Evolution towards psychic abilities

[Ophiolite]

"Natural " selection no longer applies to H. sap except perhaps by resistance to some otherwise lethal diseases . Human evolution is regressive due to modern medical techology perpetuating ( to reproductive success ) in the human genome line deleterious genes

Two weeks ago I would have agreed with you, then I started thinking. There are two ways in which your argument is flawed.

 

1. The majority of the world population does not have the benefit of anything other than the most basic medical technology. (Just check how many thousands of children are dying each week from dysentry.)

2. We are still working with instincts honed in tribes of between thirty and one hundred people. The application of some of those instincts today is largely responsible for wars and racism.

 

So, there are two major areas in which selection pressures are still in place.

(I do agree that in the west our evolution is apparently regressive, but perhaps that is just nature's way of increasing gene diversity!)

[Verusamore]

Ophiolite , your working something on instincts ?

 

I can agree with you there with point 1 point 2 .

[Sayonara]

More than two flaws tbh.

[CPL.Luke]

well, some of the genes that we consider detrimental could be helpful

 

obesity, there are several genes that mitagate fat processing (anybody seen a genetisist) now while this is detrimental in modern society in the event of a global catastrophe it is actually a benefit, because a slower metabolism allows you to eat less.

 

 

also cancer and other such ailments that come after the age of 30-40 are not factors in natural selection. as natural selection only applies to those incapable of producing children (or surviving long enough to)

 

if everyone was only allowed to have children after they turned 40 then only genes that could allow a person to survive for that amount of time would continue through the gene pool. then later if you changed the requirement to 50 and then 60 over the course of several hundred years. the average life span would have been greatly increased.

 

this has been studied using fruit flies

[Verusamore]

hmmmm , interesting .

What if my wife was 20 and I were to be 50 or vice versa .

[Verusamore]

hmmmm , interesting .

What if my wife was 20 and I were to be 50 or vice versa .

[CPL.Luke]

I believe if you continued like that the average male would be required to live until the age of fifty so you would eliminate most genes on the y chromosone that are detrimental (only if you did this for dozens of generations). and many other genes that are detrimental to your health that affect males as well as females

 

a genetisist would be better at analyzing and explaining that case better than I could

[CPL.Luke]

I believe if you continued like that the average male would be required to live until the age of fifty so you would eliminate most genes on the y chromosone that are detrimental (only if you did this for dozens of generations). and many other genes that are detrimental to your health that affect males as well as females

 

a genetisist would be better at analyzing and explaining that case better than I could

[Joshua]

So the anti-plague gene has thinned out. No wonder! With improved sanitation and understanding of disease, the plague asserts very little affect the gene pool. What good is having an immunity to a disease YOU ARE NEVER EVEN EXPOSED TO? Your special genes really play no role there.

 

This may be the case with psychic abilities (by the way, we have yet to say what that means). If the situations in which these abilities would prove helpful never present themselves then what good are they? Further discussion really depends on our defining "psychic". Does it mean "can read minds", "can read the future", "can open pop cans with sheer will power"...

 

=)

[Joshua]

So the anti-plague gene has thinned out. No wonder! With improved sanitation and understanding of disease, the plague asserts very little affect the gene pool. What good is having an immunity to a disease YOU ARE NEVER EVEN EXPOSED TO? Your special genes really play no role there.

 

This may be the case with psychic abilities (by the way, we have yet to say what that means). If the situations in which these abilities would prove helpful never present themselves then what good are they? Further discussion really depends on our defining "psychic". Does it mean "can read minds", "can read the future", "can open pop cans with sheer will power"...

 

=)

[Guest Chrispy]

This may be the case with psychic abilities (by the way' date=' we have yet to say what that means). If the situations in which these abilities would prove helpful never present themselves then what good are they? Further discussion really depends on our defining "psychic". Does it mean "can read minds", "can read the future", "can open pop cans with sheer will power"...

 

=)[/quote']

 

...Actually there is some truth to this, I myself became better aware of my "powers" after a very stressful ordeal in my personal life and I hear other psychics don't even know about their powers until something big happens in their life. For myself, it happened around when I was 15, so maybe puberty also is a factor?

[mike90]

Well as someone with limited quasi-psychic abilities heres some thought on such powers enhancing survivability. What if you could tell what is going to happen before it does, read and perhaps influence the emotions of others, know when your in danger without any clue as to what that danger is, and more, BUT, what if all these abilities functioned about 5 to 10 % of the time. Probably wouldnt do much to enhance your survival. Especially if it came with the severe emotional side effects of not being able to control what types of thoughts and emotions you could pick up on. Might even lower a persons survivability

[bulmabriefs144]

hmmm...interesting argument. I like it

 

But of course, just for the sake of argument, i will step to the plate.

 

Your argument assumes two things (actually three) things.

1) Psychic abilities is an advantage

2) It is large enough of an advantage to be selected for

3) The gene for psychic ability is not located near to a gene that is detrimental to survival.

 

 

As far as assumption 1 goes, perhaps there are drawbacks to this ability. LIke depression resulting from being able to see the future. Or perhaps knowing the future causes you to act more cazily than if you did not. On the whole, however, these seem to strech a bit, so i would agree that psychic ability would seem to lend an advantage. At the very least, being able to see the future or far away doesn't seem like it should be disadvantagous.

