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Maybe I do not understand "classic Darwinism," but I am puzzled by the claims of numerous articles in leading scientific journals that evolutionary change in human beings is "accelerating." Since when? One such article was published several years ago by the National Academy of Sciences, "Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution." It claims an acceleration in evolution in the last 1000 years, on an inferred and theoretical, not observed basis, needless to say. Its projections are based on the 4 million SNP database called HapMap, a collection of mostly European and American gene irregularities. Several books and a slew of articles in journals like Nature and Science have jumped on the scientific bandwagon. But we have a few embarrassing questions.
If the "classic" model of Darwinism was based on primitive man, New Guinea orchids and Galapagos turtles, wouldn't we need to redefine what selection and survival of the fittest and its other tenets really mean for, say, a Harvard or Stanford white male Ph.D. who sits in front of his computer most of the time or the current population of the United States, few of whom qualify as hunter-gatherers or tribal or starved or threatened by predators?
Isn't there rather a disconnect today between surviving and your genetic composition? Pretty much anyone can marry and have children with pretty much anyone they want to, and few people are dying off without issue from bad genes or fatal decisions.
If genes are supposed to mutate and produce more "fit" and eligible marriage partners because of "pressure" from the environment like drought or low-protein diets or too much or too little sunshine, how does evolution operate on a level playing field where the environment is a shopping mall or suburbia?
World population has increased from 200 million in the year 1 to nearly 7 billion. Perhaps the presumed rise in SNPs is an effect of population growth? Evolution was supposed to operate on the basis of selection, not indiscriminate proliferation.
Evolution, it is claimed, has now sublimated beyond the physical realm. It is internal, or mental, or spiritual, or cultural, or social, or political, or even (God help us) scientific. This was the super-clever dodge favored by Teilhard du Chardin, a Catholic missionary to China who wrote The Phenomenon of Man. He called it the noosphere. Whatever else, this latest Big Science Fair project requires a new definition. There are no measures possible beyond our present lifetime. We have no way of judging a Neanderthal's consciousness.
I'm sorry but I just don't get it. I wish someone would please explain it to me so I do not need to feel guilty about not reading all those pat-me-on-the-back and pip-pip-don't-you-know-old-man Victorian recidivist articles that I find, somehow, very self-serving.
I am an avid follower of the Darwin Awards but the only thing I can see accelerating are modern American and European scientists' delusions of grandeur.
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