I have been thinking about evolution a lot lately, perhaps because I am taking an Introduction to Evolution class or perhaps because I am graduating this quarter and I've been thinking about how I've changed since starting college. Either way, I'm wondering in what ways are humans evolving today? Sure there are the physical ways such as lactose tolerance and sickle cell anemia, but I was thinking about the evolution of thought. We all change our thought processes from the time that we were infants to the period just before we pass away because we are always learning, but are these thoughts different from those that previous generations had? If so does this change of thought cause recent generations to act differently and if so is this considered a phenotype on which natural selection can act. Can the manifestations of our collective thoughts cause thought processes to evolve from generation to generation? I guess I'm wondering if thoughts can be a phenotype on which natural selection can act. If so, then what are the selection pressures that humans face? Of course there would be different selection pressures felt by different populations, but with the growing uniformity in culture, what pressures are felt by humans as a singular species?
Take technology for example. It is continuously adapting and in a way evolving because there are heavy selection pressures placed on the phenotypic/expressed variants that are produced by different engineers who's thoughts, like genes, dictated what the were to become. The ones that are best suited for the their environment succeed and get worked on further and the engineers who created the product pass on their thoughts to the next generation of engineers. Would the manifestation of thoughts, in this case technologies like the iPad, be considered heritable to the next generation of engineers? Natural selection doesn't act on individuals, but humans do evolve in their thoughts and that does correlate to how they act. Those actions in turn affect the next generation and how they think and then act in response to those thoughts. So is natural selection working on society as a whole? Thoughts being the genes and the action those thoughts create being the phenotype.
For example:
I am a fourth generation Mexican American. When I look at how my grandmother viewed marriage when she got married at the age of 17 and compare her thoughts to my mothers when she got married at 19, and then further compare them to my own now at the age of 22, I can see how their thoughts and actions have influenced my own views about marriage which directly resulted in why I did not marry at a younger age than I am now.
My grandmother married my grandpa because she wanted out of her house and my grandpa was the one that could give her that the quickest. My mother wanted a family of her own and so married my father because he asked her to marry him first. Of course there is love mixed into those equations which is a variable that I can't take into account because I don't think its something that evolves from generation to generation, but my point is that they had reasons to say yes to marriage excluding those of love. Now, I myself have heard these stories and their reasoning several times in my life and have concluded that what I want is to find a partner and am willing to wait to marry no matter what age this occurs or even if it occurs. Now what I'm wondering is whether or not my views on marriage are the result of my family's thoughts evolving from generation to generation...
You can say that my thoughts are different than theirs because we all grew up in different environments, but aren't our homes and social environments the manifestations of evolved thought?
interesting blog...cheers!
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