna of our genetic endowment has a "reasonably clear" one paragraph synopsis. Try to figure out whether a small affinity change of some obscure serotonin receptor involved in bone growth regulation is deleterious or not. I dare you.

The rest of your post seems to be spinning around the observation that the genetic fitness function is shaped by cultural memes, which are themselves co-evolving. It's almost as if natural selection has no master plan.

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you have a cluster of ten genes where having eight of the A alleles makes you a genius, nine make you more than a little batshit, and the full set of ten make you A Scanner Darkly on a bad trip. On the other side, having five or fewer amounts to destination short bus. Clearly the A alleles of these genes code for smartness, and we all want that.

But then, if two eights pair up and start a family, you end up with The Royal Tenenbaums.

What happens within the population to the proportion of A alleles of this gene cluster? For the vast majority of people, an extra dose of the A allele would boost their intellectual powers and presumably their reproductive fitness. There would broadly be an increase. But then you lose enough to Van Gogh attrition that it cancels out the bulk upward drift.

Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.

I listened to a podcast recently where a professor said that his students are routinely shocked to discover that simple voting systems contain cycling majorities.

If Condorcet's paradox [wikipedia.org] disorients, what's really going on in evolution is Kowloon Walled City [wikipedia.org] (which had a population density of 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer before it was torn down, roughly what you'd get if everyone in Texas moved to Manhattan, as they framed it at 99% Invisible [99percentinvisible.org]).

We really ought to step back most of the time and view evolution as a kind of ideal gas law, as something best understood at the sweep of statistical mechanics. Yes, every atom is doing something explicable if you prefer to drill down. So was every inhabitant of Kowloon Walled City, more or less.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/qa3a5hX1muw/story01.htm

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