Younger Generations -

[Surtur]

I guess I'm on the opposite spectrum. I love technology, sometimes physically, and believe that our future as a species is intertwined with our machines. The term is transhumanist if your really interested.

The human design has gotten us this far on random genetic variations and natural selection but that improvement has stopped, we need to take control of our own evolution to continue to grow both as a species and as a culture. You can't freeze the future just because your frightened. You have to embrace the change or be lost to history. If you don't believe me just ask your nearest Neanderthal.

Nah, human evolution has not stopped. Some people thinks so, but that opinion appears to be in the minority. Besides, humans are pretty poor at picking what traits are actually the best.

 

[Sweet and Savoury]

Well the trouble with evolution currently is how is it directed.

What determines which traits are survival and which are detrimental? With the advent of modern culture and technology all types of natural selection have gone out the window with the exception of the very extreme self-destroying types like juvenile cancers and other lethal childhood conditions and even these are very rare per capita.

Just about anyone who is physically capable can have offspring successfully now (aside from Wizards of course), in fact the lower you are on the social spectrum the more offspring you are likely to have. So social success isn't a survival trait, nor is intelligence or physical health so my question remains what method of selection currently guides our evolution?

Our culture has become such a powerful survival tool we no longer need to evolve to survive changing conditions; in fact we now the unique ability among species on earth to adjust our environmental conditions to suit our survival.

 

[Surtur]

I think loveshies are proof natural selection is still around.

 

[BT 075]

I think loveshies are proof natural selection is still around.

Self-imposed natural selection, that is.

Now as for this natural selection vs. machines business... no machine will ever love you back the way a human being of flesh and blood will. There's quite a few people who believe machines will take over, and replace humanity in a multitude of ways. And that's all fine and dandy but I seriously doubt it. There are limits to what technology and science can do for us.

Some people seem to think we will all have robot servants and the best medical care in the world in fifty years. That we will all live to be 150 if not older, outlaw almost every disease known to man and rid the planet of hunger and poverty. I think that's the biggest bullshit and this is never going to happen. I'd love to be proven wrong but there are limits to everything in life. Why would technology and science be without such limits?

You can make life easier... but make it too easy and you become weak, lazy and uninspired. You need to get your hands dirty and calloused sometimes. Burn your skin under the sun. Get a cold. Get sweaty. Grow old, get sick, make passionate love and sit still surrounded by nothing but nature as you overthink life. You need to be able to go places where not everybody is playing with some little screen all the time. Find or catch your own meal. Fall asleep out in the open with nothing but the stars as your ceiling and the wind and your lover's breathing your only companions.

Maybe I'm a nostalgic bastard but I think these things matter. I don't like the cold materialism of a world in which everything can be fixed, everyone becomes increasingly more and more individualistic and interactions becomes more and more impersonal. It frightens and saddens me more then it excites me.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

Nah, human evolution has not stopped. Some people thinks so, but that opinion appears to be in the minority. Besides, humans are pretty poor at picking what traits are actually the best.

Unless and until we take masterful control of every single gene we have, evolution will not stop progressing naturally.

Self-imposed natural selection, that is.

I wouldn't call it self-imposed. That seems to imply deliberation. In the wild, an animal that flings feces at every prospective mate isn't going to reproduce nearly as easily as another animal that woos potential mates.

That's what loveshies are doing to women. They fling feces at them, and wonder why it isn't working. They are a wrinkle that evolution will smooth out.