Re: Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women.

On Jul 30, 10:50 am, "John Smith" <bobsyoung...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Ye Old One" <use...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in messagenews:ng71941ehjrj5rtq8vg1tl9blc5tu82lvc@xxxxxxxxxx







Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women.
Posted on 2008 July 27 by probaway

http://probaway.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/human-evolution-was-controll...

Perhaps the most intriguing question of all is, "Where did I come
from?" Or, perhaps stated in a slightly more general way, "Where did
humans come from?" Or, "Why are humans the way they are?" "What is
consciousness?" "What is intelligence?" "Why are people ethical?" "Why
am I able to ask questions?" "Is there a higher power that created
humans and is responsible for us? and If so where did it come from?"

There may be an infinite number of these questions but in fact there
is a rather simple explanation to all of the questions stated above if
one is willing to observe and weigh a few obvious things. The key
elements of modern human evolution are discussed in
Intelligent Design - of humans by humans and for humans where the most
critical factor is the development of human speech.

The ability to speak permits a selective positive feedback loop to
form, vastly improving the selective process and permitting it to be
greatly accelerated by what is currently termed artificial selection.
With artificial selection it is possible to see intended effects in
the offspring in the next generation and if the quality is desirable
to inform your peers to keep selecting for that quality in following
generations. Part of this process is to select against those qualities
which are considered to be inferior. There is always an abundance of
qualities which must be weighed and balanced against one another
before decisions are made which tend to become locked in for the
remainder of the decider's life and for the lives of their offspring.
Because these decisions are realized to be of such importance they are
made with great care.

Artificial selection is a subset of Sexual Selection which is a subset
of Natural Selection. Ultimately the demands of natural selection must
be satisfied because it is a killing process whereby only those
individuals who manage to survive are around to produce the next
generation. With some species there are vast hordes of perfectly
healthy specimens which are killed off with only on average a single
typical member surviving to reproduce. By human moral standards it is
needlessly cruel but we are not the ones to make those choices. With
sexual selection there is some degree of purposeful behavior by the
species because they choose healthy members for reproduction. This
more refined process speeds up the adaptation of the species to its
local environment because the members best adapted to it are
healthiest. This method has an additional benefit of permitting some
outliers to survive which sometimes is advantageous for the species
because when the environment shifts a bit those who were not so well
adapted may be better adapted and get to reproduce more abundantly.

There was a time in the past when our ancestors didn't speak as modern
humans do and then there was a more recent time when they were fully
human and like us in every way. The transition between these two
states was between 100 thousand years ago and 40 thousand years ago.
For all humans to have evolved so similarly with so many varied and
unique human qualities there had to be a small population in a
contained area for a sustained period of time. I favor the population
isolated on the islands of Zanzibar during the ice ages by low sea
levels to create the ideal confining conditions for this rapid and
thorough human evolution to take place after the basic speech patterns
had gotten started, perhaps elsewhere before the population was
isolated. The rest of our human qualities follow on relatively quickly
in a few tens of thousands of years perhaps far less. With artificial
selection massive changes can be brought about in a few generations as
may be seen in all sorts of domestic animals. It is particularly
conspicuous in the varieties of dogs that have been recently brought
into being but similar changes exist in all of man's genetically
manipulated domesticated life forms. This human ability to manipulate
genetic code is based on the ability to speak-to be able to discuss
what is better, to be able to communicate and remember what qualities
are best are all dependent upon speech. The thing which is new in this
old idea is that it has been applied to humans themselves by
themselves for a very long time. We just think about it as mate
selection, plain old sexual selection and such it is but it is
mediated by speech and that gives people the ability to improve their
social standing in the world. If one pursues language back to its
roots through vast eons of time moving back toward a pre-verbal
condition from which it perforce must have come, it becomes apparent
that something rather like human verbal development from infancy
through maturity recapitulates genetic development from pre-verbal to
fully verbal potentialities. The first twenty years of a human's life
recapitulates the first twenty thousand years of humanity's life.

