I think Kaku's and others' claimed ought to be modified a bit by admitting actual genetic evolution is still taking place; however, focusing then on the point that human intelligence and it's offspring technologies have rendered it practically irrelevant.

Did you guys just read the title of Kaku's video because 2 minutes 30 seconds was too long to watch?

He very clearly says human evolution still exists.

I never comment on something without seeing it first of course. All of it! But clearly he is not in a position to make any claims without having the proper data. Evolution is not something you observe in a day a year or a century for most species that are as large as humans and have generation of about 20 years at best meaning past 10k years only 500 generations have existed or so and that is close to the mutation rate for humans ie 3*10^-5 per base per generation.

From wikipedia as an example; "Another research from Denmark concludes that blue-eyes are the mutated character of human eyes which were originally brown from around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. The benign mutation actually effected the OAC2 gene which colorizes our hair and has other functions related to liver e.t.c. So all blue-eyed people share a common ancestor[67]"


My point is a typical period to see something interesting is thousands of years. Kaku claimed no gross evolution but he fails clearly to convince because it is not just our eyes or hair or teeth or whatever visible that matters only, there are a ton of other details in our DNA playing role in key biological functions that modern life may be producing enormous stresses on and we have yet to realize making it entirely possible that it is in fact today that the evolution rate is locally higher more than ever as a result of our technology and overall civilization. You cannot know any of this without proper study.

In any case we do live in a world where probably there seems to not exist coordinated stress from the environment towards a unique direction because our environment changes dramatically fast (there may be still though some inevitable common direction not originally evident moreover the seemingly chaotic changes in our environment) . Also its possible that features of our civilization that remained constant for the past 2-3-5 k years are already pushing us in some interesting direction. Bottom line nobody can offer opinion without real data and proper methodology to collect them. And Kaku provided no real data for his claim. Thats all.

Although we like to think of evolution in terms of macro changes, ie getting taller or blue eyes or whatever, probably the biggest driving force for "selection" is our immune system evolving against pathogens, and pathogens in turn evolving to overcome our defense mechanisms.

With the rate that pathogens are becoming drug resistant, it will be interesting to see moving forward whether pathogens can become a dominant selective force on human evolution they historically have been prior to the 20th century.

Isn't it currently true that the best and brightest humans are currently reluctant to breed while breeeding is rampant among the least naturally gifted class? If this is true and continues, is it more liklely humans will "de-evolve"? Maybe humankind as a whole will become less intelligent and more beligerent over the next 10,000 years.

There is no such thing as de-evolving. Under selective pressure, organisms will evolve to adapt to their current environment or they will go extinct, period. If "less intelligent" is +EV than so be it, that is how we will evolve.

Also, best and brightest itself is a very subjective term. If such people are not reproducing than they clearly aren't the best at passing on their genes, which is what really matters in the game of life.

True. You are probably a non-breeder. The odd idea is that humanity could evolve into a primitive state similar to where we were 10,000 years ago. Maybe "de-civilize" is a better term.

I think it's sort of interesting the possible correlation between bad eyesight and increased intelligence. I don't know if it's actually true, but the stereotype of the nerdy kid with bottlecap glasses must have come from somewhere. Has there ever been research done on this topic, e.g. does the population with bad eyes have a higher average IQ than those with perfect vision?

If it is true, I wonder why. And could our technology (eyeglasses, contacts, lasik, etc.) be somehow indirectly aiding the evolution of our intellect?

I always thought that was because nerds tend to read more. And that that makes them more likely to get short sighted.

Is intelligence hereditary?

Until some mad scientist among the non breeders (lol) or light breeders develops a virus or systems of them that targets only "idiots" and of course it makes it properly so as to appear as something else basically that will not attract attention ie, it doesnt kill them, only makes them substantially less able to be fertile anymore introducing exponential decay in their group.

Seriously we are probably 20-30 years before this is all very possible. So either mankind stabilizes the populations or we the smart ones will do it for them!

