Steven Vincent Johnson wrote: In certain cultures if a woman has sex outside the sanctity of marriage she can be stoned to death. Meanwhile, the male gets away to spread his seed amongst other females - who may also eventually suffer the same fate.
In other cultures the same activity is more likely to produce juicy gossip. In the grand scheme of things stoning women of child baring age results in the reduction of childbirths into that culture. Meanwhile, in other cultures notes and accompanying DNA are more frequently exchanged. Jeff Fink wrote: Is it culture that allowed western Europe/America to develop such incredible technology while all previous insipient techno societies such as China and Egypt failed to mature technically? Jed wrote: Jared Diamond says that geography has a lot to do with in, in his fascinating book "Guns germs and steel." I don't know if agree with everything he says, but the book is a tour de force and thought provoking. Actually, the Chinese were well along at times. But they kept inventing effective clocks, classifying them as Top Secret government projects, and then forgetting how to make them. Truly asinine, but not unthinkable in modern day society. Hi All, Selection pressure on humans may never have been higher than at present, including sexual, technological, geographical (I think Diamond is fascinating), cultural pressures, etc. All of these pressures are the bases for various "theories of history." The results of sexual pressure are not obvious: At the presnt trend, 12 will be the average age in Iraq; and the Mormons are the fastest growing religion in the US (so I've read) -- they are doing it by procreation (Big Love?). My current favorite pressure is the "disease theory of history." An interesting Nova (?) some time ago described a village in England, ravaged by the Black Death in the 14th century, whose modern descendents have a higher than average resistence to HIV -- the pores in the T-cells are too small for the virus to penetrate -- another reason to question whether or not the Black Death was really Plague. Today, microbiological attack is probably the strongest evolutionary pressure: ease of movement in and out of remote regions with large numbers of people -- did the Roman roads bring smallpox into the Empire from the Middle East and decimate Marcus Aurelius's legions on the Rhine? Now we have strange symptoms such as chronic fatigue, loss of myelin from neurons, fribomyalgia, Parkinson's, Lou Gherig's disease, etc., which the medical profession tries to explain away as "autoimmune disease." If our immune systems were that dysfunctional, we would have been extinct long ago. Based upon drastic human population crashes in the past, e.g. 535 AD, I don't think it is far-fetched to predict a world population of 1 billion by 2050. If Yellowstone blows, we could even have a pinch like the one that almost finished off homo sapiens 70,000 years ago. Jack Smith
