Are we, as mankind, devolving?

Here's a crazy thought: we are exactly the way we are evolved to be. There is no hypothetical in terms of evolution; we are the factual product of it. There is no other way we were 'meant' to be and everything you see in society today has evolved to be this way for a reason. Even fatties.

I've seen a load of crazy hypotheticals thrown around in this thread based upon an understanding that it's only times of difficulty that act as selective pressures, as if evolution has taken the wayside for the past millennia. That's flat out wrong. Evolution has been present the entire time, it's just that people only look at physical traits and only believe it's active when things get difficult.

I've seen a lot of misplaced faith in 'the biggest and best' as the prime survivors (again, only theorised in times of difficulty; nuclear winter anyone?). This is ludicrous, and certainly has no evidence from biological or archaeological studies. It hasn't been observable in the past or present, in either our species or those related to us. In fact, you can look at tribal societies today, where we believe they live very much the way we lived in ancestral societies, and they're all skinny as. Not because food is limited, but because it's easier to survive like that.

Sorry Buddha, but I'm arguing very much against you here.

Larger mammals require higher amounts of calories to maintain their body, they have to eat high fat or high protein sources of food continuously. There's a reason that larger dinosaurs either disappeared or shrunk, they couldn't maintain themselves. This applies to bigger people too. Muscle especially, it's hard to maintain.

In the cases where survival is based upon difficult times where food is limited, it'll be the runts that survive longest. They need less calories to keep going and they are quick and agile enough to get away from any predator that would have at us. In fact, it's our ability to harvest high calorie sources of food that we are able to have 'prime' specimens (ie: intelligent and muscular - traits which we subjectively believe to be the best. I could write an essay just on that sentence alone). 'Prime' specimens are a product of cushty eating arrangements, and would be the first to go if food ever became limited - go look at an Olympian's diet if you need proof. The reason we believe it to be so attractive (sexually, and as a human trait) is because it is associated with the ready ability to source high quality food, simple as. We believe them to be good providers for their kin.

I also see mass ignoring of the human social structure in a lot of these arguments. I'm sorry guys, we are not sharks; we don't work alone. We haven't done so for any observable amount of time in our ancestry, nor will we ever. It's not beneficial for us to do so.

We will always work in groups, and the ability to be large and muscular will be nullified because of it. We have no need to one person to be overpowered when we have the ability to work as a coherent group. Hunting is always done in groups and the haul is always better that way, you can actually go watch it if you want to visit an Amazonian tribal society. We use group hunting to take the very best of prey; one guy taking on a mammoth would be in deep sh#t - get a bunch of us, we're eating for a month. There is no need for 'prime' specimens, as you put it.

Evolution applies as strongly to the human social structure as it does to our physicality, we have developed an absolutely fantastic society that allows us to survive - humans are incredibly good at adapting their environment to suit them, rather than being forced to work the other way around. This is an evolved beneficial trait of the human condition - not the absence of selective pressures, as it seems to be assumed in this thread.

We originally lived in tribal societies as it was beneficial for us, there is safety in numbers and combined efforts lead to a bigger haul. As we got better at sourcing food and other necessary products for survival, societies have got larger; always in relation to our resources. Jump a few hundred millennia and you have what we have today: global scale sourcing of food/resources and the largest population of people ever in existence. Evolution hasn't been nullified by large societies, as seems to be the point of this thread, it's just that it's the human social being that has been evolving. As I mentioned before, pressures have shifted.

You'd think Memes are just funny tidbits of the internet - nope, they're the social equivalent of the gene. There's a whole facet of (serious) research dedicated to Memes. Read up a bit on Memetics, and you'll see that evolution has been going strong. Cultural evolution, people. Culture. Always hand-in-hand with human physiology.

If you want a really good topic, get into the evolution of the social being. Read up on memes (though I personally hate the theory itself) and cultural evolution from our ancestors to now, and you'll see every aspect of human characteristics differently. It will further your understanding of evolution far more than theorising nuclear holocaust ever will.

Exactly that.

All of the evidence that we have on our ancestors, going back to before records, says no; we are physically no different to humans about 200,000 years ago.

Our brain capacity is the same so, in terms of function, we don't even think any differently. We're not any smarter (or any dumber), we just have a more developed understanding. In many regards, the kind of people you see walking around today would be the kind of people you'd have seen walking around with the Aztecs or Egyptians (and even further back).

Socially, we really started to develop sometime after our physical changes (or at least the evidence seems to say so - around 50,000 years). This is when tools started to appear in abundance, and when cultural changes took off. As I said before, our last biggest steps in evolution have been societal/behavioural changes (you could argue cause and effect either way); but physically, no. Not at all.

We're taller now.

I am more evolved than you are.

I'd rather have a smokin hot 31yr old Grilf for a grandmother than have to sit on a cushion to drive my car, and thats a fact.

No worries, I look forward to it

No worries

I'll enjoy the write up for sure, no matter when it comes.

Again, working on the assumption that food is limited. The problem with infanticide is that, especially in primates (and even moreso humans), it's very rarely for a quick meal; it's only for food when resources are becoming very thin on the ground, or if the parent(s) don't have the capability to look after both themselves and the child.

Otherwise, it's not usually the biological parents themselves who do the killing. That's left very much up to the new 'alpha male' (in species to which that term applies to - which it doesn't always). It's more social than it is anything else in these situations, and certainly isn't done for food . Lions are the very best species to observe this in, as soon as a new alpha takes control, all of the previous alpha's offspring get killed immediately to make way for his own. In humans, it's usually the stepfather.

And anyway, infanticide is most common (for food, or otherwise) in species that have large litters; rodents, felines, pack animals, so on and so forth. It doesn't apply so much to species that have one child at a time, such as us. It's much rarer as we don't have the children to spare, so to speak.

Generally speaking, we've evolved a conscience about that stuff - not many of us would ever consider it acceptable to kill/eat another person, let alone a child. It's illegal to show harm to a child in any western film, and some of the most successful charities are based upon helping feed/protect children. There's a reason they always show children on those African aid adverts - we're evolutionarily designed to care, especially about children. It's the way our social circles have evolved, we take care of everyone in it, even if they're not biologically related to us, which is the most confounding thing to an evolutionary biologist (though it is explainable).

Sorry, I'll stop. It's not fair when you haven't had your say