Are humans still evolving?
To answer this question, it is important to keep in mind the difference between biological evolutionary mechanisms and cultural evolutionary mechanisms. According to the Darwinist view, is the evolution of man still able to come up with the natural selection?
Like all other plant and animal species, the human species is made up of societies of various individuals. This diversity is partially genetic and therefore can be inherited and potentially subject to natural selection. For example, if you have a cystic fibrosis gene in your DNA, you have a chance to pass it on to your children.
However, most of the individual changes of people are cultural. This is a product of human learning and social experience, and such things cannot be transferred to subtypes by biological reproduction. This is the case with things like personality and social position, for example. Wealthy people can “pass” their assets and privileges to their children; money, education, social benefits, etc. It can give. But none of them have anything to do with any gene transmitted through the egg and sperm. Or, if people say that your child has received the anger of your uncle or your sense of humor, it is very likely that your child has learned them as an example or by imitation. However, this has nothing to do with biological inheritance or the genes you transfer.
Genes make important proteins for many parts of your body to function. But things like personality, intelligence, and social position occur as a result of interactions between individuals and the outside world and many complex social experiences. Such things are not (fully) encrypted in genes. Compared to all other species, including many different human species, primates on earth and our closest ancestors, what makes us the most different is our learning, teaching, doing things that never existed before, finding new ways of interacting with each other and the environment, organizing and communicating ourselves. and our greater ability to transform the natural and social world around us. And we do all this without having to undergo any biological modifications.
Our close relatives, like chimpanzees, can do many of the same things to a certain degree. They have complex forms of social solidarity and communication; they use simple tools, teach their children complex skills and build friendship. Chimpanzee societies in different geographic regions, on the other hand, even form somewhat different cultural traditions in things like tool use or social behavior. But none of them can pass near what people can do. Today’s human species is the first species in the history of biological evolution of this planet to evolve from the constraints of biological evolution and evolve mainly through non-genetic social and cultural means. This is what makes us greatly human.
In fact, non-biological cultural evolution has become so important from biological evolution when it creates change in humans that it has little or no relevance to the advantageous or disadvantageous features of how well people live their lives and how many children they usually have, genetic changes and genetic mechanisms. . Whether or not a disease will kill you has more to do with genetic diversity than with other individuals, whether you have been vaccinated in almost every case, whether you have been taking antibiotics, or whether you have had any other medical treatment, or perhaps clean water and fresh foods. And how many subtitles you are likely to leave to the next generations has more to do with social factors than with traits that you can transfer through genetic material and genetic processes. These include relative poverty or wealth, access to resources; customs, traditions, contraception and practices, and the woman’s position; the economic structure and organization of society that encourages large or small families; the effects of religion and other ideological factors, etc. countable.
In the last 100,000 years, our bodies and brains have not changed much, and with the same basic biological bodies, we have been able to cure many diseases from the stone tool culture and move on to explore distant corners of the universe with the help of technology. Although we have biology in the first place that makes all this possible, all of this has been achieved primarily by cultural evolution, not biological.
Source: bilimfili.com
