GREAT DECISIONS II
Topic: Evolution ?? Xxxx 2009

Evolution is the usually gradual change of a trait in an organism. Evolution is called the survival of the fittest to put a positive light on the subject. Actually evolution is the death of the unfit. DDT is applied to kill bugs. Most bugs die. A few survive because DDT does not effect them. They are the only bugs able to reproduce and multiply. The next generation of bugs is DDT resistant. Some still die from DDT, but a larger number survive. The next generation is not effected by DDT at all.
Native peoples in hot countries tend to be lanky to shed heat. Eskimos are stocky to keep heat. When early man moved from Africa to northern climes, those with a rounder build survived. The skinny died from the cold.
There is a related effect, different from evolution, but supportive of it. That of adaptation. Man can adapt to winter cold weather and six months later adapt to summer heat. But, if people move to a permanently cold area, then the adaptation becomes a requirement of the life style. Those unable to survive to the lifestyle die. The general population consists of survivors of cold, thus the population is adapted to cold.
Mutations occur constantly. Some are fatal. Most are simply random. A few help a person thrive in the environment in which they live. Examples of mutations for stockier, shorter, fatter people These are not just adaptations, but genetic changes that allow people to survive where others tend to die. All these changes do not occur at once. The effect is not in one generation, but increases in the population as individuals mate and children are born with the the better trait, better for the lifestyle of the people. This is more permanent than a simple acclimation, the body has changed to fit the lifestyle. Over thousands of generations, the new population is significantly different that the original population.
Lets use language as another example. Changes occur constantly. The new generation can understand their parents, but develop new words and expressions. The next grandchildren continue with more new words, meanwhile some of the fad words of each generation die out . Over a few hundred years the language has the roots of the original, but differs significantly.
Language is local. California Valley Girl talk is different from Southern Belle and proper Bostonian. When language started, the tribe understood the same sounds. As tribes broke off into new local group, the new words in each group differed. As this occurred over the world, the result is the current 6,000 languages.
Species are the equivalent of languages. Species of monkeys exist in different parts of the world. Each adapted to its locale. Some found a tail useful for survival. Others were able to survive without tails. Some leaned to walk upright. Monkeys had already developed the front legs into arms and paws into hands. The additional trait of upright walking offered several nice features. It freed the arms for carrying things, like babies and food. It allowed the ability to see further and over grass. It allowed running. The use of clubs and rock for defense and attack. We will leave the step by step evolution of monkeys into early man to the imagination. Few fossils survive in rain forests. An occasional bone is found preserved in volcanic ash and such. We know that there were many species of monkey that developed and died out as the weather and environment changed. Yet dozens survive today -- tsars?, [check wiki lists] new world and old world monkeys, baboon, orangutan, lowland and highland gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.
So too, did various of advanced monkeys develop with features that we consider manlike. Of hundreds of traits, some existed in various proportions in various populations at various places at various times. Most died out. Note, good features can die out in the wrong environment. A capability for empathy might be clubbed by a viscous trait in a neighboring tribe.
There are people called paleoanthorpologists able to spend their lives bent over with a brush moving dirt in search of ancient teeth in conditions of heat, wind, dust, insects, land mines, rebels, corrupt officials and bureaucrats. My interests start with recognizable human-like features. Genus Homo, Latin for like us.
• Lucy was an upright monkey of 3.2 million years ago living in Africa. Uprightness is now considered the sign of our ancestors. At one time a large brain was considered the test, but this is a later development. Her kind probably dates earlier, but she is the first relatively complete skeleton found.
• Homo habilis (handy man) developed about 2.0 million ya. He still was still short with long arms, but made tools of broken rock -- pebble culture -- but looked enough like us to be labeled Homo.
• .Homo ergaster (1.9Mya to 1.4Mya) was even more man-like, taller, lighter, larger brain, flatter face, and originated the primitive hand axe. This name is usually retained for H. erectus in Africa
• Homo erectus (1.8Mya to 100,000ya) was about the same size as modern men, but his features evolved over time and in different locations with a culture defined by the sharpened hand axe, an all purpose stone ax head with a point and sharp edges for hitting and slicing and a rounded butt for holding. This ancient man spread over the world (Africa and greater Asia) -- and covered the longest period of early man. Because of this it is a catch-all stage that includes many developments in Homo variation. Note, just as various monkeys live in different ecological niches round the world, so to did men in various forms exist at the same time in different places and at different times.
  Asia was larger in the past and includes the European peninsula, Indonesia which was solid land before the ice melted, and would technically include Beringia between Siberia and Alaska, which provided migration for animals to and from the Americas, but Erectus does not seem to have bothered to move into the far north and never had reason to venture to the Americas.
      The movement "out of Africa" is nothing special to the people at the time they did it. They simply followed herds as the climate changed and ice ages brought drought and desertification. Competitive pressures of other tribes forced movement, too. Movement from Ethiopia thru Egypt to what we call the Middle East was to them just going in the most likely direction from wherever they were. The most ancient tribes out of Africa found a a fertile crescent where animals and plants thrived and the people thrived, multiplied and moved in all directions, too.
  Homo erectus move in that direction, we do not know with how many tribes over the millennia, but they spread over the habitable world of Eurasia (which then included Indonesia.) Homo erectus continued to adapt to the areas where each group found themselves, those that remained in Africa, those in East Asia, Indonesia, and Europe. Thus we have Peking Man in E. Asia, Java Man in Indonesia, Ergaster in Africa, Neanderthal in Europe, which were once thought to be different stages of evolution, but which date to similar times and are now considered localizations of Homo erectus.
  • African groups selected for equatorial heat and became thin and dark. (Chimpanzees are white skinned, it was the loss of body hair that required man to darken to survive.) Height is a mark of wellness of a people, those tribes that survived tended to be tall.
  • European groups, the most studied, have evolutionary steps in both physical and cultural characteristics. The body is much more robust than us, skin lightened to prevent rickets in less sunny areas., They developed techniques to make a variety of types of hand-axes, learned to make skin capes against the cold, controlled fire (making fire is iffy), and learned to vocalize meanings. Selection favored good tongue movement, and cooking allowed teeth and jaw to become smaller. Larger brain flattened out the face. Over time he became Neanderthal with a large brain (larger than ours, but so did this occur on other continents) and of a strength to probably be able to throw football linemen over the goal post.
  • Equally significant changes occurred in Asia and Indonesia.
    A group survived in Indonesia into the most recent age as modern man passed by where they were hidden on a island . This is the "hobbits" (Homo Florius?) that probably died in a volcanic eruption only 12,000 ya.
• Homo sapiens developed in the continental African group of Homo erectus, probably about 200,000ya. That is to say, the features we associate with modern man developed. These are a collection of traits, in appearance we can only say that he would have be able to pass in portions of the modern world. Most importantly he could breed with modern people. There is no eureka moment, just that the statistics of various traits have passed his kind into a new category. Bones of some of his kind have been found, which may or may not be representative of what the group may have been like.
  The DNS of all humans can be traced to Mitochondrial Eve of about 140,000 YA.

