Is evolution going backwards?

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How do you figure? Most of the world doesn't get enough to eat, or have adequate housing. For instance, the life expectancy of a person living in most of Africa is under 55 years. Sounds like negative selection is very much in play for the human population.

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But theres no selection going on, unless the selection is for being rich, or in large part, European. The fit and the unfit, in all meaningful senses, are dying in the third world right next to each other. This is also in no way natural given the massive wealth being extorted out of Africa by the West and the debt industry. This is not any form of natural selection but instead human selection, in that this is really a form of economic warfare. Modern poverty is not a natural problem but an artificial one, and thus does not constitute natural selection.

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Do you honestly think there's no selection going on in cases where large numbers of people are dying, in situations where environmental selection pressures are strongest?

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Population crashes generally do not distinguish in this regard. I remember reading a study of fox predation on rabbits in which the catch rate for foxes steadily claimed as the rabbit population dropped, until of course both fell off a cliff. They succeeded themselves to death, and under such circumstances there is little or no feedback between the actions of the individual fox and the food scarcity with which they are now confronted. Animals lucky enough to have been on the edge of fox territory would have been more likely to survive than those in the centre, but thats purely random and takes no account of any individuals capacities.What I meant by "no meaningful natural selection" is that we see deaths on a massive scale that do not emanate from natural sources. The impact on the individuals fitness from, say, a better metabolism, is lost if that fitness only makes them the last to die rather than the most likely to survive. Group membership is a much much greater determinant of "fitness" than anything genetic or chemical. Famine is strongly correlated with warfare - even if in a particular famine a particular individual survived and passed their superior metabolism on to their descendants I can't see that this would make any meaninful difference to the probability of those children surviving the next conflict-triggered famine.Surely for a fitness adaptation to become expressed in the population as a whole those more-fit individuals must in some manifest way benefit from their fitness such that their adapted genes become more widely distributed. I can see no reason for thinking that an improved metabolism is going to have a sufficient impact to improve the chances of the next generations survival if the source of the die-off is other human action.I don't refute the mechanisms of NS are still operational, but I don't think they are impactful enough to affect our survivability any more. I don't dispute and improved metabolism is an improved metabolism, I just don't think it matters. For large parts of the world, I think a blind paraplegic and a fully healthy person have pretty much the same odds of passing their genes to the next generation.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-07-2005 09:00 AM

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Could you perhaps substantiate that claim? Because a stressed population with completely undifferentiated mortality would be a completely novel situation in biology; and I have a hard time accepting that to be the case on just your say-so.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or perhaps, what differentiation would you expect to have seen in Birkenau or Auschwitz.What makes an individual fit to survive in the modern world is wealth. All other survival criteria are subordinate to wealth, because wealth is a representation of the total impact we make upon our surroundings.

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I think that you're conflating "fitness" as a biological term with "fitness" in its common parlance. This is an error. Biologically speaking, it doesn't matter how well you eat and how much time you spend in the gym; you'll never be as "fit" as the 300-pound woman in the trailer park, feeding Doritos to her nine children.

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No I'm not. My point is this, what makes her fit? The fact that she has lots of kids, and even that these kids are likely to survive and procreate, does not imply superior fitness. All it implies is a merely sufficient adaptation to the prevailing environment to survive and procreate. But in her environment, an almost entirely human one, what determines her merely sufficient fitness is her membership of a wealthy society. If that suddenly ended, so would her fitness and that of her progeny. It can be inherited, but only socially.The rich live and the poor die. Ever since that began, ever since class divided societies first appeared, the individual fitness of the specific person has IMO become steadily less and less relevant to whether their genes make it to the next generation.Some estimates of Aztec human sacrifice run to as much as a quarter of a million people per year. I'm aware that these figures are contested and that 20,000 is more often mentioned. Still, this is a huge number for a bronze age society. Its a massive mortality rate, without any relevance to any natural selection factor. What determines fitness to procreate in this context is membership of the group doing the sacrificing rather than membership of the groups being sacrificed. IMO, human action has superceded NS to such a degree that it's effects on us are now trivial to non-existent. What matters far far more than anything else is social organisation, IMO.

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Lethal recessives meet all the time in the human population, what's that if not natural selection? Almost any karyotype change is lethal to highly deleterious.