The birth of a human being is recorded to the minute on a birth
certificate but in fact this exact minute could probably be varied by
a month or more and still produce a perfectly normal baby. The same
can probably be said for the birth of humanity. The exact moment that
some females first communicated verbally to each other the qualities
which they preferred in males and passed this ability to the other
members of their group is the moment of the birth of modern humanity.
However, this exact moment just like the exact moment of the birth of
a baby might be varied quite a lot. But, when this trait becomes a
common habit with these women and then a routinized tradition for the
group, then the groundwork is laid for this to become encoded into the
genes. That first gene which made conversing just a little bit easier
or more efficient might also be considered as the birth moment for
modern humans. At first this genetic ability would be almost
imperceptible but if it conferred a genetic advantage, which it surely
would, then that gene would spread through the whole group and through
any group with which they interbred.

Communication with others goes back genetically even to plants where
they chemically warn each other of danger. Some monkeys possess some
twenty or so single verbal calls linked to single situations and one
must suppose that almost modern humans with vastly larger brains than
monkeys would have an even larger collection of single words. A big
breakthrough comes when there are word pairs which communicate more
complex thoughts. Not just single words such as raptor, snake or cat
for appropriate warnings and reactions but word pairs such as raptor
tree, raptor ground, snake tree, snake ground, or cat tree, cat ground
which gives the hearers of these communications a new advantage in
what is appropriate behavior. When there are word pairs as part of the
vocabulary there arises the problem-opportunity of word order where
tree snake means a different kind of snake than ground snake. It seems
strange that word order could have a genetic component but there could
be a genetic component to paying attention to word order because there
might be significance in that quality. This genetic quality would take
a while to become stabilized but as it does so it permits ever greater
possibilities for potential meaning and for the possibility of pairs
of word pairs and then genetically potentiating the possibility of
complex sentences.

With each of these improvements in human speaking abilities there
comes an improvement in the ability to discuss the qualities of
potential mates and with that an improvement in mate selection and a
further improvement of all of the genetic qualities of the species.
This has been a positive feedback cycle for quite a long time but now
with the development of syntax there comes the possibility and the
probability to start selecting mates in quite a refined way for all of
the qualities which we call human. Because these people are now fully
articulate their selective refinements can become rather sophisticated
and move into the realm of art, story telling, music, work habits,
morality, kindness, reliability, knowledge of traditions and a whole
host of things we call human virtues.

Most of this process of artificial selection has been moderated by
females because their commitment to the next generation is personally
greater than males. Thus it is that most females will have a child or
two but there are many males who have none and some males who have a
great many. This is simply because females perceive some males as more
worthy of breeding. Men pursue many women but women choose a few men.
This is the way it is now and there is little doubt that that is the
way it has been for a long long time. Thus it is that women have
controlled the evolution of humanity and still do. The Gods that
created man are our foremothers.

--
Bob.

I guess you forgot to notice that, in the species that includes man and
apes, the dominant one is the MALE!
It is this - the most powerful one - who gets to mate with ALL the females
of the group.

Really? What I witnessed growing up was the male apes in high school
determined who the alpha male was, and he got to mate with ...the
alpha female, who was of course determined by the females as a whole.

Of course, modern society is so complex that we are all members of
multiple tribes, and each one may have its own alpha males and
females.


It is his power (control), and not her choice, that makes the "selection".

She Who Must Be Obeyed assures me that you are correct.


Though, in some ape species, females have been known to cheat on the all
powerful head male ......................... big surprise!?!?!

I remember a study about 30 years ago that concluded about 10% of kids
born in the US could not have been fathered by male on the birth
certificate. That was determined by blood type; I wonder what genetic
fingerprinting would tell nowadays. I got the synopsis of that study
second hand by an MD; I don't know how the population studied was
chosen or any of the pertinent details. Does anyone know of any more
recent studies that cover the same ground?

Kermit

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