CALDONIA

Maybe we should allow Evolution to continue and hope that the human species is "improved." Our attempts to supervene in a natural and very long-term process might have disastrous consequences.

Doubting Didymus

That won't work. It may make us better able to survive in our environment, but for all we know it might be 'better' for us in the eyes of natural selection to return to a less intelligent apelike existence. There is no guarantee that we would like to be what natural selection would have us be. Also keep in mind that the means by which evolution progresses toward increased fitness is by the weak going to the wall. Not to mention that it would take ten times longer to get anywhere than selected breeding. Are you willing to wait for ten million years for the human condition to improve? I'm not.

If anything will improve the human condition, it isn't going to be a natural law. It will be ourselves. And we don't need enhanced intelligence to do it. If only we could drag our heads out of the daily concerns of nation-states and look to the future, we could have everything the species needs without needing to alter ourselves to get there. Humans are incredible. We have conquered gravity for crying out loud. We walk on the moon. We transcend each and every physical barrier our anatomy has placed on us. We can move faster than sound, we can live for a century, we can descend into the deep ocean. We will improve our condition, and we will not need magic brain pills to do it.

CALDONIA

But evolution has no goal and no plan; it is more about survival and adaptation. "Fitness" is a word mistakenly given a moral sense when evolution is being examined. I have read that Neanderthals had in some cases brains larger than modern humans. Were they more intelligent than other huminoids that existed in their time? Maybe. But they became extinct, nevertheless.

Selective breeding cannot in any way account for changing environment which we in our arrogance ignore. It is subjective, not reactive. Evolution does not seek to make us the "best that we can be," it makes us the most able to survive and reproduce in our environment. If we were to today begin a program of selective breeding, would we start to examine how to produce humans that might survive a world decimated by the Greenhouse Effect? Or should we look to create humans who can withstand the effects of radiation from a nuclear World War? In my mind, eugenics takes hindsight and projects it into the future.

Doubting Didymus

I agree.

Neanderthals did not have bigger brains than us, though. Their tools were inferior also.

Shadownought

Actually, they did. The average Neandertal brain was a fair bit larger than the average Homo sapiens sapiens brain; however, they were a bit stockier and more heavily built than we are, and it is the ratio of brain size to body weight that is usually used in estimating intelligence.

As for tool-using, Neandertals were actually quite sophisticated for their time and perfected the techniques of stone tool usage that had been evolving over time. They are also the first humans that are known to have been able to CREATE fire. Their technology may be primitive compared to ours, but they lived thousands and thousands of years ago.

The reason they died out is because Homo sapiens sapiens emerged a little after they did, and began to migrate into Europe, where the Neandertals had lived for some time. It's not known whether the Neandertals just couldn't compete with them, or whether they just gradually integrated with the increasing sapiens sapiens population in Europe. However, they survived for two hundred THOUSAND years in a very cold climate, and that's an accomplishment when the rest of humanity was still largely in Africa.

[ December 03, 2002: Message edited by: Shadownought ]</p>

fando

Well, I was just pointing out that genetic engineering can be substituted for eugenics. I imagine the ethical issues are the same.

Doubting Didymus

So they did. 100cc on average. Thank you for correcting me.

Gar

That's interesting. I had heard the term Eugenics before but i never knew what it meant.
The Spartans did that sort of thing. Their goal, when it came to pairing off spouses, was to create the best human being possible (to them, the best warrior possible).

Demosthenes

well, genetic engineering to enhance desireable traits in people is eugenics.

ageofreason2000

And after a few hundred years of this they found themselves incapable of fielding an army.
Perhaps a good warning not to meddle.

I'm highly dubious of fiddling with intelligence, more so when its based on an arbitary IQ test, what about common sense, drive ambition. With this tampering how do you know you are not removing that "certain something" that makes an Einstein?

Seems to me the mind is largely an unknown as far has hard scientific facts are concerned, a mish mash of theories and philosophies.
We should wait until all its mysteries have been unravelled and we fully understand the interplay of the higher functions.

Genetics seems a good way of reducing physical defects and diseases, but the mind is a whole new ball park.

Age