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As I said I don't dispute the mechanisms are still present. I merely think they have been puched back into statisticial insignificance by comparison to the effects of human action.Most organisms compete against other, different organisms. Cheetahs and leopards compete for game animals, so one can see that an increase in some fitness that contributed to hunting prowess for an individual leapord may improve the individuals survivability, hence reproductive opportunities, hence impact the species of leopards as a whole in their competition with cheetahs.We compete against each other to a massively disproportionate degree by comparison to competing against other organisms. An increase in the fitness of one person may improve that persons survivability (although I contest this is important above) but in so doing it may also massively decrease the survivability of other members of HomSap.So it seems to me that now, becuase we control our environment to such a tremendous degree, and our competition and predation is almost entirely intraspecies, we are playing a kinda evolutionary zero sum game in which any positive mutation which arises may well only have the effect of wiping out many other positive changes that had arisen in the population.In most organisms, the down side to the increased effectiveness of an organism is externalised to another prey organism. In humans, the down side is suffered by us, becuase we are our own prey.

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To the degree that behavior is not genetic, perhaps. Survival or extinction of the human species may be cultural/behavioral at this point. But then, maybe not. Diseases will always adapt ahead of our ability to respond to them; when the superbug hits survival is going to pretty much depend on mutation.

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I would suggest that most of our development and survivability is now located in our knowledge, rather than our physical bodies. That I think is a major difference to how the physical world impinges on our fitness.

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Eventually all populations reach K, or the carrying capacity of their environment, where they stop growing. At that point more for me does mean less for you; that's true if we're humans, cheetas, or what-have-you.

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Stable populations of any species are zero-sum games, just as you described for humans.

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I'm not coinvinced this situation is comparable. Are there any studies of organisms who essentially live by self-predation? Becuase it seems to me that changes things significantly. I fully understand the zero sum game based on limited resources. But my suggestion is that humans are playing a different game.This is because in the human game there is both the more-for-me-means-less-for-you situation, AND the I-get-mine-by-killing-you situation.I'm actually inclined to think that human beings probably exceeded K a long time ago, making auto-predation a necessity. this implies that a selected feature that improves the lot of the individual may be propagated precisely becuase it causes maximum death in the individuals own species; that is, further adapatations to improve the fitness of the individual DECREASE the fitness of the species overall.

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Is mankinds current state the PHYSICALLY best we can ever be? In the future, do you think we might have to worry about survival again because people all become to slow to move? To slow to build buildings? To slow to organize society? Too slow to stop wolves and tigers from attacking?

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Not really. If we adaopt a new physical form it will probably be through genetic engineering. One idea would, for example, revert the legs from walking mode to climbing mode for use in the microgravity of space. Get an opposable toe, that sort of thing.

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Uh, what are you talking about? Humans are not, largely, cannibals. We need resources that we cannot manufacture ourselves; we do not live by "self-predation."

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Yes, I think we do - because the largest part of our materials acquisition is through expropriation. All the imperial and feudal states existed as coercive powers; their fitness was directly proportional to their exercise of violence against others.While we seldom perpetrate actual cannibalism, we certainly have done so for the purposes of state formation and the like. Thus, we do live by self-predation in the fitness of a person necessarily requires the direct expropriation, and often killing, of another person.

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The word you're looking for is "competition", and yes, every species competes with its conspecifics for resources. Often that competition is lethal; most species (including our own) develop behaviors that allow individuals to compete for resources without killing each other. (Head-butting rams, etc.)

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Yes and no - we have no competitors. Our intra-specieis competition is often extremely violent - such as, for example, the barbarian migrations into the Roman empire. So while some of our competition is non-violnet, a sizable propportion, possibly the simple bulk, is violent.

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(When was the last time you had to kill someone to have sex? Come to think of it don't answer that.)

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All armies commit rape. It might as well be a law of nature.

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It's not possible to exceed K exept over short periods of time. What has happened is that humans are able to modify their environments to increase the K value.

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Sure. But my argument is that subordinating another human population to your servitude increases K. The lives of that captive population become a buffer between you and the uncaring world. And this function is orders of magnitude more efficient than major engineering projects in the physical world.

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Equivocation on the term "fitness".

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Not equivocation, but different context. If my fitness increases becuase I am equipped with Bronze-age technology, then the proportional fitness of any person equipped with neolithic technology falls off dramatically.

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As I said, the word you're looking for is "competition." When a pack of hyenas chase a tiger from her kill, that's not expropriation or predation, that's competitive scavenging.