  How can we all come from the same woman, Eve?
  If 200 people are ship wrecked on an island, each with a different last name and live according to conventional marriage conventions of last names, then when rescued 200 years later, the all have the same last name. Again, how?
  Half of the 200 names of females disappear either by marriage or death.
  A quarter of the men die before childbearing.
  A quarter of the men have either only daughters or boys that die before child bearing.
  Half the men have at least one son survive the first generation and continue that name.
  At this point, only 25 names remain. Disease, accident, weather, conflict take a toll, which we will allow to balance that some families have multiple sons, so let just follow the easy statistics.
  Repeat each generation with a loss of one half of names would indicate 12, 6, 3, 2, 1 name survives in 6 generations or 120 years in which only some old folks have other names. Let them die off and only one name exists by 200 years.
  Thus, through no fault or exceptional ability than random nature, the DNA of one woman rests in us all today ; we call her mitochondrial Eve, or just Eve. Note, there were other woman of equal merit who's DNA randomly died out. Eve was a mother of two girls, otherwise one of the girls would have been Eve. Eve had parents of the same genetic species dating back, to 200,000 YA, but Eve is the youngest to be found, at 160,000YA. The parent's generations died out as tribes do, either randomly or by lessor survival characteristics for the environment in which they were place -- like a larger enemy tribe, again, at no fault to themselves,
  Or perhaps there were too many liberal, civilized, pacifists who did not approve of preparation for physical contest in a competitive world.
  "Y-chromosomal Adam" was of the same species who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago. This was just before the important "out of Africa" event of 50,000 yr ago that spread H. sapiens round the world that includes us all. Three lineages of Adam exist in Africa, only one went out to the rest of the world.

  
  DNA tracking. Mutations occur constantly, in fact, at an almost uniform rate such that by counting mutations, a guess can be made as to how long ago that two peoples (groups) separated. The sequence is obvious, if the people of the Ukraine have a certain DNA sequence and the people of Poland have all this plus a mutation, then we know that people migrated from one place to the other, in which direction, and can guess at how long ago. People tend to stay put, thus any region develops a preponderance of one DNA. Women stay put more so than men.
  Gene science can actually follow the effect of armies, such as Khangis Khan's in which men move across an area leaving a difference in the DNA age of men and of women. And DNA also shows where colonies migrated, as where both men and woman moved from Scandinavia to the north of England (surprise, Viking may have been ruthless raiders, but they also settled with their women brought from home.)
  
