A Biologist Calls "Two Humans" Prediction "Utter Nonsense"

BurtWorm

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Wed Oct-18-06 09:37 AM
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A Biologist Calls "Two Humans" Prediction "Utter Nonsense"

Edited on Wed Oct-18-06 09:39 AM by BurtWorm

If you thought the BBC story about two developing strains of human beings--one "high class," the other "low"--was fishy, you had good reason. This is from Pharyngula.com, a blog by PZ Myers who teaches biology at the University of Minnesota in Morris:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/utter_nonsense.php

What the hell? How can the BBC News publish this tripe?

But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.

Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

Ignoring the fact that you cannot predict long-term evolutionary trends without knowing long-term environmental trends (and not even then), I would like to see the evidence for any of this. For instance, I doubt that there's even a speck of credible data showing that men with square jaws have greater reproductive success than men with more rounded jaws…or that large penises and fertility are correlated. The author of this claims is just making things up, I assert.

On what basis does he make these claims? It's all about his perception of what sexual selection should do.

People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.

The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the "underclass" humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.

In other words, because he (and the advertising world) has set up hairless women with pert breasts and glossy hair as the ideal, well, they must get lots of sex and produce lots of children who will propagate that Cosmo state of airbrushed perfection. Meanwhile, no man is going to breed with the majority of women (you know, those women who have body hair and whose breasts actually sag a little bit…the "squat goblins") unless they are chinless, lopsided dwarves, so we're going to see that subhuman breed spontaneously segregated from the noble Eloi.

I might have believed this nonsense could come from some late 19th century eugenicist, but now? Is there any evidence of the kind of sympatric speciation event described going on? Humans are a happily interbreeding group, with no hint of the separation of genetic classes corresponding to this prediction emerging, or that real-world human beings make mate choices as simplistic as that, or that the people who best fit those stereotypes are at all superior in reproduction. What competent biologist could even suggest such silly nonsense?

The source is not a biologist, which helps. It's Oliver Curry, who recently received a Ph.D. from the Government Department of the London School of Economics, and now teaches Political Theory. "Eh, what?" I hear you say—what does training in government, economics, and politics teach you about how evolutionary biology works? Apparently, next to nothing. Worse still, this fellow is a member of something called the Evolutionary Moral Psychology Group. I roll my eyes at everything Evolutionarily Psychological, and sticking the word "Moral" in there just makes it worse. There is good work in morality by psychologists and social scientists, but calling it "evolutionary" seems to be a universal corrupter, as the practitioners, who rarely have any knowledge of population genetics or evolutionary biology in general, strive to tangle their misperceptions of biology with the complicated business of how their brains work....