How about that for evolution and survival of the fittest. The fittest are always the ones with science and intellect. Game over.

Ps: Significant components of intelligence are hereditary and most importantly the quality of intellect of the parents will be the determining reason and influence behind the childhood development of the offspring no doubt. If intelligence is partially result of environment or luck a great deal has to do with how you treat the kid at super young age and the education you provide so yes it is hereditary one way or another!

Re eyesight. My eyes are excellent other than huge myopia which when corrected with contacts everything is great. So myopia is the issue here not a serious condition at all. That can even be corrected biologically in the future anyway. I am interested in finding out what factor in all this book reading has had or what influence was created living indoors to do all this reading and playing that develops intellect which makes focusing very far less material. My vision became worse without glasses as i aged from 10 to 20 and then stabilized. So during all my intense reading period it kept increasing and of course internet and modern day reading/learning outside of books is still on screens lol.

I would like some doctors/ophthalmologists or optometrists from their statistics to comment on this if there is any truth to a correlation between reading or indoors lifestyle at youth vs playing most of the time outdoors involved in sports and distant vision "exercises".

How about a reverse effect where it is the myopia that takes the young child towards indoor activities and reading and therefore develops their intellect instead of the other way around? Obviously a lot of natural intellect exist in people that are less educated or involved in sports very actively so any effect will be a light one anyway but i am convinced there has got to be some correlation one way or another. Certainly its kind of ridiculous to play sports that you risk head injury all the time and certainly a very smart person that their happiness depends on their intellect would never do things to compromise their head including drinking and drugs with possible exception smoking due to its nicotine concentration effects which however is still overall detrimental to brain quality in other ways!

Our eyes are adapted to scan the horizon on the plains of East Africa looking for predators/prey. They are not adapted to spend hours a day reading. "Smart" people generally have bad eyesight because they read more, wearing the muscles in their eyes out.

Happend before. Multi-story stone houses, paved streets, plumbing and all that **** in rome and then 1000 years of dark ages.

10,000 years is an awfully long time but a blink as far as evolution goes. I think humans will make greater strides in artificially evolving in that time frame.

You're already seeing bionic implants like the cochlear, and the start of artificial joints, limbs, and organs. See the trends in first world countries with people's attachment to technology and generally more sedentary lifestyles. Biotechnology, genetic engineering, computer science are all growing by leaps and bounds.

As they work the kinks out I think you'll start seeing more and more in the way of artificial enhancements. Small at first, like implants and things we're doing for a few disabled people now. Over thousands of years, people will slowly become receptive to increasingly aggressive alterations. At some point they might even be necessary to survive in whatever environment exists then, for example if the atmosphere is heavily polluted.

As sci-fi as it probably sounds, it's not that hard for me to imagine completely replacing limbs and organs as a matter of course. And if you're swapping out arms then it's not a given that the new ones have to mimic the biological versions. There could be more digits or whatever suits people's needs. We may not walk the same way or even breathe the same way as we do now.

No guess as to how far that goes in 500 generations. You figure there will be some dark ages and setbacks to slow things down. They're making a lot of advances in the relevant sciences though and at this pace these things might not be that far off.

Guys. Really. "technology" and "evolution" are not the same thing. No matter WHAT technology might be developed, it means nothing if it doesn't affect fitness.

Develop through technology some virus that attacks everyone except those with a particularly well defined rare combination of genes and see how rapidly human race develops into an animal that has only that combination!!! Possibly even within 1 generation or 2. But of course if you keep embryos and basically the DNA of many humans in a cryonic bank and regenerate it indefinitely eventually you will preserve the species but really you could have wiped out 99.9% of mankind in the meantime. You do not even need to do it in a spectacular way like AIDS. Instead silently without any symptoms attack all the population because its very easy to transmit (design to be ultra easy) and then when everyone is infected more or less release the final attack.

