Eva Durant wrote:
> Not informed , yes. But not intelligent?? I wasn't aware of
> any decline in public intelligence. Any data?
> Voting and tv vieing habits are not valid - they belong to
> the "not informed" bit.
>
> I am seriously concerned now. How many of this list have
> this total contempt for most of humanity???
>
Not contempt, Eva. Concern. The decline isn't limited to mental
(brain/nervous system). No species is composed of exact replicas/equals.
Adaptive fitness is a reality. Humans are the only species known that
attempts to make differences disappear - a physical impossibility. For
those dealing in 'souls' or 'spirits', I have nothing to say, and you have
nothing to show us.
This doesn't make deep democracy impossible; recall Garrett Harden's
"mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon" as the rational way forward. (see
Jay's site: dieoff.org)
Steve
See this report from yesterday's BBC:
Humans may be collecting bad genes
January 27, BBC Net
<http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_264000/264191.stm>
Better health care might be causing humans to become weaker.
Humans could be getting weaker and sicker with each new generation
because of a build up of bad genes.
Most animals weed out harmful genetic mutations by natural
selection -- only the fittest survive long enough to reproduce. But in
humans the weak have been prevented from dying out by improvements in
standards of living and health care.
Commenting on the research published in Nature, James Crow, from the
University of Wisconsin in Madison, said it was likely that in this
situation natural selection would "weed out mutations more slowly than they
accumulate".
He said: "Are some of our headaches, stomach upsets, weak eyesight
and other ailments the result of mutation accumulation? Probably, but in
our
present state of knowledge we can only speculate."
Geneticists Adam Eyre-Walker, from the University of Sussex in
Brighton, and Peter Keightley, from the University of Edinburgh carried out
the new research. They calculated the rate at which human genes have
mutated
since our ancestors split from chimpanzees six million years ago.
Keightley told the BBC: "We estimate that about 4.2 new mutations
have occurred on average every generation in the human lineage since we
diverged from the chimpanzees, and that 1.6 of those are deleterious."
That rate is so high that without other factors intervening the
human
race should be extinct by now.
One possible reason that humans have survived is that in the past
natural selection eliminated handfuls of harmful genes because individuals
with lots of mutations died early, before reproducing.
But it is also likely that genes which were only slightly harmful
became "fixed" in successive generations. Over time these would accumulate,
especially if improving living standards and health care meant that the
harmful genes were less of a handicap for survival.
(more links on the URL above)
