What is evolution, what drives it? and do humans in anyway effect their own evolution, does nature control....

Question

itself? we are all interconnected with with everything else we are a part of nature, right? so how can we have any freedom in what we do?

Human nature is nature expressed as a human. - unknown

Answer 1

evolution and predestination are so vastly different that even attempting to make the comparison is foolhardy. Evolution is perpetuated through natural selection of favorable genetic traits. An example of this can be seen in a hugely simplified situation concerning the evolution of turtle shells.

Lets say that the most common ancestor between turtles is some given shell-less lizard. One day one of these lizards was born with ever so slightly harder scales on its back. it is important to note that this is completely a random incident and all variations are mutations, favorable mutations are often called adaptations. Now, the lizard with the harder scales does not know that it is in an advantageous position and yet it is able to survive attacks from predators more often than others of his species. Because of this slight advantage, the lizard is now more likely to reproduce thus spreading the genes for harder back scales. As this continues the scales may mutate to eventually become harder until the modern turtle shell was created.

It is also important to remember that environment plays an enormous role in evolution. For example it may be favorable for a polar bear to be white in its arctic habitat, but imagine that bear in a dark jungle. It would stick out like a sore thumb.

To bring the focus back to the specifics of the question, evolution has no effect on our freedom. We are in control of how we act evolutions only role is to provide us with a genetic code which has been lucky or skillful enough to survive and breed.

Answer 2

That is why human evolution is a spiritual issue. We (meaning humans) are the biggest influence on our own evolution. So if we created a world that was favorable toward people who acted fairly then these people would prosper. Our own hand is shaping us to some extent. It is just like being judged by testing us. What are we? What will we turn out to be?

Going are the days when we would be shaped by hunger and homicide. Brains are not even playing too large a role either. Simple evolution plays a small role now. For example, since who ever figures out how to control their birth rate last will inherit the world, we begin to see that simple evolution has reached its wits end and progress must come from ethical disinterested behavior.

Answer 3

that's what it is - if human beings have progressed to the factor that we can improve our lives extra and administration affliction, then it is all area of evolution. besides the shown fact that, i do no longer see how we can incredibly evolve as a species any extra beneficial pondering how super the gene pool is. Evolution occurs over long sessions the place mutations have a raffle to propagate, and with various of genes in the pool, any mutations that are valuable won't have an significant result on the inhabitants as an entire.

Answer 4

Simply put, evolution means change over time. It has been said that change is the only constant. You can certainly make connections between biological evolution and personal evolution, but for practical purposes they are very different things. Humans can affect biological evolution simply by breeding, but really have little intellectual control over the evolution of the whole species. You can have a great deal of control over the evolution of your personal life, granted this control is confined by your natural existence.

Answer 5

First, as to the question of freedom, I don't agree with the notion that nature is entirely deterministic. This especially goes for humans, because we actually choose what we do a lot of the time.

It's true (as one of the New Atheists argues) that thoughts seem to arise spontaneously, but it's also true that we choose which of them we want to focus on, and that influences the direction of further thoughts--and if you try to claim that choice is itself a spontaneous thought, you will quickly find yourself pursuing infinity and not catching up.

So you see, I believe in free will, and therefore I believe humans are capable of influencing their own evolution. Not necessarily in a direction they would consciously desire, however.

The essential point of evolution is that a great deal of life on earth is descended from common ancestry. Those who start off on tangents, like asserting that it demonstrates the godlessness of the creation of the universe, are departing from science into philosophy, and badly founded philosophy at that.

While natural selection is a factor in some cases (for example, when an uncontrolled competitor gets introduced into an ecological system), a great deal of evolution appears to be driven by genetic drift, a factor Darwin did not really address. For example, if Democrats and Republicans stopped interbreeding (and my mother-in-law sometimes makes me consider that a possible scenario!) over many generations differences in the populations would become apparent. The proportion of blue eyes in one group might be affected by the distribution of chance deaths in hurricanes, and so forth. Eventually, the populations would converge toward different averages in skin, eye and hair color; in skeletal proportions (cranial shape, height, weight); maybe even in oddities like the proportion of webbed feet, hairiness or baldness, average nose sizes.

I threw in the webbed feet because I didn't want to make the whole list about things we normally see as racial distinctions, but differences we class as racial are merely convergences toward different averages in separate populations. It would obviously take quite a while for two human populations to become distinct species. A human generation is a very long time compared to, say, that of fruit flies.

Answer 6

If you get born with three legs, you won't make it. If you don't speak, you used to not reproduce. So selection is being cancelled in the West by concepts of social fairness. That is devolution.

Answer 7

Evolution is only a theory (not fact). It is based on another theory called "gradualism" which is disproved by sharp edges on mountains and cliffs. Also, Darwin, the postulator of Evolution, retracted it. It is driven by people who cannot beleive in anything else.

Answer 8

Evolution is the dogmatic metaphysic of ideological modernity.