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Post by The Giant-Size Man Thing on Nov 18, 2004 17:54:38 GMT -5
Actually, choosing mates would be Sexual Selection. And yes, diseases do occur, but we have vaccines and cures and treatments and all kinds of stuff to fight them.
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Post by Juan on Nov 18, 2004 18:00:07 GMT -5
Sex is part of Nature. Pwned.
And we don't have a cure to all diseases, and I was mostly speaking of genetic problems.
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Post by The Giant-Size Man Thing on Nov 18, 2004 18:04:12 GMT -5
Whoops, you're right. I was thinking in terms of ecological selection. Natural Selection does encompass both ecological and sexual.
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Post by NeoEllis on Nov 18, 2004 18:49:08 GMT -5
Increased weight and taller stature is due to nutrition.
Either way, people aren’t dieing from disease at close to the rate they did a few hundred years ago –or at the rate most other life forms do, for that matter.
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Post by Infested Manae on Nov 18, 2004 19:45:45 GMT -5
People aren't dying from disease and sickness as fast as they were fifty years ago, much less hundreds.
As for the taller part, that's not so much diet as evolution in my opinion. Let's be honest, our diets have gone down the tubes in the past decades. Horribly. Our rich-country diet consisting of a lot of meat literally fattens us up for the kill. There's lovely things in all of our arteries already, tubes of fat that'll only get bigger. If anything, our diets have hurt our statures by reducing bloodflow needed to maintain the growth. If you went by saying diet alone caused increased height, you'd have to assume people in the jungles of Africa and poorer countries were still five feet tall...
Besides how tall we get, I think humans are developing in muscle-mass more than required for height increases. The 'bigger, faster, stronger' of humanity can't be attributed solely to better training. There are still walls you hit doing that kind of stuff. And we don't have a sludge hammer handy yet.
I also don't consider our increasing intelligence as evolution. That's more of an effect of archiving knowledge. I mean, could you image where we'd be today if not for those Dark Ages? Or if the Library in Alexandria didn't get burned down? There were some major dice rolled on this world, and we didn't get our new pair of shoes for the baby.
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Post by NeoEllis on Nov 18, 2004 20:37:30 GMT -5
Buuut it would be impossible for such evolution to manifest itself in only two to three hundred years. Generally speaking, people from Africa are often genetically taller.
Also, as fatty as our western diets may be, you can't discount the comparative amount of calcium (which aids in the growth of bones, obviously) available in the US, Canada and Europe.
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Post by Tobari Sabbatine on Nov 18, 2004 22:36:00 GMT -5
Well I know we're not going to have body hair...
It would have been funny if the said "Yes! Turns over the bible was right"
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Post by Juan on Nov 18, 2004 22:39:21 GMT -5
So? And if we were all forced to live in trees we'd physically evolve differently. There is no set path of "Forawrd" for evolution, it branches.
The mind has been evolving, and has been for a long time. I mean, look back eight thousand years (a relatively small time evolutionarily), man was illiterate and unable to understand most concepts of thought. Its not just upbringing, its a luck of fundamental intuition.
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Post by Juan on Nov 18, 2004 22:40:16 GMT -5
Well I know we're not going to have body hair... That is just some whacko people's guesses. Hair is important against tempretures which we still do encounter.
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Post by Mega Raptor on Nov 18, 2004 22:49:37 GMT -5
Ya know, with how dependent we humans are getting on technology, it wouldn't surprise me if given a long stretch of time we start to evolve to 'match' technology as it becomes our new environment, more or less.
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Post by Infested Manae on Nov 18, 2004 22:59:13 GMT -5
Buuut it would be impossible for such evolution to manifest itself in only two to three hundred years. Generally speaking, people from Africa are often genetically taller. Also, as fatty as our western diets may be, you can't discount the comparative amount of calcium (which aids in the growth of bones, obviously) available in the US, Canada and Europe. Who said anything about only two or three hundred years? It's been happening for a while. Though, to be fair, remember that people were having kids at 15-20 five hundred years ago, and 20 is still common today. Five generations is plenty of time for some evolution. 20 is more than enough to add a few inches. Like I mentioned before, those finches evolved their beaks twice over the span of ten years. Ten generations at the most, to a stimulous as simple as the availability of types of seeds.
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Post by Tobari Sabbatine on Nov 26, 2004 17:15:27 GMT -5
That is just some whacko people's guesses. Hair is important against tempretures which we still do encounter. no, cloths have that job now.
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Post by Juan on Nov 29, 2004 20:54:37 GMT -5
no, cloths have that job now. Not nearly enough.
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Post by Triyun on Nov 29, 2004 21:54:34 GMT -5
Diet contributes to height, look at Japans dietary habits and height over the past century. Its believed by most that this is the cause. No doubt some groups of humans are taller than others, but diet increases those with a similar gene pool. Things in africa tend to be bigger than in asia though like the elephants.
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Post by Juan on Nov 29, 2004 22:07:44 GMT -5
Japan is a rather enclosed and smaller nation, where height and room has always been, no matter what, at a minimum. Africa is quite big and roomy.
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