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What if - there are only two groups of hyenas fighting, and the kill is itself a dead hyena?You see you keep introducing multiple species into the situation, and my argument is that this is not accurate as a model of humanities present situation. And all-hyena food chain is a better model.

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To the degree that you have greater access to resources and mates, of course. Again, a nearly universal situation in biology and not anything special.

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Except you still aren't able to give an example of one, which is what I was asking for. I'm suggesting that humans are not in fact in a zero sum game at all - but one that has a negative sum.What I'm looking for is a mechanism to explain what I understand to be our very low degree of genetic variability by comparison to other species. Becuase while you are correct to say we seldom kill and EAT our fellows, we very often kill them for the express purpose of seizing the stuff they were intending to eat themselves. We are still killing for food, its just that our primary target is not cows, but people.

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But for the large part, humans do not eat other humans. So I'm not quite sure how this example applies.

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Becuase in many human societies, the killing of humans is a fundamental mode of production. So for example, we have both Norse and Greek daramtic poems that refer to the "red spear" as the means by which this person "ploughs".IMO this is directly analogous to predation. Like predation, this mode of production NECESSARILY results in a dead prey animal, while most COMPETITION does not.

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The major human food source for all populations are other species - plant species like grains, or animal species. Human flesh is not a source of sustenance for any human population that I'm aware of; those few cannabalistic societies eat human flesh only ritually.

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On the other hand, the only competition we have for food sources are other humans, but this is not "self-predation", this is competition, which is universal in the biological world. I think that you're conflating these two points.

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Yes, purposefully; I'm suggesting that in human context the concepts of competition and predation are interchangeable. You see this arises from your observation of farming above - farming is not our aborriginal mode of production, hunting is. So it seems to me that we hit the carrying capacity of our natural environment about 6000 years ago when human density was such that subsistance farming became the necessary norm. From that point on, signifanc human competition became versus other humans and almost invariably to the death - a very different envrionment than that of natural competition.

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One of what? Where species compete with other members of their own species for resources? Where a successful adaptation in one individual's gene line means the extinction or reduction of another's?

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You keep changing what you're asking for examples of, and changing what you think is so special about humans, so maybe if you clarify exactly what you're asking for an example of, I'll be able to provide you one.

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Actually I have not changed anything. Yes, an example of a species that competes exclusively with members of its own species, and where a succesful dapatation of one individuals gene line requires extinction or redcution of anothers.Becuase it seems to me that that is what happens in much of human history. Something like 80% of the gene lines of European feudal nobility have been exterminated, I have read, although I have no citation for this. But that should reveal the direction I am going in, I hope.

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Now you've just lost me. You believe that human populations are shrinking, not growing?

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Not as such necessarily. Whats odd about our situaiton is that the raw, technical means of subsitance keep improving, but they occur only in human hands thus all competition is against humans. Those two factors eem to me to coincide with a reduction in genetic variation of the specieis as a whole - that is, our species is not becomeing numerically reduced, but is beceoming genetically reduce. In that respect evolution could be said to be "going backwards".But a coroloary oif this situation is that we have in fact been in excess of the nonhuman K we find in nature, then ALL continuance of our species depends on the continuation of culture. A signifcant cultural collapse would instantly put us in a situation in which we exceeded K by a massive degree, and the die-off would be huge.

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The word you're looking for to describe this situation is, as I've repeatedly said, "competition", not "predation." Let me see if I can spell it out for you. Predation is when you kill a cow and eat it. Competition is when you kill a man and eat his cow

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Well I don't think thats quite accurate, by comparison with the way animals actually compete in the wild. The vultures are first at the casrcass, the small scavanger next, the big scavengers last. Very few encounters will actually result in the immediate death of any of the animals involved. Sure, the result over the long term may mean that one of them dies from a lost opportunity cost, but that is not a NECESSARY outcome of the competition.Where we see human societies carrying out cattle raids, then the death of the competing animal, the other human, is a necessary prerequisite for aquiring the cow. This is why I say it is "more like" predation than competition; all significant competitive acts in this context result in human mortality. That does not seem to me to be the same situation that pertains in any other species.

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No, Contracycle, no. We only eat other species. We need resources like water, energy, minerals, etc. We don't get these from other humans. We get these from the environment, and we compete with other humans for them. It's amazing to me that this distinction is so totally lost on you.

