Safety? We don't need no stinking Safety!
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It is only ever beaten by entropy
Worst super villain ever, all he does is sit silently with a smirk.
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That's a better way of saying it.
We've made it possible for anything to have kids. Therefore, the most irresponsible, weakest, and least educated will have the most kids. And therefore evolution starts to work against us.
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Whatever the reason, safer vehicles do actually save lives and don't lead to drivers being less safe.
How do you know this? Do you have a window into an alternate universe where they have more dangerous vehicles and can see that they drive the same as us? Where's your control group?
What you describe is largely true and so far beyond the other side of evolution that it becomes degeneration.
Ugh. No, it's evolution. Evolution doesn't make things "better". That's a value judgement and beyond the action of a simple cause -> consequence loop. Evolution is not even a force, it's a description of the long term effect of removing genes that don't reproduce.Thinking that evolution is the opposite of degeneration is wrong. When burrowing animals evolve into blind versions it's not because it's beneficial to be blind, but because eyes are complex structures and if they don't serve a purpose, those with bad eye genes aren't culled and the structures start to fail after generations until they no longer serve a function at all. "Use it or lose it".
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You are absolutely right, you won't get an argument from me.
What I was trying to do in my comment was parody Terry Pratchett. Degeneration is an accepted antonym of evolution, and in the context so aptly explained by @xaade, which is the value judgement and understanding of most people i.e. Evolution = Survival of the fittest. I thought that the use of it funny, appropriate and in honour the man himself.
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In our context, evolution means
Survival of the minimally fit necessary to age to mature reproductive ability.Not only have we lowered the bar, we are also lowering the age of maturity somehow.
A lot of people are saying it's because of what we're eating, but I wouldn't be surprised if a species can't lower their reproductive age by simply having sex at a younger age.
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That's not how it works.
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Yes it is.
Survival of the fittest goes out the window, if society builds a safety net that allows weaker people to live and reproduce. Which means that the definition - survival of the fittest - isn't accurate.
It's more like, survival of whatever gets to reproductive age.
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Survival of the fittest goes out the window,
Nah...the evaluation of "fittest" just changed as it always does as other things change.
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I still think it's more like "fit enough".
It's the "most" part of the word that I'm having trouble with.
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Survival of the fittest goes out the window, if society builds a safety net that allows weaker people to live and reproduce.
Again, "fittest" doesn't mean "best", or any value judgement. "Fit" means "adjusted to the environment." If you change the environment, you change what it means to be fit. You're assigning a value to fitness that it doesn't have.
It is almost a tautology. "Those better suited to reproduce in a given environment, reproduce more in that given environment."
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Ok,
So I'm not more "fit" than that guy that's at death's door, but manages to get enough health care to live long enough to have kids and then immediately die.
In fact, I'm simply more fit than necessary.
I can see that.
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I still think it's more like "fit enough".
It's the "most" part of the word that I'm having trouble with.
As @Kian says, you're just using the wrong fitness function. Of course, there are many complicated circumstances that go into the evaluation, and it's not even the same for different members of the same species.
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In fact, I'm simply more fit than necessary.
You may be even less fit if you think you should wait until you have a steady income to have kids.
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That's not really a maybe.
If the educated portion wait 10 more years between generations than the uneducated, then they are less fit because their rate of reproduction is lower.
However, as the population becomes less educated, certain social systems fail and the environment becomes harsher for the less educated.
You'd think it would balance it out, but it really just increases government spending.
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Education level isn't heritable. The child of two PhDs, raised in the jungle by gorillas, does not grow up to have a PhD by magic.
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I'd have to check if the majority of educated parents produce educated offspring.
I know that there is some crossover, but I was assuming the majority sharing that trait, makes the minority of crossovers trivial.
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The child of two PhDs, raised in the jungle by gorillas, does not grow up to have a PhD by magic.
Good chance of becoming a super hero/villain, though.
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Education level isn't heritable.
What about culture? Isn't that the big difference here? Eh...it's just another factor in the fitness evaluation.
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I'd have to check if the majority of educated parents produce educated offspring.
Sure, but it's not, strictly speaking, heritable. If people became aware of a major disadvantage to being educated, they could easily forgo education and become uneducated. If people became aware of a major disadvantage to being short, they can't grow taller. Social traits don't fit neatly into survival of the fittest.
