CharonY

Yes at the time of reproduction, but if you manage to stay alive at the cost of not reproducing you are not contributing. Conversely, if you reproduce and then die, you still contribute. This is like in the example of salmons. If they don't go through the trouble of migration to their spawn sites, they would live a fair bit longer. But they would not contribute to the gene pool. In other words, if there was a mutation that prevents them from conducting that migration, it would improve their survival, but eliminate them from the gene pool and would therefore vanish as trait (negatively selected). Intelligence has shaped our environment, so the contribution to human evolution is indirect. We change selective pressures and that can affect our gene pool. The one part that could be somewhat considered direct is sexual selection. What is considered to be attractive in a mate can be culturally shaped and this could lead to proliferation of specific traits. Evolution and intelligence is harder to assess as we really do not know how it is inherited and estimates of inheritability have been diverging quite a bit. Mostly because it is seemingly a very malleable on top of the inheritable bits. I don't understand what you mean with your last questions. Evolution is not about the origin of life.

You are mixing different things here. Survival does not equal passing on genes. They can increase chances, but very contextually. Conversely, there are multiple species where reproduction is coupled to death. Secondly, improving chance of survival does not necessarily involve intelligence. Effectively one would need go back to the basic definition of evolution, where we ultimately end up with terms like inheritable traits that are under positive selection, for example.

I would argue that this not the case either. Mechanistically shaping the environment one or another might change selective forces acting on an population. But so does virtually any interaction as selective forces are only static in models. And if we call any action changing the selective landscape guiding, then, as others already pointed out, we would expand the term guidance likely to a non-meaningful way. I would probably rather state that guidance requires a sort of intention and goal, which are absent in this cases. I.e. the intent and goals of these actions are related to proximate survival but not with the intention focused on evolution (the only exception I could come up with would be breeding programs with specific goals).

It is like saying that mitochondria are the power plants of eukaryotic cells. Hence evidence for industrial revolution in cells.

I'll contest that. There have been different approaches to creating knowledge and the issue here is that Western science has trouble recognizing other school of thoughts. In fact, quite a few of the early Western science approaches loaned concepts from elsewhere but only over time did it become so successful. One important bit is that it actually did away with the spiritual aspects and became increasingly materialistic. In addition, there are many non-Western religious systems believing in some form of creator, so it really seems like cherry-picking the arguments a bit.

It is fairly simple actually. Having no evolution means that the gene pool does not change from generation to generation. This is a situation we call the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle In order for that to happen it requires certain conditions to be satisfied, such as infinite population size, entirely random mating, no mutations etc. These are obviously not true for human, or in fact almost all populations. In other words, evolution is the normal situation and having no evolution is in fact an extraordinary claim. How would you, for example ensure that the next generation has the same genetic composition as the previous? Simple answer is, you cannot. What you might be thinking about are likely large-scale changes in visually obvious traits, but that is not what happens in the short time humans have been around. Rather, the level of phenotypic change you should be thinking about are things like, the shift in lactose tolerance, pigmentation. A fun study found that shift in folks growing up in the UK were an allele associated with higher nicotine dependency was weeded out because folks died young (due to high smoking habits). In populations where smoking was rare and also in modern times (again, fewer smokers) these alleles are becoming more frequent again (as selective pressure have lessened). In short both theoretical as well as empirical evidence clearly demonstrate ongoing evolution and one might need to revise ones preconception of what evolution is to fully realize that.

Just very quickly and generally (not really specific to the trait in question). We can start at the locus (site) of the mutation that provides the trait of interest and then look at the surrounding regions, which presumably are not under the same selective pressures. If the mutation arose in different persons independently, we would expect to see some variations in those surrounding areas (think of it as different persons providing different backgrounds for the mutation). Blue eyes arose likely not due to a mutation in a gene associated with eye color (OCA2) but in an upstream regulatory element. The interesting bit is that the surrounding area is also conserved in all (tested) folks with blue eyes suggesting that they all share a common ancestor providing this mutation. However, as this analysis relies on testing of folks who are still alive, it obviously cannot tell us if there had been other mutations with the same phenotype or even independent cases of the same mutations. I.e. we can say all currently living folks with blue eyes (who have been tested) have the same common ancestor, we we cannot say that there were no other cases of blue eyes in the past.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

It does not have to be. It is possible that other variants existed, but they vanished with this specific haplotype being the sole survivor.

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it. Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in. Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population). Generations.

Not really, evolution is the change in the total genetic composition (i.e. gene pool) over time. Even if no traits are changed, the gene pool can. However, selection happens on heritable traits, which is what you are thinking about. But this is only one aspect of evolution and not the only one. And what parents transmit to the next generation are not identical traits, it is the genetic material. This is an important distinction as depending on the mix the next generation(s) receive, the traits might be quite different from those of the parents.

Well, the way it is going, college-aged people will sound like chat GPT, because all the writing comes from there (or will be soon). Probably a bit off-topic, but we will likely see fewer folks writing more complex texts with their own voice. Mostly, because they never learn to do so.

