I'm currently reading a Richard Dawkins book called "The Blind Watchmaker". It is a long, wordy book, that goes into very deep detail about evolution, and how it works. The term Blind Watchmaker comes from the fact that evolution has no set course. There is no final dirrection in which it is heading. It's simply following natural selection. A quick example of this would be a giraffe. Many, many years ago, giraffes legs and necks were not as long as they are today. As all the other animals, that giraffes cohabitated with, ate the leaves and new gowth off of the trees, they left the only eatable food high on the trees, out of reach of most animals. Now a girrafe that was a little bit taller than the other giraffes might have been able to reach further up the trees and get the eatable food. So the taller giraffes ate, while the shorter ones starved to death. The tall giraffes matted with other tall giraffes, which caused the "taller" genes to getted passed along, while the "shorter" genes died out. Over thousands of years, this cycle compounded and caused giraffes to be the freakishly tall animals they are today. The giraffe didn't get taller by thinking about it, or telling it's children to be taller. The short ones died. The tall ones ate the food at the tops of the trees and lived. It wasn't preplanned, it was blind evolution.
What is the point of my little evolution, natural selection story? After fully understanding how it works, I thought of a major problem. As humans, we have stopped evolution. Think about it. Evolution and natural selection have always allowed the smartest, fastest, stongest, best equiped to carry on, breed and pass on their genes. That no longer happens in the civilized human species. You have out of shape, dumb, unhealthy and lazy people having 12 children, and the fit, active, smart, contributing people having 1.5 kids. We are propping up the weak. I'm not saying we shouldn't, I'm just saying, because of that, we have stopped evolution. We might even be going bcakwards. I already covered how we support criminals in my previous blogs. Those low life, lazy, dumbasses breed. In caveman days, they died off, leaving the tribe stronger.
This is the first time in billions of years, that natural selection, in a species, has stopped. We have got to the point, that we have enough control over the worlds resources, that we can make sure that even the weak can survive. The weak usually fell victom to preditor, disease, or hunger. In the civilized world we no longer have any real preditors to worry about, we have medicine to help fight most disease, and we have so much food, most of it ends up in the garbage. We've made it very easy to survive, meaning anyone can do it. I'm not saying this is really a bad thing, it just makes you think.
Is this the end of the line? Have we brought an end to change?
So are you going to have 1.5 kids? You should actually have 3 since I'm not having any.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you haven't checked it out yet, watch "Idiocracy". It's essentially about stupid people taking over the world. Mike Judge did it and it stars Luke Wilson. It is excellent, and scary, and funny.