Survival Of Whoever

Evolution and Capitalism have a lot in common. They can produce highly efficient solutions to problems, they're ruthless, and they act slowly. It's also weird what they each choose to hone to ultimate efficiency. Did you know that an eagle's eyeball is warped slightly so that whatever is at the centre of its field of vision appears magnifed? But on the other hand, manatees.

And what about peacocks? Five million years ago, one female had a tail-feather fetish; now look at them. Meanwhile, they're are so many living things that obviously need fixing. You just have to look at your own body for examples (asuming my blog is only read by humans.) As any sports fan can tell you, the human knee could use a good redesign.

But it's the same with capitalism. It can produce efficient solutions to problems. There are companies like Amazon and Walmart that have developed highly efficient systems to move items around the world. But then there's that phone cases and printer cartriges kiosk at the mall that no one ever seems to buy anything from. It's capitalism's panda, eating one plant, not really interested in breeding, yet somehow hanging on and surviving.

And both capitalism and evolution can be agonizingly slow. A lot of human health problems, from knee injuries to sinus infections, are a result of our bodies not being adapted to walking upright, even though we started doing that five million years ago. And there are so many products that need work. Like, when you buy a package of six muffins at the local grocery store, they come in a plastic tray. The label has a sticker wrapped around it. But because the plastic case doesn't have flat sides, the sticky side of the label is exposed in several places. That means it ends up sticking to any bread or produce bags that come near it.

Eventually, the design will be fixed. But that's only motivated by the supermarket losing enough business, just like evolution is only motivated by creatures' survival rates. So our sinuses might cause us pain, but it won't change unless it causes people to die. Say, they get eaten by a lion because they were distracted by pain. But even that might be faster than lost sales causing a change in the muffin tray design. So put some thought into the products you choose; you're helping businesses evolve.

I Am A Dropout, Like My Father Before Me

There's an interesting new study that suggests people are getting - very slowly - less apt for education. It's based on research in Iceland; its small, long-isolated population makes it a goldmine of genetic research. It probably applies to other populations too, but for now we can only be sure of Iceland's slow decline. Now, if you agree that Björk was better than Of Monsters and Men, you have some scientific backing.

This is the sort of study that is destined to be misinterpreted and exaggerated for years to come. No doubt there are dozens of anti-Millennial essays being pounded out right now on hundreds of Baby Boomers' manual typewriters. But the truth is that the effect is tiny - less than an IQ point a decade.

But still, it's an interesting idea. It's easy to imagine how this could happen. Natural Selection works when factors affect a creature's likelihood to reproduce, and there are still plenty of factors that affect human reproduction rates, even if they're no longer sabre-toothed factors. And unlike past natural selection, this may not reward good qualities. In the education example, the thinking is that people who dedicate a lot of their life to their education will probably have less time to have kids. Say you take a masters, you won't graduate until well into your twenties. Your counterparts who got real jobs after their bachelors have a few years headstart on starting a family. And folks who just did high school have already been going forth and multiplying for the better part of a decade. Any genes that encourage education get passed to fewer members of the next generation.

Who knows how many other things could affect your reproduction? The type of job you have, the food you buy, the place you live. It's important to realize that these effects are not just small and slow, they're also dwarfed by individual differences. So you'll find plenty of prolific parents doing post-docs, and childless high school dropouts. Thus, these findings don't have much short-term practical use. And talk of overall strength of genetics will remind people of eugenics. But I like my science dangerous, useless and misleading. It's enlightening to demonstrate how natural selection works using relatively tangible things.

Great Interest In All The Motorcrashes

Recently, there were some stories online about an Australian publicity stunt to promote car safety: they created a modified human body to survive car crashes. And they named him Graham. They described the project as the human body catching up to automobiles, since we really haven't had time to adapt to them. So in some hypothetical world where cars have been around for millions of years, we'd end up looking like Graham.

That's interesting, because I've always wondered how evolution would change modern humans. See, contrary to what you may have heard from your biology teacher or Marvel Comics, evolution doesn't make living things "better." It responds to their environment to make changes to make them more likely to survive. Or at least, to reproduce. For instance, a creature won't just suddenly become a faster runner unless there's some reason why running faster will make them more likely to live (say, by outrunning predators.)

So, for modern humans, it's hard to say which way evolution will take us. To use that running example, it's unlikely we'd evolve to be better runners, since we rarely have to outrun predators anymore. However, if you can run fast, you'll be successful at athletics, which will increase your likelihood to reproduce.

To be clear, I realize that this discussion is moot. It would take tens of thousands of years for any evolution to be noticeable, and it's increasingly clear that long before that we'll have either destroyed ourselves or transcended biology.

But it's interesting to contemplate, because there's all kinds of ways modern life might change us, and not necessarily in positive ways. For instance, it takes a certain maturity and forethought to make the decision to use birth-control. And people who have that maturity and forethought will be less likely to reproduce, thus breeding it out of the human race.

And Graham's creators have a point: since car crashes are one of the things most likely to kill a person before they can reproduce, surviving them would probably be a big influence on our evolutionary path. The only other factor that would have such an impact on our chances of reproducing would be impressing the opposite sex in high school. And I think the idea the idea that we would evolve to become a fifteen-year-old's ideal is even more horrifying than Graham. Suddenly the choice between apocalypse and uploading our consciousness to computers doesn't seem so bad.

Apology for Non-Symmetry

I'm going to have to admit it: my face isn't quite symmetrical.  Yes, the bridge of my nose is a little off-centre.  It's not something that bothers me too much: look closely and you'll see that lots of people have face bits that don't line up.

What does bother me is the question of how this happened.  If you find that, say, a carrot has a bend in it, you assume that it was growing straight, but something intervened.  It hit a rock, or some bug took a bite out of it and that curved it's growth in that direction.  So how do you explain my nose? 

It hasn't been broken or anything; have I just slept on one side more often than the other and gravity has done this?  Then how come my whole body isn't slanted?  Maybe it started much earlier:  as an embryo, one stem cell blew out at the wrong time, and I've been growing off-centre ever since.