 

Which leads us to point 2. That is, that psycic ability is not strong enough to be infuenced by selction pressures. If something does not really effect us one way or the other, then it is not really selected for. Take wisdom teeth, for instance. For the most part, having wisdom teeth is a disadvantage, for they do not really fit into our modern mouths. Thus, having wisdom teeth can cause great pain or infection when the emerge. However, it is not really that much of a disadvantage, becuase we know how to deal with these problems now. As such, there is really not much pressure being exerted for or against wisdom teeth and the frequency of wisdom teeth just kinda floats around in a population. This is known as "genetic drift."

 

The point being that this could also be the case with pychic abilities. That is, they are advantagous, but not really all that much, so there is not a whole lot of selection pressure selecting for it. THus, we find that psycich abilities would not really be selected for.

 

Lastly, the psychic gene could be located really close to a gene that is heavily disadvantageous. Perhaps a gene associated with parkensins disease or something. Thus, the harmful gene would be selected against and the psycic gene would reduce in frequency as a result of this.

 

Well, i lied, i guess there is one more reason. Perhaps psychic abilities are present in potential but the ability to use them must be learned. Thus, since psychic abilites are somewhat dismissed in our society, most people would not ever learn how. This is not really a genetic reason, but i thought i would throw it out for fun

 

Anywyas that is my thougts for right now. Cool.

 

There's another reason who it might not be common. It would be called "genetic culling". That is, suppose a family did have strong psychic powers. What would happen to that family? They'd likely be outnumbered by mobs who would burn them as witches. Or they might find they have troubles in the romance department as everything about a person is written out like it's on a page.

 

Psychic ability might be a survival advantage but not a social one.

 

There is also the possibility that the bulk of the population does have this gene, but due to a social climate that isn't very open, most people either never learn to use them, or if they had, hide them for their own survival. In essence, the absence of psychic ability is not an absence of evidence for it, but evidence that our society is not sophisticated enough to deal with it.

[Esh]

Epigenetics does explain this. Intuition is so closely related to psychic abilities that people confuse the two. It is possible that, as of now, and for thousands of years, an early or very early experience 'triggers' some rudimentary ability, and as humans do not with pretty much anything, they decided that psychic abilities are mystical or arcane, thus spiritual. 

The evolutionary process would begin when people who have psychic abilities begin to reproduce children who have inherited the genetics of two psychics. 

I suspect that psychic abilities are early evolution. Because of this, science is unable to study it. When did we stop using our appendix? Lose our tail? Gotta go back pretty far and beat the odds that no physical examples of those early adaptations exist. There are some haunting examples of "psychics" solving crimes with eerie accuracy, able to give details not known to the public, and "pre-cogs" (borrowing from Minority Report) predicting events shortly before they occur. 

Two problems arise with my theory:

(1) As of now in the evolutionary calendar, people whose psychic abilities have been expressed do not possess a full complement of their given ability, same as in psychology—many, many people who claim to have, or have demonstrated, some mysterious ability have a history of suffering childhood abuse or neglect; thus, these paranormal abilities can be explained as gene expression of a latent coping mechanism, and similar to a number of psychological theories, these coping mechanisms are not fully expressed, but instead they are expressed to the extent they're required by the environment which expresses them. So the abilities would likely either translate to weak skills which are neither consistently available nor accurate, or alternatively, or only emerge in specific environments unique to the individual. 

(2) Back to psychology, setting aside outright frauds — everybody's gotta make a living somehow — which makes even the most blatant frauds celebrities to the group that values such psychic hotline superstars, the same evidence-based scientific communities who write off these claims as explainable by many natural factors also cannot claim without evidence that those who claim paranormal abilities or who have a history of demonstrating same are delusional, malingering, or are pathological liars without some evidence of such statements. Some scientists are careful and mindful of this; others are careless.

There are a few elementary principles that do apply to people who claim to have, or have demonstrated, one or more unique paranormal abilities: (a) abiding fear of failure or pressure not to let others down at a time when they are counting on thoe abilities to work, such as finding a murderer or missing child, (b) perfectionism, (c) denial about the origins of the unique ability as a coping mechanism to deal with trauma and the related weaknesses and limits of that unique ability, and (d) memories of the traumatic experiences that triggered the unique abilities.

At this point, there seems to be no way to draw any conclusion about the existence of paranormal abilities, whether telekinesis, precognition, mind-reading, remote sensing, and any similar skills. 

I vote epigenetics, but not quite full-blown evolution — yet. 

[TheVat]

17 hours ago, Esh said:

Epigenetics does explain this....

The evolutionary process would begin when people who have psychic abilities begin to reproduce children who have inherited the genetics of two psychics. 

I suspect that psychic abilities are early evolution. Because of this, science is unable to study it.

Well, is it epigenetics or just selection at the level of genes?  If the former, how do you think that would work - you are talking of changes in gene expression without alterations to the DNA sequence. (i.e. turning off or on certain strings of coding) But then you say it's natural selection of "the genetics." 

And why would science be unable to study it?  All these concepts you are tossing around are scientific ones, based on testable hypotheses.

And on what evidence are you suggesting that psychic abilities are real and can be mediated through the expression of particular alleles?  Again, you have several testable hypotheses here - you need to show us the research testing them.  Since this whole theoretical framework is being built on there being genuine paranormal abilities, you need to first provide some peer-reviewed research findings that support that initial premise.