DescentBB

According to this study, we're hardwired to undertake the path of least resistance.

http://neurosciencenews.com/path-of-lea ... ance-6139/

In other words, we tend to prefer laziness or the path of least resistance. That makes sense since it requires energy to get things done and most people prefer to spend that hard earned energy doing the things they like. I read somewhere that the act of going to work everyday is not something that's a normal part of the human condition and that the Industrial Revolution was where that daily grind was forced upon a reluctant humanity. I'll have to look for the study about that one.

scary as we head to an age where easy answers are even more wrong than they usually are already......or, maybe just that the consequences of easy answers can be worse.

Evolution in action...

Evolution knew nothing about having to get up and labor in an 8 or 10 hour (or more) workday for almost every day of the week. It's not natural to our very being. We didn't evolve with constant hard and grinding menial work as an influencing factor in our evolutionary development until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which only encompasses around 2 centuries of human development. That's too short a period to adapt and it's a totally different and new human situation from having to just fight to survive when we had to. Damn, I wish I could find that research article to post. It was quite interesting.

So are you one of those people who believe humans just hung around in hammocks drinking coconut juice all day before the modern age. I've had these discussions with other people who think that humans had nothing to do all day before the modern age, but nothing could be farther from the truth.

The idea of free time and leisure time wasn't even a valid concept before the modern age. Humans were designed to be up and moving around for most of the day, pretty much everyday, just look into how much muscle and bone mass you lose just from sitting around for a short time, so yes evolution has a lot to say on the issue.

Before the modern age people spent most of their time collecting water and food, making clothes and shelter, fending off predators, and dyeing from every bug that came along.

There was a daily grind, it was just different.

If I find that research, I'll post it. It did make some sense. But you do have to admit that working at a job full time is not a natural part of our evolutionary being. It's something that came about in the last 200 years. Surviving in the wild was a totally different behavior norm for humans instead of the modern grind of having to go to work day to day. Most of the time, work for most people is either boring, disliked or menial. It's the lucky person who has a job they like. When people are bored or hate what they're doing, they tend towards laziness. The mind craves stimulation and will seek it out. In nature, humans didn't have time to think about how bored they were when either something was trying to kill them for food or the weather was making life hell, shelter miserable and food scarce.

Perhaps, but what is definitely part of our evolution is adaptation to new situations, and a great head start for dealing with them.

Now if we were tree sloths…I could see how a daily grind could present a problem.

actually, it seems what you are seeing is what happens without evolutionary pressures to remain intellectual. In other words, it confers no inherent advantage, so thus no need for nature to select for it.

Spidey wrote:Perhaps, but what is definitely part of our evolution is adaptation to new situations, and a great head start for dealing with them.

Now if we were tree sloths…I could see how a daily grind could present a problem.

200 years was not enough time to fully adapt to the modern working lifestyle. Evolution is extremely slow for higher and more complicated lifeforms like humans. Technically, we're still in the hunter-gatherer phase of our development. Now if we were bacteria, we'd be all set.

It seems we've ignored something important about the modern lifestyle, physical and psychological stress. This isn't the article I was looking for Spidey, but I did find this one about how the modern lifestyle may be causing more stress than the body can adapt to through evolution, resulting in all sorts of stress-related issues like inflammatory and autoimmune diseases and even dysfunctional family life (one of the discussions in another thread). Even our modern diet is working against us. It's called the Evolutionary Mismatch.

http://www.ashdin.com/journals/JEM/235885

Well in my opinion we already have all of the tools needed to deal with modern living.

A body designed to work all day if needed.
A brain powerful enough to do all of the problem solving needed.

But where evolution needs to catch up is longer life spans, that is really where things start to fall apart.

Also I’m pretty sure the social institutions and other tools needed for modern life could use some modernizing.

For example that article mentions stress related disease, well how a person deals with stress is very important, probably much more important than any evolved trait.

So what I’m trying to say is, it may well be our culture that needs to evolve…not our bodies. (except for that lifespan thing)

The brain is fine and willing, but having been cursed with bad allergies and several supposed autoimmune diseases that have stopped me from working, you need to recheck your strong body thinking.

No, I didn't say anything about "strong body" I said the ability to work all day if necessary.

And I'll bet your problems started after 40...right...the age most people died before the modern era.

As I said...evolution hasn't caught up with longer life spans.

Well anyway…I wouldn’t expect evolution to be solving the problem in the future because the way our culture is set up at the present time, it removes most of the pressures that drive evolution like natural selection and survival of the fittest. (people who are ill equipped to handle the pressures can still reproduce at high rates)

But don’t get me wrong, humans will probably continue to evolve, just not for that particular problem.

(actually I believe that the human race is very close to de-evolution)

Spidey wrote:No, I didn't say anything about "strong body" I said the ability to work all day if necessary.