I think a fundamental challenge is building trust between the groups. And from what I see, these happen mostly on the ground with local association and between activists. But Oct. 7 put a heavy strain on these initiatives. And the political entities in this conflict are very apt in leveraging the distrust.

I think the seminal undergrad text book on evolution is still Futuyma. The 1-2% with chimpanzees is a different type of count, and was really base on looking at genes (i.e. excluding large non-coding areas) and even then it was based on a subset of genes. In addition, I believe they were based on substitutions. For example, let's say humans have a stretch of DNA being GCTTA and chimpanzees at the same locus it would be GGTTA then there would be one substitution (C->G). But there are also regions with deletions and insertions. E.g. GCTTA becomes GCAAGCGCTTA, the question is how you quantify the additional AAGCGC (or the missing part, depending on perspective). The original 1-2% differences simply ignored them. I believe lining up the genomes and matching the bases would still yield something like 80% match, but not entirely, memory gets a bit hazy.

Yeah, I used that paper to tell my wife that she is more Neanderthal than me. Did not go over well at all. Typical Neanderthal!

I saw another depressing poll (somewhere) showing that folks believe that Trump would be better to handle the Gaza conflict (well actually handling anything would be stretch). Here is a tracker on the litigations, though most likely it all hinges on SCOTUS. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/current-projects/the-trump-trials/section-3-litigation-tracker

That goes towards the main thrust of my argument. The first point is that using proximate events (i.e. attacks) will result innocent life lost (on either side, and we can ignore the relative scale to avoid complications). The second is that the status quo inevitably will lead to attacks. From this it follows that the current situation is a morally untenable one, as it require the acceptance of regular innocent deaths. The point I was therefore trying to make is that anything other than a large-scale redesign of the relationship is necessary, and so far a two-state solution as the endpoint has been the only theoretically viable option. This also means that groups actively eroding this or other peaceful paths, are culpable in the ensuing death cycle. So yes, Hamas clearly are the proximate perpetrators, but the existing system is the overarching framework resulting in them (or eventually other groups) to attack Israeli civilians. And as it stands, actors on both sides have been torpedoing peace efforts, with civilians bearing the outcomes. That is not to say that there are any clear paths ahead, but I do think that it is necessary to focus and elevate voices that work toward that goal, rather than allowing populists and terrorists to frame the condition and direct the outcome. Building peace is so much harder than waging war and requires a disproportionate effort. But it is the only way out of it. In other words, the gist of the argument is that we should not focus on proximate conflicts as those will obscure any paths out of violence. Somewhat unrelated to this point, but touching on many aspects presented in this thread, there is an excellent assay on the New Yorker by Gessen that is worth a read. It starts with a Jewish perspective on anti-Semitism but also links that to the situation in Gaza. It is well worth the time to read: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust

I think the Hamas part is very much implied, but perhaps too implied. That being said, the rest mostly referred to the otherwise hard to understand situation why Hamas has come to power in the first place. I think it is pretty obvious that Hamas has no intention to make lives better for Gazans (though potentially at the beginning some might have thought that). As mentioned, the issue is the ongoing campaign, and basically as some analysts and also Barak have mentioned, the issue is that the the suffering heaped on civilians (not Hamas) is depleting the goodwill that Israel had from suffering the violent attack by Hamas. They were therefore saying that Israel needs a targeted and timed action, but so far it is no unclear where things are going to end up. It does not help that some officials have floated the permanent displacement of Gazans and I think the original 24h deadline for Gazans to leave the North Gaza, without any assurance of a safe path (that came later, but the damage was done). That is a fair assessment . I think the issue I had with some justifications is the lack of a scope (I have mentioned commando-style actions as suggested by the US for example). But lack of announcements in that regard and again and in some cases pushing the likelihood of permanent displacement (with others contradicting those statements) does not really inspire confidence. As I said, I have simple thoughts and the thoughts said that at least we should spare the children (and then perhaps move up the morality ladder a bit if we hadn't failed that step already. And again, it does not matter whose child it was). I know you are trying to find policies that contradict this particular moral stance but as we have discussed in threads on abortion, it depends on the developmental stage of the fetus and its likelihood of survival, but also the risk to the mother. And in this context, late term abortion is a conservative talking point that misses its mark entirely. Medically, late term refers to pregnancies past 41 week gestation. I.e. if birth happens later than expected (40 weeks). Of course there is no abortion in that time frame. Moreover, fewer than 1% of abortions happen after the 21st week and I am not sure whether any of those are without some medical indication. But I suspect that it was more a jab at my simple moralism rather than a serious argument.

And the discussion started that there were no good guys in the conflict (except the innocent civilians). I have no idea how the arguments made in this thread could be interpreted this way. Moreover, with one possible exception no one even tried to justify Hamas' action, so I am not sure why you try to argue that point. I see a distinct mismatch in what you are arguing against and what has been written in this thread.