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Gee, and people accuse me of being rude.What I said in the paragraph you quoted was the KILLING humans is fundamenatl to many societies, not EATING them. But my argument is the "killing a cow" to "get its leather" is not a million miles away from "killing a human" to "get its cow". That is, human-on-human homicide is and has been a basic mode of resource acquisition since the developement of agriculture. Herdodotus, spekaing of the Greek city states, even says "As piracy increased, and capital reserves came into being...". Of course we need minerals and carbohydrates and all that, and indeed often compete peacably, but that is not the question I'm raising: I'm specifically trying to construct an analogy about the effects on fitness of endemic and permanent warfare.

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Predation specifically refers to the killing and eating of another organism. We predate cows. We don't predate other humans because we don't eat them!

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But my argument is that functioanlly, the relationship between peoples locked in endemic warfare is much the same as predation. Seeing as I have already agreed that I am DELIBERATELY conflating predation and competition, resort to pedantry seems innapropriate.

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Look if you want to define words however you see fit, why should I bother? My patience is at an end with you because you refuse to use terms in the way that they've already been defined.

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Yes of course, heaven forfend anyone propose a new concept, we should exlcusively study the Old Masters who knew everything.

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That's every single species. Literally, every single one. That's how evolution works in a stable population - the more fit outcompete the less fit, and the gene lines of the less fit are extinguished. That's how mutations become fixed in a population - literally any stable population whatsoever.

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Yes but as I have repeatedly pointed out, you are describing two different processes. "Absolute" fitness is determined by effectiveness of resource extraction. Proportional fitness against others of my speciies is determined by my proportional efficiency in bagging prey or whatever. These are two different things.In humans they become a single operation. In animals predating other species, what I am referring to as "absolute" efficinecy is an answer to the question "can I catch my prey"? Obviously if the question is no, the animal does not survive. Proportional efficiency only comes in after this point, where the question is "Can I catch my prey with such efficiency that I am recognisably superior to other members of my species, and thus a good mate choice".Now it seems to me that in humans there is often only one question, not two.

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It's precisely accurate. Predation is the killing of another animal and eating it. Competition is the killing or rivalry of another animal for resources. Again, if you feel absolutely free to redefine the terms as you see fit, then I don't have time for this.

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Look, if all you can do is read out of the book, and simply cannot think any thought that has not been prescribed for you, then fine, don't bother. But th

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But killing each other isn't the only way we allocate resources, though in our history it has played a large part. For instance, instead of killing the owner of the cow, I might become the leader of a government and simply tax cows. Or we might gamble for the cow, or engage in ritual, non-lethal combat. Or arm-wrestle.

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Sure. These things can happen WITHIN A SINGULAR SOCIAL GROUP. But there is a sizable history of human groups treating all other human groups as non-human; as valid subjects for predation just like any other animal. And that to me is the key distinction: almost none of our competition with non-human rivals results in human fatalities (with the notable exception of diseases). And is on that basis that I draw a parallell with predation. Whteher the resource desired is the victims own meat, or the meat the victom socially owns, there is still a dead victim.

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I absolutely disagree. Throughout human history the majority of resources have been allocated non-lethally, just like every other species. You're simply engaging in circular definitions - the only competition you find significant is the lethal competition; as a result you conclude that all significant human competition is lethal.

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No, I am trying to discern the effects of lethal human competition. My proposition is that it is analogous to predation. By simply asserting that predation has a dictionary definition you are not enagaging with my proposition. The discussion of non-lethal competition is not relevant to my point at all.The only similar thing I can think of in the animals world is frex the practice of male lions taking over a pride, in which they kill and eat the offspring of the previous pride leader. But that is a very much smaller proportion of all their competition than endemic warfare has been humans.

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It's not a million miles away. But we have a word to describe the first situation - "predation" - and a word to describe the second - "competition." Why won't you use them?

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Becuase they imply things other than the situation I am describing. If you apply a COMPETITION model, it will not display the same frequency of fatality. Thats why it is innapropriate.

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No, they're functionally different, because the people are not being eaten. Hence, this is competition, not predation. Again, these are specific words with specific meanings meanings that clearly perfectly apply to the situation, and it boggles the mind that you don't see it.

