Do you ever stop to consider what an amazingly successful animal humans are?
We've out competed virtually every other animal on the planet for land and resources. We can change our environment to an incredible degree in order to suit our needs. We've expanded and settled virtually every continent on the planet.
I don't think evolution is responsible for how amazing humans are. We are so far ahead of the 2nd most complex animal. I think we were intentionally designed. I also don't think evolution explains why there are so many different ethnicities of people. Why is everybody different on the outside but exactly the same on the inside? Evolution couldn't have done that when you really think about it.
Evolution goes a long way to explaining why humans are so impressive. Intelligence is one way to be successful in evolutionary terms and that's the basket that our lineage put all its eggs, as it were. Non-human apes have done this to a large degree as well. We're not unique in our abilities or complexity, just extraordinary in the scope of those abilities.
[quote]Why is everybody different on the outside but exactly the same on the inside? Evolution couldn't have done that when you really think about it.[/quote]
Actually this is a level of evolution that even "macro" evolution-deniers recognize as undeniable: change within a "kind". Humans have not historically been exempt from environmental pressure and so people living in very bright, hot places have darker skin with more melanin which helps protect them from solar radiation. People living in darker, cooler or more over cast regions have lighter skin to absorb as much as they can and lighter coloured eyes so as to be more sensitive to light. People living in very cold climates tend to be shorter and thicker as a means to conserve as much body heat as possible. People living at high elevations have a higher red blood cell count which allows them to more effectively deliver oxygen to their cells.
This is all evolution. This is all natural selection acting on different populations of people who are living under different environmental pressures. They change in response to certain environmental pressures but they haven't changed so much that they're not still genus Homo and species sapiens.
Except, of course, we are now past the tipping point for exponential acceleration of global warming. Our "success" will not only kill most of us but also knock out 90% of this round of evolution. There's no guarantee that our species will survive it']s own greed, pollution and foolishness.
@Pikachu Hmm. Fair enough. All things pass, so even success in those terms doesn't really mean much - except subjectively for the species that examines itself.
I'm none too proud of humanity; I see much of our "success" as evidence of how much we collectively ignore the larger picture of how dependent we are on the balance of nature.
Molecular evidence suggests that between 8 and 4 million years ago, first the gorillas, and then the chimpanzees (genus Pan) split off from the line leading to the humans. Human DNA is approximately 98.4% identical to that of chimpanzees when comparing single nucleotide polymorphisms (see human evolutionary genetics).
Bacteria, termites, ants, arthropods, cockroaches, annelids and molluscs have endured and proliferated far longer than we have, and will likely continue long after we've gone extinct. In terms of evolution, I'd vote for them and several other species long before I'd choose humans.
@Pikachu i do understand your point about humans being an evolutionary success. But I don't see the way we've brought about our success, particularly the last 200 years, as anything to celebrate. Yes, I see looking with pride at wiping out other species as hubris. It's more than just survival of the fittest. We're supposed to be thinking creatures. We have the ability to look at what we're doing and understand not only the tragedy of of it, [u]but how it affects ourselves down the road.[/u] The dinosaurs were here for how long? And man has been here for how long? I know you know the answers. Do you look at the state of the world now and man and think he'll compare to the dinosaur timeline? Evolutionary success, yes. But too destructive to keep it going.
Well to be clear, i'm taking no moral or ethical stance on the manner in which we've achieved revolutionary success, only pointing out that we are indeed remarkably successful.
And it's not quite fair to compare us to dinosaurs. We're just a single species after all.
We're astonishingly successful. While the biomass of arthropods, worms, mollusks, fish, and other mammals exceeds humans, for a single species, we have more biomass than any other animal species. If you count anthropogenic material, like concrete, steel, and plastic, the combined mass exceeds all other life combined.
Now to be fair, imagine the success of just plain life. It makes us as a species very very small once again. No matter what, it seemingly seems that all life has no end. It adapts better than even us.
Whole massive asteroids have crashed into the earth and life still exists then, when we didn't exist, and now.
There's a brand new unseen before bacteria that looks like it survives in arsenic! Even eats it. It was discovered in California by NASA in 2010.
@ArishMell please reread the article. This bacteria is unique in the fact that it incorporates arsenic actually into it's own DNA. Until now this simply wasn't thought possible. Hydrocarbons and phosphorus yes, but none had arsenic actually in their DNA.
@ArishMell to my knowledge none have metals in their actual DNA. Only arsenic is poisonous to everything else. What they do is probably excrement the metal. They tolerate the metal. They don't metabolize the metal like this one does.