  The Journey by man seems to have started with beach combers who moved across the ice age shrunken Red Sea at the even narrower then south end from Ethiopia to Yemen, then followed their coastal lifestyle along the Gulf of Aden, across what was then dry land but is now the Persian Gulf, and on to India.

  Human tribes generally consist of about 50 people. A the group grows there are pressures for the tribe to split. We envision the younger people moving off to new hunting grounds. Or in the case of beach combers they might move further along the coast. Lets make some assumptions. A tribe splits every generation of about twenty years. Assuming that twenty miles was an average distance to move on. Then the expansion of human-kind might proceed 20 miles each 20 years or an average of about one mile per year. The walking distance from Yemen to Australia and Beringia is about 9,000 miles. Thus man could have reached the ends of his world within the round-off error of ancient dating, that is to say, almost instantaneously on a glacial time scale. Therefore it is not a surprise to find cultural remains (tools) in Australia dated 10,000 from of similar remains in Ethiopia.

  Each younger tribe moved further along the coast. Still younger tribes formed from the settled tribes moved up the various great river to settle the inland areas. When a river ran out, they moved in whichever direction was not blocked by mountains and deserts. The great rivers of Asia led far inland.
  At India some tribes followed the coast south into what was then a land connected to Asia, not flooded into the islands of Indonesia as for the last 10,000 years. Back then the Australia-New Guinea-Tasmania continent had only a straight separating it from the massive EurAsiaAmerica continent. These boat building coastal peoples could cross and did cross that straight. When the waters came up, settlers on New Guinea, Tasmania, and Australia were isolated with some of the earliest men. Each N.G. valley became a land of its own people, each with its own language. The arrivals in Tasmanian. came with a full toolkit of bow, arrow, nets, but lost it all and returned to an old stone age culture.
  
  From India, some tribes continued up the coast of SE Asia to East Asia -- China and Japan and Beringia. Beringia was a thousand mile long tundra for game and for man. When it flooded, some moved east to America, between the east and western glaciers and flowed into north, central and south America.. Others had already moved west from Beringia into the "Mammoth Lands" between Siberia and Tibet and on to Scandinavia.
  Peking man variety of Homo Erectus was found early and once thought to be the home of modern mankind. The cave with bones of many animals showed his hunting prowess. However, we now think that man's bones are just refuse as all the other animal bits carried to the caves by giant hyenas. But, even eaten, bones proved that man was there, even if not at the top of the food chain.
  The western peninsula of Europe was late being settled by modern man, but it was already occupied by a few thousand late H. erectus men, called H. Neanderthal. Some tribes moved up the Tigris-Euphrates valley and at Turkey, some moved west along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Lake. Others moved into the rich lands north of the Caucus, southern Mammoth Land. Another theory have later arrivals come out of Africa following the Mediterranean coast around into Greece, Italy and Spain. There were no newspapers telling the people of Africa of the marvels of Eurasia, there was just a tiny connection at Suez that may have been found from time to time. And equally as likely, some bands from Asia may have found that path back into Africa. The possibilities confuse the genetic record.
  Northern Europe was settled by those who took their time enjoying the vast richness of Mammoth Lands.
  Neanderthal lived in family groups, of say, 15, whereas Cro-Magnon lived in bands of about 50 people. Neanderthal retreated to isolate areas and died out as have so many, most other branches of the human family tree. but not before adopting some new technology (blades) and social customs (ornamentation). If only, -- the NFL would have loved them.
  Later, many innovations for the benefit of mankind came from the areas in and surrounding Kazakhstan. including the dog, horse, Indo European language. Was this the meeting point of Siberian and Tigris-Euphrates people? Dog, a friendly wolf (DNA suggests that all dogs came from a litter of three wolves) noted for its ability to understand the body language of man. The dog made settled life easier by being a night watchmen and made herding less labor intensive. The horse was used for military advantage, there were not implements such as carts and plows until later. Language is a major trait of modern man. Evolution of the skull and tongue allow modern speech and was a survival trait. However, a different mode of speech was possible by earlier men. Late erectus, such as Neanderthal could certainly say words. We have not way of knowing if he had a full language. Language allowed man to operate in larger groups, to plan, and to share technology
  The last ice age forced northern Europeans down to the Mediterranean where they encountered the southern branch of Europeans. When the ice cleared, only the northern folks were available to return to repopulate all of Europe (northern white skin). The same seems to have happened in Asia, the Siberians moved into China and spread the characteristic, cold weather eye fold when they repopulated east Asia.