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How can you honestly claim you DO see it? You are setting yourself up here. Would you then claim that a lion who kills prey animal, but is driven off the kill by another animal, did not engage with predation but with competition? You COMPETE WITH your peers; you preduate upon your prey. The main difference between the two is that competition does not NECESSARILY produce dead bodies, and predation does.To render the disinction between comeptition and predation as purely what happens to the body afterwards is surely absurd. It fundamentaly fails to describe the significance of the act.

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But why on Earth would you bother? All it does is confuse the issue. God, why on Earth would you want to make things more confusing? What's wrong with you?

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And again, here *I* am with a reputation for rudeness, for fucks sake.Look crash, I have tried to explain it. Our layers of rationalisation of social conflicts are, I argue, concealing a fundeamentally predatory relationship. Or at least so a I speculate by asking if there is any example from the natural world of the main source of a species deaths being the direct acts of other members of the species. Thats very odd - it does not accord with either the competition model or the predation model when stripped of our cultural excuses.I am proposing we look at the actual behaviour, ratehr than trying to fit the actual behaviour into comfortable, pre-established categories.

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But, in fact, these are not two differen things. Biologically both are simply a question of competing for resources. Mates are a resource. "Can I catch food"? is fundamentally the same question as "can I attract a mate?" There's only one question, and it's "what do I have to do to get the resources I need to continue my genetic line?"

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Of course thats the case - thats the entire basis of my argument. Thats why the eating of the body cannot be the defining characteristic of a predatory RELATIONSHIP. I am well aware of the orthodox meanings for these terms which is precisely why I asked you to apply your expertise to looking at human relationships in the same light as animal relationships, to look at whats outside the box.Again I ask: are there any animal specieis in which the proportion of individuals killed by other individuals of the same specieis is so high? Every time I ask this you come back with mutliple species.

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I'm not the one stubbornly insisting that his ideosyncratic nomenclature is superior to the terminology developed over 200 years of ecological research. You're an ideological slave to your idea that human society is so fundamentally worse than literally any animal organization; you're obsessed with the idea that humans suck so fucking bad that we have to pervert legitimate terminology to describe it.

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What? Oh for fucks sake. I didn't say anything was superior, I tried to offer you a new term that did not carry the same connotations as the existing terms as a thought experiment. And I most7 ceertainly have never said or veen thought,m frankly, that human society is "worse" than animal socieites, that is just lunacy.I'm trying to ASK YOU what you preofessional expertise would conlcude are the likely effects of human endemic warfare. Thats an honest question and I simply do not understand why you respond in such a hostile manner.

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I've already engaged your point, and refuted it.

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But you have not, becuase every exmaple you give of "competiton" involves multiple species and only the probabalistic decrease in another individuals fitness - not their actual death. Warfare cannot be described as competition on these terms. I am asking you "what are the effects of such a high level of human caused fatality" and you keep defaulting to wholly innapropriate analogies of multi-species competition or non-fatal competition.

This:

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Competition is the most accurate model of the entire scope of human resource allocation.

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and this:

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Competition is the most accurate model of the entire scope of human resource allocation.

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... show exactly how the question I am trying to ask gets categorised away.
I'm asking, what are the effects of endemic warfare specifically on human genetics? You then say, well warfare is a form of competition, butnnot all competition is violent, therefore it must have no special effect.OK, let me try again then. Are there any specieis which engage in unnecessary competition with a high death rate? Especially among individuals who usually have not yet reproduced?

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You're artifically restricting your scope to human warmaking, instead of looking at the whole picture, which is one of occasionally fatal competition, and occasionally nonlethal competition.

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Yes thats exactly right, that is the question I have proposed.
And I point out that I consider the claim that warmaking is a form of competition to be ideological; that is, I consider that to be an apologetic for warmaking which is in fact distinct from other forms of competition.

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You're proposing that we look at a small category of human behavior and ignore all others. I'm proposing that this is stupid.

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Really? Then all of science must be stupid, and only the hippies who try to grock the whole intuitively have any chance of success.

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1 : the act of preying or plundering : DEPREDATION

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It's clear to me that, in fact, the eating of the body is integral to the situation described as "predation", because if it isn't, then the situtation falls under "competition", and then we'd have two words for the same thing.

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Note the term PLUNDERING; thats is the concept I was trying to advance. I wish yo would stop playing word games; if you can't be bothered to address the question just tell me to fuck off.