The sad reality is that Man will not win over the planet, at some point there will be an extinction-like event that will render us back to dust, or hydrocarbons or whatever that event makes of us. Yes, we've rendered many species extinct as we will eventually become or depopulated to the degree where we once were. Over the millions of decades species have evolved to survive whatever the planet throws at them, will we simply evolve into something more... or less???
@spjennifer We won't drive ourselves into biological extinction, whatever horrors we inflict on ourselves.
Ironically, it would be the most remote, least "developed" societies who would have the better chance of survival, unless the danger is of something that could be world-wide, like severe nuclear fall-out. The nearer threat is of societies and "civilisation" as we have come to define them and take for granted, falling part for any of several, very grave reasons.
Palaeontologically, individual mammal species seem to last roughly three million years so in theory we've over two million years to go yet; but we cannot predict if that would apply to us, or how we would affect it.
If [i]Homo Sapiensis[/i] dies out by evolution it would be a slow process, in human terms. We might even change into a new species of the same genus, really quite imperceptibly over very many generations; but even a major single event like another asteroid collision as at the end of the Cretaceous, might not destroy us all.
@ArishMell Between the nuclear powers they together have the ability to destroy the entire planet many times over and it doesn't look like those weapons are going away anytime soon, all it would take is one loon to press a button... Science shows that there have been extinction type events in our past, volcanoes, meteoroids, even the ice age so who's to say what our future brings??? I just don't think we can go on populating and using up all the resources of this planet without there eventually being consequences to that. In 1927 there were 2B of us, we've just passed the 8B mark in a little over a century so...
@spjennifer We're probably better equipped to survive large-scale natural events as a species than most other animals, but it certainly won't be easy or pleasant.
Humanity and our ancestors have lived through the cold phases of the present Ice-Age, by avoiding the coldest regions. The warm phases too - again by just migrating out of harm's way. It was a lot easier for our ancestors than it would be for us now, though. There were far fewer of them, they could be more adaptable, they had not invented nations and borders, and so on.
I agree though, that our biggest threats are ourselves by numbers, resources depletion and wars - and our seeming inability or unwillingness to remove those threats.
True but we have also f-----d up this world we live in to the point where our survival is in doubt and the extinction of many other species, already settled.
Could well be. Personally i doubt we'll fuck it up enough to go extinct. I think we're too clever for that at this point. I do think there will likely be a massive population reduction.
Yeah, from time to time. Except I'm not sure of the definition of "success" given our responsibility for global warming and probable catastrophic global extinctions of 90% of the planet's current species sometime within the next 20 - 100 years.
@hartfire You think it'll be that much? That's like an end-Permian level extinction event and they hand poison hypercanes and boiling oceans and lava flows the size of Russia.
@Pikachu Yes, I really do think it will be that severe. Although we're now only at 1.5% above pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases dumped in the atmosphere, we are already experiencing many extinctions of insects and wildlife due to changing climates destroying their habitats and breeding conditions. We're also experiencing greater levels of desertification (Sahara growing southword by 20 metres per year), inundation (low-lying city-ports, Pacific islands) and the shrinking of farmlands due to loss of glaciers and snow that feed rivers and irrigation. Each winter the arctic tundra gets less snow and ice; each summer the permafost melts in a 10% larger area than the year before. As it melts it releases bubbles of methane into the atmosphere, 25 times more potent as a global warming gas than CO2. The ocean surfaces absorb carbon dioxide. This deprives algae of oxygen, which intern starves microscopic sealife, krill, and on up the food chain. We are already in far more trouble than most people realise - and I've only mentioned a small fraction of what's happening.
We're distracted by the tragedies and horrors of war and the soap operas of politics. And in the meantime we are the frogs in the proverbial pot of water set to boil.
[quote]What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals![/quote]
I wouldn't call the current state of humanity a success
I wouldn't call the state of humanity two millennia ago a success either (e.g., hello Sicilian deforestation by the Romans, which made the climate of Sicily more arid over time, [i]prior[/i] to the Industrial Revolution)
Humans have been effing things up for literally thousands of years, we're a long way off from "evolving" (one tell-tale sign is that religion still exists)
And that whole environment exploitation may end up being our ruin...but at the moment we're just super, super successful in evolutionary terms. Our population is growing exponentially, we have complete dominance over resources, no natural predators and we occupy in large numbers almost every continent on the planet.