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If people became aware of a major disadvantage to being educated
There is, at least a disadvantage for being educated by a university. Cost.
But even still, the social trait changes slowly, because of intense pressure from parents and other parental figures. And given you get educated in college once (most people), the trait changes mostly from generation to generation.
Which means it's sticky. Not as sticky as genetics, but sticky enough to watch it move.
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YMBNH
Not new, but doesn't look to be a regular.
WTF is Linux hardware?
It's a joke, people have run it into the ground and then started digging so feel free to ignore all references to it.EDIT: and @twelvebaud brings in some from CS, so I shoulda pointed out that it is relatively recent one.
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I agree with whatever @locallunatic posted above.
Filed under: [FUCKING HELL WHY DOES IT DELETE TWO CHARACTERS WHEN I PRESS BACKSPACE ONCE?][0]
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YMBNH
Nope, about 8 years now. But I don't use the forums that much, and before the big forum change, I only read sidebar, so if it's some in-joke that explains it.
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@Zadkiel said:
WTF is Linux hardware?
It's a joke, people have run it into the ground and then started digging so feel free to ignore all references to it.Thank you for the non-snarky, actually helpful, response.
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If that's true, then a few drivers are really, really shitty. You know what, I could buy that.
I think they all live here.
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We've made it possible for anything to have kids. Therefore, the most irresponsible, weakest, and least educated will have the most kids. And therefore evolution starts to work against us.
Ah, <a href=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/">Idiocracy is really a documentary.
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I'm hoping we learn to modify our genes before we grow too dumb to do it.
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[spoiler]Or we modify our genes so that we are too dumb to do it again.
Watching an anime about that.
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Most people have always been stupid. I don't see that changing ever.
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stupid
Depends on how that is measured.
Number of ideas
Quality of ideasWhich disability do you want?
Not being able to come up with good ideas. (you have many marginally great ideas, nothing impressive)
Or not being able to challenge ideas you came up with. (you got stuck on one set of ideas and can't think outside the box to see why they could be bad).
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Half the population are of below average intelligence.
Scary thought, eh?
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They'll get along just fine without us.
I mean, it might turn into "The Walking Dead" in living standards, but they'll get along just fine.
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Half the population are of below average intelligence.
Scary thought, eh?
@George Carlin said:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Filed Under:Poet Cannot Be Empty
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All the world is stupid save thee and me, and even thou art a little stupid.
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There is, at least a disadvantage for being educated by a university. Cost.
That's very true, and it's not just a resource cost but also a time/opportunity cost. It's possible that it might be compensated for by allowing better quality of upbringing of the descendants, but those costs are real and quite measurable.
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The dumbest person you know is smarter than the smartest person in 1200 AD.
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Half the population are of below average intelligence.
Actually, that's not necessarily true. Usually, "average" is used in place of "arithmetic mean", which is adding up the numbers and dividing by the number of samples.
This means that extreme values can shift the mean so that more or less people are on either side. For example, and incredibly dumb person could shift the average down, meaning that more than half of the population would be of "above average" intelligence, while an incredibly smart person could shift the average up. Rather than single extreme values, of course, what you are more likely to have is simply an uneven distribution, which has the same effect.
"Average" is not a strict mathematical term, of course, and you may claim that you meant the mode or the median. If you do, however, you are still wrong (for slightly different reasons).
What you really meant to say is that half the people are under the 50th percentile in intelligence, which is not, in my experience, called "an average".
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What you really meant to say is that half the people are under the 50th percentile in intelligence, which is not, in my experience, called "an average".
It's usually referred to as the median. It's very common, especially WRT to things like income.
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Since the IQ is ordinally scaled, it's actually forbidden to simply do an arithmetic mean.
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Ah, foiled by language. Misinterpreted what median meant in my quick search (took it to mean middle value in the range).
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That is the median, yes. You sort all values in ascending or descending order and the middle value (or the arithmetic mean of the two values in the middle) is the median.
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You might have values repeat, though. In which case, the middle value in the range of possible values, and the middle value when all values are ranked, is different.
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Doesn't matter if they repeat. You still take the ranked middle value.
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I highly doubt that.
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If you have the list 1,1,1,1,2,3, the median is 1, and what I thought (mistakenly) the median was is 2 (because the possible values are 1,2,3).