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Probably not, but not because we kill ourselves more than other animals, but because we are killed by other factors less. You're asking a loaded question. Are there other species whose competition is often lethal? Yes, almost all of them.

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No thats not equivalent at all becuase they are usually competing with other species; that is not equivalent to intra-species "plundering". In other words, BECUASE we are killed by other factors less, I would expect that warfare in humans would have a pronounced effect that is fact NOT selection by fitness.Look, gangs of chimps will drive each other out of their territory. That is simply not the same as competing with a leapord. In our specieis, that gang confrontation reaches the point of nuclear weapons. Is it really so unreasonable to think that the change in scale in lethality has an effect on us?

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Well, I'm no professional, just a guy. And I'm no historian, and I can't see the future. But our genes appear to have very little to do with success on the battlefield, because the victor is usually the group with the resource superiority. But in our species, having superior resources generally means a negative growth rate. Being rich and white is not generally a recipie for successful gene transmission.

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Look, it is BECAUSE our genes are largely irrelevant to battlefield conditions that the question arises of what effect all this observable lethality has. Even that has been progressive, becuase being tall and strong still have their uses, but less so today than in the bronze age.Your second conlusion I find silly I'm afraid; a species with many young is not necessarily any more likely to pass on their genes than a species with few, cared for young. Its a trade off, and the same applies in human popoulations. Being rich and white is definitely better for passing on your genes, as it is much more likely that your genes will actually be passed on. A feature not missed by certain AfroCentrists.

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I can't see that there's any effect whatsoever. I don't see a relationship between genetic traits and an ability to survive warfare.

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No no no - in relation to the thread, is evolution going backwards? Precisely BECUASE there is no relationship between personal fitness and being a military casualty, military casualties eliminate the fit and thee unfit both. What effect does this have on our genotype overall? Becuase we have thousands of years of endemic warfare, I would have thought it should be accounted for in any model of human genetics.

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Define "unnecessary". Presumably, all competition in every species could be unnecessary if the conspecifics all played nice, and restrained their population growth.

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Unnecessary as in not compelled. IMO, the term "competition" carries many undue connotations under capitalist ideology; many different conflicts are subsumed under capitalism. If an animal species has free rein in an environment in which it has no predators, such as rats imported to Tasmania, the population booms, but I am not aware of an increase in mortality in regards internal competition within that species. If mate competition was non-fatal before it will stay non-fatal. I think the human situation is different in that we too have no predators but our level of intra-species fatalities arise from social conflicts of one form or another. Even if the rats in Tasmania reached carrying capacity, the only effective sources of mortality are still only failure relative to other members of the specieis or outright failure in the hunt of other species.This is what I mean by unnecessary. Very few of us in the developed world NEED to compete with any risk of death with other humans. But the developed world still engages in wars, and so humans still die at human hands, despite the fact that this is not usually immediately necessary for the survival of the populations involved.

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No, they're usually competing among themselves, because only their conspecifics occupy the same precise ecological niche.

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Right, but not directly and fatally. Fatalities are direct externally, even if a member is so ineffective that they are unable to find enough food to live. They are seldoim killed by members of their own species directly.

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Right, because the first is competition, and the second is predation - the leopard predates the chimps.

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You missed the point. As above, competition has many meanings - what I was referring to is the compeition between chimps and leapords FOR prey, not the direct predation of one on the other. That is, any success by a leapord might reduce the available prey for chimps, hence they can be in indirect competition.This is not the same as group conflicts between chimps in any way. But the group conflicts between chimps are not much like human warfare because it generally does not reduce the gene stock directly.Hence, the best model for human-on-human warfare is similar to the relationship of direct predation between leapords and chimps, it seems to me. And it is definately nothing like the indirect competition when EITHER a chimp OR a leopard might take the only available prey.

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I don't see the process as selective, however, so from a biological perspective its no different from a mudslide wiping out one large segment of a population. At best its genetic drift. There's no selective power to warfare that I can see.

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Right. This is a good model and I'd be happy to abandon predation/plundering and instead make an analogy to self-inflicted disasters of this magnitude.I'm not sure it is the case though that warfare has no selective pressure - it actually makes those best at conducting war LESS fit by often curtailing their breeding careers. Thats one of the apparent contradiction I want to examine.That said though I agree for the most part casualties of war are not selected in any meaningful way, which is why I ask what effect that has on the genepool, precisely because it does not act like a selective, competitive pressure. Depsite that it must have some effect because whole gene lines can be wiped out in this manner.