Yeah we are going there and we better prepare for it by creating a unified caring society where such individuals cannot rise to a position of massive capability like that because we have seen nothing yet in terms of a real stress test. Sooner or later individual nations that are pressed to intolerable positions either by others or their own wrong choices will rise to such capability. I wonder what kind of counter research is taking place to prevent such possibilities.

The only way that humans in 10,000 yrs will be like anything we can imagine, is if there is a global catastrophe that 'resets' us to where we are struggling for survival.

Otherwise, technology will put our species beyond our current imaginations in a few hundred years at most.

Does anyone think it would be possible some time in the future to bring back the dead? I dunno what technology this would take but could it be possible some time in the future to bring back the dead even those cremated?

Cremated like hell no. Its too unreal without some totally out of the blue kind of physics. Unless we could replicate brain before death at some prior situation in life where the state of the brain in whatever macroscopic valid sense can be replicated and then you regenerate the person in terms of DNA and modify the brain of the "clone" to match the original person or rebuild brain from the ground up starting with cells put together or an alternative seemingly more chemically possible implied next. For example feeding a brain with an intense series of stimulation that replicates prior life compacted in a very brief fraction of the time taken to actually live it, in effect forging neuron relationships taken decades to establish in real time for a real person, now reconstructed chemically with proper stimulation of the clone brain within minutes or days whatever to end up nearly identical to the old one, the original person in the near identical macroscopic sense.

Then once you "reboot" that person they will basically feel like they were that old one that died and they would have absolutely no ability to tell otherwise. But clearly it would not be that other person in the third observer and certainly not physical sense. Basically all this goes down to whether its possible to talk about such a thing as macroscopic state of a human brain that can be well described and reproduced or it is extremely complex and futile because of the necessity to perform something dramatically more elaborate than "simply" an already gigantic task ie the recreation of >trillions of connections without any significant error.

From wikipedia;


"The human brain has a huge number of synapses. Each of the 10^11 (one hundred billion) neurons has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons. It has been estimated that the brain of a three-year-old child has about 10^15 synapses (1 quadrillion). This number declines with age, stabilizing by adulthood. Estimates vary for an adult, ranging from 10^14 to 5 x 10^14 synapses (100 to 500 trillion).[11]"

You probably would have to replicate all this system like a harddrive copy only in this case its a lot more complicated and sensitive and yet moreover the sensitivity still able to correct itself and recover and adapt well, often within sensible range of changes resulting from disease or whatever conditions. We need to be able to understand all this better, how human intellect/consciousness emerges and functions and evolves in time and how all this "state" is preserved in time and rebuilt partially to move from one point in time to another and more or less be the same person gradually transitioning between these states without losing key properties unique to that person and also some common to all humans (so what defines the chemical difference between 2 brains), in any hope to be able to recreate it and it will be an immense effort even if technologically possible.


On the practical side i am very confident that the definition of death is already expanding in seconds per year this decade. I mean 100 years ago death was within a couple minutes or so declared but these days you have 5-10 min and even 30 min with proper temperature control in some documented recent cases that will shock everyone.The fact is its possible that if certain conditions can be met near death the biological death can be seemingly literally postponed many minutes well over 10 with proper treatment. You really have to look into what happens to cells/organs once a person dies in the traditional sense (heart stops definition?) and try to slow down the processes that lead to an irreversible macroscopic barrier - a point of no return - where you cannot go back anymore without super dramatic technological assistance that tests the extremes defined by the very laws of nature. I think recent results with low temperature treatment of bodies are very encouraging that indeed what we define as death is even primitive and most people of reasonable overall health that die from heart issues probably are if under the right technology treated within minutes can be recovered eventually with minor or severe or even no problems at all. All you have to do possibly in the future is provide any person near you that appears to die in a non violent body destroying death, some proper injections and then the right equipment available to all homes of the future that is instantly connected to the right medical personnel remotely and then buy yourself time practically until the real assistance arrives with the right equipment to reduce temperature and revive the person gradually etc.