Except, if you remember, my premise that any policy resulting in innocent deaths (esp children) is a bad one. I.e. it was specifically a critique to the cycle of violence and their use to justify the next one.

I think blaming Netanyahu is justified, just read through some international Israeli articles on that matter. He torpedoed paths to peace (regardless how strenuous they might have been ) and allowed money to flow to Hamas with the stated intention to weaken proponents of a two state solution. So at least factually there is some culpability, if folk co-developed a situation where terorists can thrive. So it does not seem one-sided, as I don't think anyone here is justifying Hamas. One could argue whether ge should be No1 or 2 or wherever, but faultless he and hardliners are not. The one-sided argument seems to me that it is all the Palestinians fault, without formulating what their alternatives were (beside thriving through blockades). If someone blamed all the Israeli as you did with Palestinians, you might have point, but I might have missed those, if they existed. And if you really want to narrow culpability to the direct actions only, then non combatant Palestinians should be equally excluded. Yet those are still dying. Finally, you seem to attribute intentions to posters. I am critiquing your arguments and extrapolated to what seemed to me the conclusions. I have made no assignment of guilt to posters, as that would be silly. Unless Netanyahu posted here or followers of Hamas. Palestinians and Israeli civilians are victims and it is hard for either group to take up responsibility either way. Both are not dying at the same rate historically, though. That is the issue with these actions and the seeming conclusion if executed unchecked. The US wars were a lesson I that regard.

I think you might overthink it. What folks basically do is look at a locus I.e. a given stretch of DNA and check what variability is there in a population. These variations are not entirely random and by having sufficiently distant members of a species, we can infer or estimate what their ancestors might had. Of course there is always the chance that we miss variations that somehow have vanished from extant populations or misjudge the gene flow. But you are correct that limited data might impact interpretation and an lead to false assumptions.

I think I might have addressed it here somewhere (or potentially elsewhere, I cannot really recall) but the 1-4% were based on earlier studies and hinges on comparison with sequences obtained from Neanderthal samples. Also, these are not genes (generally speaking, we all have the same genes, but what is relevant are Neanderthal specific variants, or alleles). These numbers, however are not exact calculations but rather rely on identification of matches with the Altai Neanderthal genome and then using existing modern human sequences to estimate the rate of introgression (i.e. how much genetic material was introduced). The 1-4% therefore represent the level of ancestry calculated by these comparative analyses. This is an interesting point and indeed having insufficient Neanderthal reference can lead to wrong calls in the process. I.e. sequences might be tagged as likely Neanderthal, while they actually aren't or vice versa. This is actually what some folks think what happened. Based on a fairly recent paper the assumption is now that the Altai Neanderthal might have picked up DNA form modern humans based on a failed migration from Africa to the middle yeast and this might have led to a misattribution of signals as Neanderthal, although they were actually from modern humans. This would explain the mystery that East Asian population were showing a higher Neanderthal signal, despite the fact that no fossils were found there. However, if those signals were actually modern human to begin with, that would perfectly explain the distribution.

So what purpose then does blaming Palestinians for their own situation serve in this particular context? Does it not mean that because Israel is justified in their actions and Palestinian carry (whatever level of) guilt, their deaths are, if not acceptable, then at least justified? Now, MigL has amended that his post were mostly meant as a pushback for some of the earlier posts, but I do think that the (repeated) claims of making use of their beaches and oil are at the minimum misleading and worst case an attempt to highlight Palestinian culpability. And at in the context of large scale military actions with a tremendous death count among non-combatants and children, and an ongoing humanitarian crisis with risks of disease outbreaks, it is hard not to read it a as a justification. That being said, the big issue is basically what another poster mentioned before: no one in this conflict is really on the side of the Palestinians. Certainly not Hamas, and the other Arab nations are clearly more motivated to use them as bargaining chips. Israel has also shown little interest in cultivating allies among Palestinians and hardliners have done their most to destroy chancers for a two-state solution. So what remains is bickering about how many civilian deaths we are comfortable with. With increasing brutality of Hamas the number goes up. Really, I do not understand the strange dichotomic view of some of the posts suggesting that if Israel is not extra-brutal now, genocide is their only option left. Israeli politics have closed as many peaceful solutions as they can and as many (also Jewish) analysts have mentioned, these cycles of violence are a consequence of it. I read somewhere that Palestinians and Israelis are at a point where they are unable to recognize each other's pain.

I think it is an issue of perspective and it is tricky to figure theinterface between Biology, inner perception, outward presentation (both of which are heavilyinfluend by culture and learning) and what psychological measures we use. As mentioned, most things are gradual, rather than categorical. That is zaoatos' mentioning of averages is exactly. In a given context we can find differences in the means, but some measures overlap more than others. So you could say men are more likely more aggressive than women, but if you could not state with certainty that the woman in front of you is certainly going to be more aggressive (right now) than her male counterparts, if that makes sense. Even social attraction is not 100% sexually coded (as homo- bi- an asexuality exists, but most are heterosexual).