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I would get some pretty bitchin' Minecraft builds going. That's for drat sure.
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Feb 6, 2015 17:56
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Splizwarf posted:That is stupid, if we're going to look at it this way then the selection should ideally be for continued reproduction throughout the lifespan and a strong drive to deny non-progeny/mates access to resources, with a lifespan as long as the median sanity can handle. It isn't stupid actually, and the reason is that humans evolved and adapted as primates living in extended-family groups in a savannah in East Africa. Each extended family group consisted of probably 10 to a maximum of around 60 individuals (exact numbers vary depending on who you ask). Each group would have been exhausting its local resources. The survival strategy is group-based; by belonging to such a group, your offspring are more likely to survive than if you went off on your own. As a result, the sustainable longevity of the group as a whole is the best strategy for your genes to survive indefinitely. Many of the members of your group share your genes (not the exact combination that uniquely make you, but your close relatives are collectively carrying many copies of all of your genes). Any competitive strategy that reduces survivability of the whole group, then, effectively selects against your genes (compared to some other nearby group that is doing better at group survival). A group that had a mutation where adults breed longer overproduces babies that it cannot keep alive. Instead of having 5 babies a year and enough food and resources to successfully rear them, it has (say) 10 babies a year (due to more reproducing adults in the same-sized group) and all of them die of starvation when the group's available resources prove inadequate. Humans have a lot of physical adaptations that support and reinforce this lifestyle, from hidden estrus to menopause. Adults past breeding age assist the group because, with no immediate children of their own, they still contribute to the survival of the other babies in the group (who likely share their genes). However, if those same adults live for too long, the group's attrition rate is too low; birth rates must be much lower, and there is no adaptation of existing genes available to reduce natural birth rates to some silly number like 1 baby every 10 years for young healthy reproductively capable adults. (Genetic adaptation is almost entirely based on modification of existing structures and processes; wholly new genes do not spring forth from nothingness.) In this context, then, you can see how immortality - or even just hereditary supreme longevity - could be an adaptation that would be negatively reinforced. It would have to happen simultaneously with adaptations that reduce the birth rate, while still preserving the ability to increase the birth rate after periods of starvation or attrition from other factors (drought, flood, disease, etc.).
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Feb 6, 2015 19:56
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(point even holds for sperglords and ur-goons as endless failure still has educational potential).
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Leperflesh posted:It isn't stupid actually, and the reason is that humans evolved and adapted as primates living in extended-family groups in a savannah in East Africa. Each extended family group consisted of probably 10 to a maximum of around 60 individuals (exact numbers vary depending on who you ask). Each group would have been exhausting its local resources. The survival strategy is group-based; by belonging to such a group, your offspring are more likely to survive than if you went off on your own. drat bro. you really thought this through.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:04
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Carol Pizzamom posted:drat bro. you really thought this through. i read it in a book
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Feb 6, 2015 20:08
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Leperflesh posted:The idea that evolution is "progress" or some sort of movement "forward" toward some particular thing, is one of the most pervasive and common misunderstandings about the nature of evolution. Unless interrupted by a horrid die-off, evolution results in improvements as a very general objective statement. Humanity's 'ecological niche' is in having ever improving cerebral capacity, which has permitted us to flourish about everywhere on earth. It is not unreasonable to expect that a human from now locked in phase with a bog standard interpretation of immortality, will experience through generations being mentally superceded. Or be the last smart thing left after a die off which is a twilight zone quality punchline/personal hell.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:26