And I'll bet your problems started after 40...right...the age most people died before the modern era.

As I said...evolution hasn't caught up with longer life spans.

Actually, several of them started up at or after puberty, the rest after menopause. Tell me the evolutionary reasons for chronic headaches and allergies? They definitely aren't beneficial to the organism, me. I even had pets as a kid and swam in a dirty lake all the time, so it wasn't like I lived in a clean environment. There's not a lot known about why autoimmune diseases are increasing in western industrialized nations, but perhaps the constant consumption of processed foods and exposure to man-made toxins in the environment play a role, but stress may be just one of the biggest mitigating factors. This trend even has a name, "The Western Disease".

http://www.alternet.org/story/80129/the ... of_balance

Spidey wrote:Well anyway…I wouldn’t expect evolution to be solving the problem in the future because the way our culture is set up at the present time, it removes most of the pressures that drive evolution like natural selection and survival of the fittest. (people who are ill equipped to handle the pressures can still reproduce at high rates)

But don’t get me wrong, humans will probably continue to evolve, just not for that particular problem.

(actually I believe that the human race is very close to de-evolution)

I think you're a little wrong on that. I believe our brain is what's evolving, into a smarter and larger organ, but the formerly robust body is slowly being weakened by our modern lifestyle. Figuring out fire and the ability to cook our food has drastically changed our digestive systems into a system that's shorter in length and far less acidic, which makes it no longer good at digesting roughage and killing the food-borne pathogens that are found in raw meats, water and soils. However, it's really great at feeding a demanding brain that craves high sugar and high fat meals which enables it to grow larger in size and complexity. Since that trend is continuing, our brains will continue to evolve to be bigger and smarter.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/cook ... -evolution

As to the my post about stress, there's something else that stress brings on, obesity. Once someone becomes obese, that automatically predisposes us to being lazy and looking for easier ways to do things, like mechanizing everything, so everyday mundane tasks and even work can now be done for us. It's a vicious cycle we've built ourselves into. Maybe in the future we'll all evolve into blobs of fatty protoplasm with no bones and no means of locomotion, bodies that will certainly contain a big brain and the gut to feed it, while machines and robots build themselves and do all the work.

https://www.verywell.com/stress-and-obesity-2509552

Brains don’t evolve because they are well fed, they evolve because smarter people can out compete and therefore out populate dumb people…that no longer happens to a degree in modern society to have an evolutionary affect.

Your assumptions that we are still evolving in any sort of genetic way are really kind of a stretch. Any mutations that don't exclude their host from reproducing will be diluted out to nothing in the gene pool of 7 billion individuals. Large populations stabilize the genetic makeup of the population (the evolutionary reasoning being "why change what is clearly working").

Also people tend to confuse gene expression with evolution…

For example I hear people say the fact that offspring are always bigger and smarter than their parents is evolution in action, when in fact what is in play is gene expression, the ability to grow and fill a particular environment was evolved by fish millions of years ago. Some species of fish and animals such as Crocodiles can express this gene in a single lifetime, where humans express this gene over generations.

If Humans faced limited resources over an extended period they would become smaller over the generations, it looks like evolution, but is not.

Spidey wrote:Also people tend to confuse gene expression with evolution…

For example I hear people say the fact that offspring are always bigger and smarter than their parents is evolution in action, when in fact what is in play is gene expression, the ability to grow and fill a particular environment was evolved by fish millions of years ago. Some species of fish and animals such as Crocodiles can express this gene in a single lifetime, where humans express this gene over generations.

If Humans faced limited resources over an extended period they would become smaller over the generations, it looks like evolution, but is not.

Look at skulls from humans that are thousands of years old. They all differ from modern man because they have a sloping forehead, a smaller frontal cortex and a smaller total brain case size. We've been slowly getting bigger and bigger brains over the hundreds of thousands of years we've been around on this planet. Evolution favors whatever trait or mutation that allows an animal, or humans in our case, to survive over it's competitors. A larger brained human gives us a distinct advantage over other primates and animals, but in exchange for that intelligence, larger skulls, functioning hands that can do delicate tool work and an upright 2-legged stance, we had to give up brute strength, fur and tough skin. Apparently, a smarter brain meant we didn't need those things to survive. We obviously DID become smaller as well because we are definitely less muscular and weigh less than say, a gorilla. But what we lack in strength, we made up with intelligence. We evolved to be above having to be at the mercy of nature. We can now build shelter to protect us from the weather and farm the land to help us grow our food and raise animals to eat and cloth ourselves.

Yes...what you are describing is actual genetic evolution that takes place over thousands of years. The point I was trying to make is humans can change size over relatively short periods of time without mutations.

So yes...in a hundred years we will have bigger brains, but it won't be from evolution.