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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles If beavers build dams to help themselves survive, doesn't that mean they are regressing as a species? Why can't they just stay out in the water and on the bare shore the whole time?

The scale is not even the same. You cant compare beavers building a dam to construction workers building an apaprtment and freeloaders just sitting on their ass collecting wellfare and living in them.

At least each beaver knows how to build a dam and the trait is easily relearned throughout generations. Imagine if we had to reinvent the wheel? lol

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Why do you think that will happen?

It is ineveitable that at some point in time some catastrophe would or will strike. Be it thousands or hundreds of years from now. If not. God bless i guess

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Small mammals like mice and rats with their tiny core and high surface area to volume ratio die much more easily in the cold, even compared to a naked human.

what are you talking about? Rats like most other mammals grow fur and can shed in the summer. I am talking about hypothermia even in tropical climates where temperatures drop significantly during nightfall. We simply have very little immunity to nature when it comes to our morphological presence. No hair nothing. We have been conditioned to our sheltered lifestyle that if taken away would devastate our species completely.

Anyways i am playing devils advocate alot here and obviously i have faith in our species for the next couple of hundred or several thousand years to come but one cannot argue that in terms of the environment and physically / genetically we as a species have become weaker and more dependent on our devices to survive.

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Originally posted by Nrg2Nfinit It is ineveitable that at some point in time some catastrophe would or will strike.

It does, year in and year out. Earthquakes that kill tens of thousands, tsunamis and droughts that kill hundreds of thousands, disease epidemics that kill millions or tens of millions. But we survive because we have become so numerous and spread ourselves so far around the globe into so many climates and biomes that these disasters will not affect the long run survival of the species. What do you think will be so catastrophic that it will wipe out every human in every climate and location around the globe?

socialized medicine

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Originally posted by Sunsnail socialized medicine

I actually predict that the unsustainable human population growth will eventually result in the ecosystem forcefully rebalancing itself, with either a mass famine or some sort of plague drastically culling the Earth's population. The affluent will survive and eventually humanity will have been reduced to a more managable size with a generally higher standard of living. Our impact on the climate and the environment will be much smaller, and after an incredible tragedy of human suffering, things might actually be much better.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN yet i would argue that there are still more people engaged in such matters now than there ever were in the past.

The matters now are so much smaller in amplitude then the discoveries before that lead to them.

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Originally posted by Nrg2Nfinit The matters now are so much smaller in amplitude then the discoveries before that lead to them.

well of course, there's (relatively) less to know now!

but seriously, we now have thousands of people that dedicate their lives/professions to various scientific endeavours; how can you even compare that to previous times when most average people were simply struggling to subsist?

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Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles Anyway, the article has less to do with genetic evolution and more to do with environment.

Yep, there has not been remotely enough generations since the industrial revolution to see significant genetic effects.

In the long run, the most adverse genetic effects would likely be the result of medical advances that allow people with deleterious genetic conditions to live a normal life and reproduce when they would otherwise perish.

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Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN well of course, there's (relatively) less to know now! but seriously, we now have thousands of people that dedicate their lives/professions to various scientific endeavours; how can you even compare that to previous times when most average people were simply struggling to subsist?

I agree with you completely. More people are studying, technology is being amplified (nothing really new is being developed, things are just more efficient and precice.

The truth of the matter is the more we depend on our devices, the weaker and more suceptible we become to nature without them.

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Originally posted by Arbiter Yep, there has not been remotely enough generations since the industrial revolution to see significant genetic effects. In the long run, the most adverse genetic effects would likely be the result of medical advances that allow people with deleterious genetic conditions to live a normal life and reproduce when they would otherwise perish.

basically what your saying here is that the gene pool will continue to flourish with genetic defects and we have to resolve them with our medical advances. The only true way to weed these defects out is through eugenics.

Natural selection is thus bypassed, and defects are not naturally weeded out.

Going back to another point, humans are not too great at surviving cold but we *can* survive heat much better than many mammals (one of my reasons for posting that persistence hunt video where the guy runs the animal to death in the middle of the day) -- bipedal = less surface area exposed directly to sun + sweat glands and bare skin for releasing heat from the body. That is what we are built for anyway as we evolved on the savanna.