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5er posted:Unless interrupted by a horrid die-off, evolution results in improvements as a very general objective statement. Humanity's 'ecological niche' is in having ever improving cerebral capacity, which has permitted us to flourish about everywhere on earth. It is not unreasonable to expect that a human from now locked in phase with a bog standard interpretation of immortality, will experience through generations being mentally superceded. Not to be smarmy but, no, this is not correct. -"improvement" is a value statement. Speciation events take place as populations adapt to new or changing conditions, including those created by other species in their habitat. Traits that have a cost but no longer provide a benefit can be lost; for example, blind cave fish. Losing eyesight is not really an "improvement" in the sense of some advancement along a line towards a glorious goal... it's the loss of organs that cost energy to grow and maintain but no longer provided a benefit. More broadly, intelligent life was never "destined" to happen. There is no long evolutionary march up a chain or ladder. Bacteria remain the most successful form of life ever, in any metric you choose to measure, up to and possibly including fitness for space travel. -Humanity does not have an "ecological niche" any more, unless you mean, "all of earth" - but even ignoring the last 10k years, there is plenty of evidence that cerebral capacity is not growing and is also not "ever improving". Neanderthals had larger brains than we do, for example. Fortunately, there is not a direct 1:1 relationship between cerebral capacity and intelligence, either. Neonatality is an adaptation that allowed for larger brains despite the restriction of the female birth canal, which is itself restricted by the requirement for the pelvis to support upright stance, an adaptation that probably took place before, and was a prerequisite to, our big brains. -It is actually unreasonable to think that future generations will have bigger brains. For a variety of reasons: big brains require longer periods of helpless infancy, due to the maximum size of a skull that can fit through the female pelvis. A longer period of infancy is very costly for a variety of obvious reasons. An adaptation to be a child for longer before the cranial bones fuse, in order to allow a larger brain, would have to be so advantageous that it outweighs all the costs. And that advantage has to be one related to reproductive fitness, or it won't be selected-for. In what way are we currently, or likely in the future, to see environmental or even social pressures that give a reproductive advantage to humans who spend more time in infancy growing bigger brains (and, again, that does not necessarily equate directly to more intelligence)? (In fact, currently we see in modern industrialized nations a tendency for puberty to arrive earlier, rather than later.) Birth rates are dropping across the board in all first-world countries, as women gain better control over their reproduction. Reproductive success right now has more to do with economic status, than "intelligence," however you choose to measure that, and it's a negative correlation. I'm sure you can postulate futures in which intelligence takes over as a positively-correlated reproductive strategy, but you'll have to also account for a mechanism for larger brains to become biologically feasible. And you're still left with the big problem of how an immortal fails to be reproductively successful forever, given you've already presumed that this immortal fails to die, forever.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:42
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Otto von Ruthless posted:also i think a big reason behind people saying no to this hypothetical so readily is that we are feed a steady diet of stories where these kind of deals end up going poorly throughout our entire lives.
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Feb 6, 2015 20:43
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Ephemeron posted:If I was immortal, I'd spread a lot of stories throughout all cultures about immortality being a sucker's deal to dissuade possible rivals. Puritanical sacrifice remains one of our pervasive cultural myths. Of course trying to be immortal always backfires, because, like Icarus, trying to be too much like God/The Gods is an unacceptable challenge to the theocracy. 
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Feb 6, 2015 20:46
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Smart people do not have a reproductive advantage over stupid people, because our niche is now the society we have created. Rather, there may be some small advantage: better educational opportunities -> better jobs -> better pay -> better healthcare, but this advantage is small compared to the trend of better educated people to have fewer children. And poor healthcare doesn't do much to reduce reproduction rates.
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Feb 6, 2015 22:38
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What if everybody becomes inmorta?
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Feb 6, 2015 23:13
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I guess it'd better be immortality where you can survive not eating food because we're going to run out
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Feb 6, 2015 23:34
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you could eventually invent a time machine and a forget-everything machine even if you're completely retarded because you have infinite time so it's bound to happen, so you could go back in time to when you were like 5 and make everything own again. You could even give yourself sweet tips or super powers like it's NG+
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Feb 6, 2015 23:40
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i unironically like that immortality is assumed to be forced upon people because dude imagine all the video games who cares if your in this pear
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Feb 6, 2015 23:49
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