evolved people don't procreate

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Are you suggesting that the species will be continued through technology? And this is the reason people don't have to physically reproduce. Although genetic material would have to come from somewhere.

Neanderthals don't procreate. That's true.
Unless you count the small bit of Neanderthal DNA that many people possess.

It seems to me that what you meant to say was that intelligent, responsible people don't procreate.
And you probably count yourself in that number.
In which case, you'd be incorrect on the first count.
I can't speak on the second, but this thread does not inspire confidence.

Remember evolved means different. And different does not mean accepted.

I can see that there are many here that are of the kind that believe blindly in what people of authority claim. That's fine. Personally I am of a more schizotypal nature or something, questioning the nature of reality is my primary hobby. Anyway here's one perspective on evolution which is a bit different from the common one.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bCJOscgCc0[/youtube]

It's BS. Evolved people DO procreate and that's a good thing.

Probelm is all the dumb people are having kids while the geniuses are virgins, so all those stupid genes will be in the gene pool.

It's not smart or wise to think you are smart if you don't want to/feel the need to have children. It's the opposite. It means you're too dumb to help save this species from having stupid people procreate and lower the average IQ.

People are a special case. But as a starting point its valid to look at the other species.

Some species do seem to achieve a kind of optimum form for their environment and then remain relatively unchanged for literally many millions of years. Some examples are sharks, ants, maybe horseshoe crabs. Perhaps at this point, a main motive force of evolution, random mutation no longer turns out improvements over the current model. That is not a permanent condition however, for once the environment changes the species may no longer be at optimum efficiency and in fact be in trouble. At that point, between random mutation and natural selection, evolving can occur again.

Humans reached their current stage, which is called Anatomically Modern Humans something like 200,000 years ago. I believe since then there has been very little change, physically at least. The most significant situational changes have been in socialization and technology, with those spiking dramatically upward in the last 10,000 years or so.

If in addition to physical changes, there have been psychological changes in response to the changing situation, or evolving, it is not so clearly defined. We tend to timeline advances by the artifacts themselves (ie. 6000 BC - Invented Wheel, 1927 AD - Invented Whoopie Cushion, etc), but this does not mean we couldn't have invented it earlier. Technology is very much a one-thing-leads-to-another thing. Certain prerequisite discoveries are required to develop subsequent ones. Its hard to say therefore if and how our mental faculties have changed. Certainly, all the basic abilities we recognize today were already in existence in the ancient period (Egypt, Greece, Rome).

And certainly the changes have not stopped, and may still be accelerating.

My own thought on mental faculties is that 1) Things are changing faster then our ability to make any significant adjustment, or 2) The brain is attempting to keep up but with each change has to adjust again.

Procreation, in nature is of course the prime directive, the purpose for which all else works. Species that have achieved a evolutionary optimum do not stop procreating.

Over-procreating however causes problems and nature will take steps to reduce populations directly (ie. lemmings) or indirectly (predators, famine, disease).

If you are feeling the inclination to non-procreate that may just be personal choice, or might possibly be actually something nature is doing. For instance, if over-population is causing stresses and insecurity, people may be being influenced not to have children, or as many.

Steven Hawking has three children. Enough said.

Agreed.

Personally I can't understand the anti-natalist point of view that life is painful and not worth living, and sentience should end and the human race should stop reproducing. To me it seems like these people are broken. Morally I consider passing on the torch of sentience and the history of accumulated knowledge the very best thing the human race can do. Someone has to reproduce for that to be possible. On an individual level there's nothing wrong with not having kids. But prescribing that for everyone has a huge flaw.

"Evolved people don't procreate."

What in the actual f**k does that even mean.

Procreation is the purpose of evolution.

Therefore, "evolved" people, or in the case of those currently living, those with desirable traits, are exclusively the ones procreating.

Vice versa, the fact that one procreates does not make one "unevolved"... just the opposite, in fact.

Threads like this are why I hate the internet.

Goodbye.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

I feel like I'm talking to the TV when I chat on this forum. Bunch of regurgitators on here.

Here's one thing you might want to think about. I think you would have the idea that humans have evolved out of apes, and apes out of some more primitive animal, gradually though with no boundary, going back to a fish or something, to some plant or algae and to some microorganism. And prior to that it was some minerals. And prior to that only God knows what. Now, we can see that for every step upward in the evolution there is less mass. There's much more dead mineral matter in the universe than there is living matter. And there is much more plant mass than animal mass. Much more plant eating animals than meat eating etc. So the idea that you'd procreate more the more evolved you are doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Bacteria procreate more than plants, plants more than animals.

It takes more time to create things like humans. If it took one day rather than 9 months I imagine we would do a lot more of it. Is that what you mean?

No, he means that human population is 7 bil already, that's much more compared to any other mammal species, except bats, rats and mice perhaps.

However, over procreation means that the current model is optimized for the current environment - humans and bats are typical mammal examples for that. There's no "rule" that says that plants should procreate more than herbivour animals and herbivor more than meat eaters.... bats populations are probably greater than many rare plant species' population.

Not reproducing might be a form of Devolution. Something that naturally occurs when too much reproduction is actually becoming harmful for the species as a whole. Kind of like hitting the brakes on a car, or even going in reverse for a while. But it would necessarily be temporary and corrected by natural processes once the population reaches sustainable levels again.

Yes, life forms that have evolved greater complexity do have less biomass on earth and have longer generation times.
(biomass: amount of mass taken up by a type of life which as you note is greater for plants than animals)
(generation time: the length of time between generations which is longer for more complex life forms).

It looks like you are noting that the more complexity a type of life has evolved, the less frequently it will reproduce. Insects reproduce with greater frequency than mammals and less than bacteria. That works for such gigantic categories as plants, animals, insects, bacteria. But if you look closer at animals you see that the reproduction quantity (and biomass) is actually tied to how many environments the organism can live in. Humans (and chickens!) can live in lots of different environments on earth and so have quite a biomass. Pandas, alas, are not so versatile and barely reproduce at all. Does that mean they are done evolving? (It might mean they are done for as a species but that has nothing to do with where they might be placed on an evolutionary tree). I brought up pandas to show what happens when reproduction stops. It doesn't mean the organism has reached perfection (no such thing). It means they are doomed unless they can get back to reproducing.

Although there are more ants than humans and possibly also more chickens than humans, humans outnumber plenty of other species just by how versatile we are and able to live nearly everywhere on the globe. This versatility was evolved! So in that sense, the fact that there are 7 billion of us is because of all the evolutionary tweaking that made us so able to mold nearly any environment to be liveable for us. We reproduced so very much because we evolved those abilities (which mainly is our brain letting us mold environments).

So your argument doesn't work because you took it too far. Just because there are more bacteria than plants and more plants than animals it does not therefore mean that evolution trends inevitably towards less reproduction (pandas!). And even if it did, that could never go all the way to zero or you would just have stagnation rather than perfection (a theme of sci-fi writers when exploring the topic of immortality).