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  ( much more to come )
  Homo Sapiens Itdal, H.S. Cro-Magnon, and H.S. sapiens are three stages of modern man.
  Add tracing of the movement of man by DNA changes in time and location
   

  I find evolution of mankind a subject of science and discovery -- rather than a topic of discussion. Hence, I did not include much in the Great Decisions Two discussion of 19June2009, other than to give a feel that man did evolve and therefore continues to evolve as time goes by. I am not able to come up with a list of general questions about pure evolution that is suitable for the class. Do you have some? Is this a subject for a full 2-hour discussion?

  Discussion fodder is the Trans-Human phase from where we are to where we are going -- on into the immediate future. Wonderful opportunity for discussion. Various topics have been broached. Is this worthy of a continued 2-hour discussion?

  Then with that topic broached, the details of actual Eugenics rears its head. What to change? How to change? What will be the results?
  Thus there are three distinctly different topics and the group discussion was unable to do other then name some issues and did not have time to get into in-depth discussion. Therefore I am creating two additional papers for possible continuing future discussion.
  
  1 . This paper on Evolution has much taken from my website "Mankind". Are there topics that need to be discussed?
  2 . I would still like to hear discussion on human transition.
  3 . And the new paper on Eugenics? I was not specifically prepared for that topic and had ordered two books on that subject that only arrived during that class hour. The handout contains lots of questions. The insights of these authors will be integrated into a potential class discussion on specifics, pros and cons of Eugenics. Maybe we can determine some answers in another discussion. However, I expect that any worthy decisions on the subject will, in real life, be bastardized by political interests and government bureaucracy.
  "Yes, Minister", BBC TV "BritCom" of 1970s is the most insightful look at politics -- ever!"

  Current Evolution.
      We have seen that survival of the fittest is really the death of the unfit. What are some of the issues of today's world?
  • Ambient Radiation.
    • Hold a portable radio and turn around. Radiation comes from everywhere an pulses through your body. Turn the dial. All frequencies are passing through at all times. Consider other than radio frequencies -- TV, Short Wave, Long Wave, (more popular in Europe), radar, PC monitors, microwaves, all forms of electronic light, even magnetism.
    • Loss of the Ozone layer -- solar light and radiation, gamma rays.
    • X-ray is a part of over-testing by medical malpractice fears. Dental. Remember the ads saying they are now safe? What were they before?
    • Remember fluoroscopes when you could see your foot bones inside your new sneakers at every shoe store after the war? Quietly disappeared in the 1950's when atomic radiation reared its head.
    • Health Caves of abandoned radium (1898) mines ; as a health food additive. Before uranium discovered.(1842/1934). Plutonium (1941).
      Luminescent paints in watches. AMA set minimums to assure light quality. Caused cancer.
  • Chemicals in Food Supply. GMFs?
    • Plants -- fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, weed killers,
    • Meat -- antibiotics, insecticides, growth stimulants.
    • High fat foods -- the typical N.American is now obese.
    • Recreational drugs. No FDA inspections.
  • Symptoms:
    • Autism and A.D.D. did not exist when I was in school. Now half the kids are on prescription drugs like Ritalin
    • Alzheimer’s -- is it just that the population is aging? I don't think so.
    • Cancer. -- Look how long we have had certainty about tobacco. List other known carcinogens
    • Sperm viability has dropped from 50% in 1930s to 15% today.(1)
  Will the future human be resistant to radiation and chemicals because the weak have died off? Most of these issues do not kill until after reproductive age and just cause a statistically premature death rate. Therefore the die-off will principally be of old people and have little genetic effect on evolution; at least not until the premature death age is lowered into the thirties. The drop in sperm viability receives little notice and might possibly be considered a desirable population control/improvement effect. So far, only drug wars directly effect young people's deaths.. Well, all wars until recently have primarily effected that group of males. See war-like.
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  (1) Wikipedia : "WHO criteria as described in the old manual of 1989, a sample is normal if 30% or more of the observed sperm have normal morphology."
  2009 : "a sample is normal if 14% or more of the observed sperm have normal morphology."
  "Men who scored high on a battery of intelligence tests tended to have higher counts of healthy sperm."

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  About this page : Draft of a possible discussion of only Evolution, or at least make up for the lack of discussion on pure evolution expected by some in the TransHuman discussion of 19June.
  Last updated : 7July2009
  URL : http://www/manorweb.com/topic/evolution0.html