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Look at the facts. The populations of industrial nations are declining. The populations of the nonindustrial nations are increasing. If you weren't blinded by the fact that you live in the former nations, you would find my conclusion obvious. Even with the advantage in child care, that "strain" of humanity is on the decline.

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Actually, I find your conclusion silly becuase I have lived both in the developed world AND the undeveloped world, you will recall.Its well known that wealth reduces the pressure to breed, becuase we are not reliant on our childrens productivity ; but this is also a consequence of a high infant mortality rate. It seems to me that a much higher proportion of individuals genes are likely to be carried into the future in the developed world than the the undeveloped. The high reproduction rate in the undeveloped world is symptomatic of dire distress, not success.

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And what I'm telling you is, the advantage of cared-for young isn't cutting it in the face of readily-avaliable contraception.

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Its still a trivial effect by comparison to aids, industrial diseases, slave labour and warfare. The many-children strategy is a response to the unlikelihood of passing your genes on to the future, not a symptom of better prospects.

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Absolutely none, because its not a gene-selective influence. It's like a mudslide wiping out the eastern half of a population - it's not a selective force, because you can't breed for "not being in the way of mudslides."

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Correct, that is my argument.

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There's no reason to, if its not a selective force.

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Ecept, how certainly do we know this? Has there been any study to determine whether it is or not?Anyway, the initial proposition I made is that this might account for the lack of variation in human genes. Does that sound reasonable? [quote] Well, I guess it could be not compelled if all the animals agreed to play nice, and restrict their reproduction. Not likely, though.[/qupte]Please stop with the ridiculous caricatures.

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I'm sorry; economics is off-topic in this thread.

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Of course but then I am entitled to challnege yourt obfuscatory use of the term "competition", and reject its dogmatic application.

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Conspecific competition is density-dependant; it doesn't really become a limiting factor until the populations reaches K. At such time as resources become scarce for that species, intraspecific competition will increase. It will have to.

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In what form?Remember, my initial proposition was exactly that - at the point that humans developed farming, we exceeded K and intraspecific competition in the form of warfare became more intense.Buy the problem is the active elements in warfare are not biologically related so it has the impact of a mudslide even if it is conducted as auto-predation. What effect would that have?

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Which has been true of human warfare for most of history, too.

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Yes - in low density, low agriculture societies. That is why I have specifically limited my argument to the 6000 years of actual civilisation.

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Chimps don't compete with leopards for prey, as their diet is largely vegetarian. Though instances of organized hunting or even cannabalism are not unknown.

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Umm, indeed - but this confusion has arisen because of the multiple meanings of "competition".

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How do you figure? Chimps engage in lethal conflict, just like humans.

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In lethal conflict, sure - just like humans, no. Where is the chimp standing army, professional warrior, general? Where is the ideology of warfare or manifest destiny? Lethality does not indicate war; my argument is that in humans such fatal conflict is much, much more proportionally significant.

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I mean, yeah. You might wipe out entire gene lines. But you're not doing so based on the content of those gene lines, so there's no adaptive effect on the gene pool. I'd say the situation we're describing would be best identified as "genetic drift", and there's considerable dispute about the degree to which genetic drift shapes a species.

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But I didn't ask about ADAPTIVE effect, I actually asked about the truncation of genetic variuation in humans.My argument is something like this: if you had 90% yellow M&M's, and 10% red M&M's, although most of the time an extracted handful will be in those proportions.But perhaps not. It might be that the actual handful is extracted comprises almost entirely an unlikely but feasible conctration of red M&M's, which will thereby change the proportion disproportionately.This is potentially even more specific if it is say the yellow M&M's who are purposefully booting the red M&M's out of the container. That is, human groups have themselves exterminated whole ethnicities.

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It's not the proportion of individuals that is significant, however. It's the raw number of genes passed on; it's the fact that the genes of the third world constitute an increasing section of the human gene pool, and the genes of the first world constitute a declining section.

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I think it must be significant - otherwise the whole process of sexual reproduction is pointless. That is, the very system of combining two sets of genes to create a new set counteracts inherent data replication errors in the DNA. What happens to a group that does not get infusions of new DNA but keeps copying the same DNA over and over - should this not be expected to induce errors and hence reduce fitness? Or trigger speciation?