How does modern society affect human evolution?
For example, being strong or being smart in the past meant there was more likelihood you could survive, whereas in modern society weak members of society are protected and everyone has equal opportunity to mate.
The other thing in modern society is that people tend to marry people they have similiar qualities. For example, good looking people tend to marry other good looking people, smart people tend to marry other smart people. Short people will marry other short people.
In addition, people who mate will more likely bring up children that have similar qualities to them.
Wouldn’t eventually you would have two human races? One race full of people with really good qualities like being tall, intelligent, good looking etc. and another race with all the bad qualities like being short, ugly, stupid etc. Qualities that once would’ve been weeded out by natural selection, but is kept because modern society provides welfare to.
Bonus aspect – non-educated people tend to have more kids, whilst educated people tend to have less kids. How does that affect the balance of evolution. Would there be a minority of superior people, and a whole bunch of really inferior people?
By: junkette
About the Author:
Filed under Anthropology by on Dec 18th, 2009. 
Comments on How does modern society affect human evolution?
Marketing Strategies
Hasn’t worked that way so far has it? Think about it, we’ve been hanging around in tribal groups for about a million and a half years so far and we’re still one race. Despite natural selection, the mating of two stupid people doesn’t mean that their offspring is too stupid to survive. Evolution doesn’t pick for the “survival of the fittest,” it picks for the survival of the fit enough, a subtle but important distinction. No one knows where the human race will be a few million years from now. Especially since we are a species that is more then willing to adjust our environment to our needs, rather then the opposite.
Marketing Strategies
monoculture and a very modern lack of good sense has pretty much doomed our race, as far as evolution goes. We’ll kill ourselves by ruining our environment before we really need to worry about our own evolution and besides; with all the chemistry we put in our bodies, we’ll be lucky to last another thousand years lol!
Marketing Strategies
ALright you need to find the difference between survival of the fittest and evolution. Major difference
And evolution is true
Marketing Strategies
This is probably one of the most interesting questions ever asked in this forum.
How does evolution work? Simply by two mechanisms: genetic drift and selection. To reproduce, our genes must duplicate when we produce eggs and sperm, and each has a single set of genes. This duplication process involves about 3 billion base pairs (our DNA elements) for the entire genom. Tiny errors in this process are called mutations, and they create genetic variation. These variations, if they manifest themselves in our traits, will be selected in favor or against, and some will increase in frequency. The same happens without selection, by a process called genetic drift.
Now what is the selection? Biologically, it is by courtship: the strongest males are selected by the females, or the most beautiful females by the males. In a primitive population, this makes sense, because it improves the physical health of the population over time. However, in modern society, other traits are important for survival. For example, in our capitalistic society the most important traits are how you can deal with money and with power. That has nothing directly to do with your appearance but more with your brain structure and education, This means traits that assure our survival in modern society are not necessarily based on our genes, or at least mostly not. This is why biological evolution does not work anymore in the human species, also because there is no direct relationship between positive traits and the number of offspring created, on the contrary.
So in summary, modern society does affect human evolution, but not in a positive way. Now the thing is that, as a social being, this is something we have to accept and have to come to grips with. Basically, as a species, we are genetically degenerating, whereas we are balancing this problem with our advances in medicine.