However if the brain really passes certain cellular chemical reactions point that is physically irreversible or ultra massively complex task to perform then probably nothing short of the program i described above with brain replication can reverse the death because it becomes an arrow of time problem requiring time reversal of the evolution of a huge number of systems that would be technologically and even physically unreasonable to expect to occur simultaneously.

I try in what i said above to be rationality optimistic and i do not think i am exaggerating or underestimating the situation. I think we will come very close to eliminating 70% of deaths or more in the future by simply having proper equipment and different methodology applied to each person that "dies" as defined today without a violent massive failure situation (such as an explosion or shot in various critical places that affect brain etc.). As for the speculative deeper understanding of human brain and the potential reconstruction to an arbitrarily close macroscopically for all practical purposes prior state i want to remain optimistic but i and also science in general need to learn more about how the brain works and exactly what is it that needs to be done to recover the way neurons connect to each other, basically understand the chemical basis of what is human intellect and of course all other functions of the brain responsible for life. It may turn out possible with substantial effort and technology or it may be extremely complex to impractical even if one had any technological means short of a fundamental breakthrough in physics that intervenes against the second law in a seemingly present day ridiculous macroscopic level.

some reference;

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2741140/

http://www.anesthesia-analgesia.org/.../38/6/423.long

http://www.12newsnow.com/story/16200...tes-underwater

What about people frozen like ted williams? Are you saying they could be revived eventually?

I dont think so because current process of freezing is destroying some cells irreversibly i think unless its done very carefully. Biologists here can tell us more about how they properly freeze cells for example and some tissue and what the difference between these procedures and human body cryonics are. My argument is that i trust the scientists using cells to do these things in their research labs daily and not so much the "labs" devoted to full bodies. Maybe i am wrong and they apply same methods but i find very hard to believe you can control entire body as easily as cells (hard plus costly) and it may be a toxic procedure when applied to entire body ie the one they use for cells today. Keep in mind even sperm or embryos do not last forever and they take very careful methodologies to freeze those that i think have far less issues than with actual full body cases because of the complexity of the procedure and the substances they use. Even entire organs like the brain may be problematic but there are results for small organs that do not look terrible.

You cannot just freeze a cell. It takes several steps that are important to do it right to avoid ice damage so they use special chemicals. If they could (in the future) read the brain of that person somehow they could try to do the reconstruction i proposed but i doubt that present day freezing is preserving faithfully the brain state if it damages certain parts of the brain cells. Plus of course the reconstruction i proposed may also be impossible eventually as too tough to do to large scale without somehow destroying what you are trying to "copy".

Read more here for the problems currently;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics

And lets hope some doctors (eg fertility experts or organ transplantation specialists) and biologists doing lab experiments comment better for example by describing us exactly the process. Otherwise just go to usenet or a library and get any books you can find on cryonics if very curious read them and then erase them or buy the ones that helped you learn.

I haven't looked into causes outside genetics for myopia, but this is obviously wrong as it is the format of the eye and not the wear on the muscles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia

"Education and IQ

A number of studies have shown the incidence of myopia increases with level of education,[60][54] and many studies[70] have shown a correlation between myopia and a higher intelligence quotient (IQ).

A 2008 literature review writes that studies in several nations have found a relationship between myopia and higher IQ and between myopia and school achievement. A common explanation for myopia is near-work. Regarding the relationship to IQ, several explanations have been proposed. One is that the myopic child is better adapted at reading, and reads and studies more, which increases intelligence. The reverse explanation is that the intelligent and studious child reads more, which causes myopia. Another is that myopic children have an advantage at IQ testing which is near-work because of less eye strain. Still another explanation is that pleiotropic gene(s) affect the size of both brain and eyes simultaneously. According to the two most recent studies, higher IQ may be associated with myopia in schoolchildren, independent of books read per week.[71]

Other personal characteristics, such as value systems, school achievements, time spent in reading for pleasure, language abilities and time spent in sport activities correlated to the occurrence of myopia in studies."

The movie is called 'Idiocracy'. And its already happened for real in Detroit.