[GHung]

It occured to me some time back that we are in the process of either driving our next evolutionary step, or driving ourselves to extinction, along with a lot of other species. Just as climate change drove our ancestors out of the trees, will AGW drive some of our species to adapt => evolve to a different form of Homo, or are we an evolutionary dead end like those who refused to come down to the grasslands to face a new reality?

'First human' discovered in Ethiopia

Scientists have unearthed the jawbone of what they claim is one of the very first humans.

The 2.8 million-year-old specimen is 400,000 years older than researchers thought that our kind first emerged.

The discovery in Ethiopia suggests climate change spurred the transition from tree dweller to upright walker.

The head of the research team told BBC News that the find gives the first insight into "the most important transitions in human evolution".

Prof Brian Villmoare of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas said the discovery makes a clear link between an iconic 3.2 million-year-old hominin (human-like primate) discovered in the same area in 1974, called "Lucy".

Could Lucy's kind - which belonged to the species Australopithecus afarensis - have evolved into the very first primitive humans?

"That's what we are arguing," said Prof Villmoare........

[snip]

.....Climate change

The dating of the jawbone might help answer one of the key questions in human evolution. What caused some primitive ancestors to climb down from the trees and make their homes on the ground.

A separate study in Science hints that a change in climate might have been a factor. An analysis of the fossilised plant and animal life in the area suggests that what had once been lush forest had become dry grassland.

As the trees made way for vast plains, ancient human-like primates found a way of exploiting the new environmental niche, developing bigger brains and becoming less reliant on having big jaws and teeth by using tools...
Full article: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31718336

While I'm sure our tree-dwelling ancestors were pretty happy up there in the canopy, they weren't given much of a choice (if one accepts this theory), just as our decendents won't have much choice; evolve or die out. If we fall far enough, perhaps we'll end up providing the seeds for several new species of hominids, depending on location and climate.

[Paulo1]

A bit off-topic...

Remember Waterworld?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterworld

I actually liked the movie..Go figure.

I live 5km from the ocean on a river that is tidal....becoming brackish in late August when the westerly is blowing. I even get seaweed hanging up on my dock. We get salmon, steelhead, cut throat trout, and dollies from my beach. Crawdads in the summer. I sometimes joke I'll be able to throw the crab traps in within 15 years.

Climate change. Last week you wrote about cleaning snow off your solar panels. I put on 1,000km on my new motorcycle in February. We have almost no snow on the local mountains. I somewhat expect to be supplying my son water, (who is on a coveted glacier fed water system while I am on a lowly drilled well), by September. But who knows, we might have a wet summer?

Seriously, the water is rising 2-3mm year. Storms at high tide now wash out parts of the Island Highway at Campbell River. If the average sea level increased 10cm, I would expect the downtown core to be abandoned. Certainly, parts of Vancouver (Richmond) would be flooded. They already rely on dikes. I just think of the coastal Chinese cities, or Bangledesh. Their interiors will dry up and their coasts will flood. Not a rosy picture for hundreds of millions of people. There will be mass migrations and all the associated strife that can be imagined. Will coastal SE America stay populated? I know this much, those 100 year flood event records will be part of the realtor's package for any new sales. Houses will be built on berms or stilts....maybe.

I am looking out at the water, right now. The tide is dropping and the water is probably 25' below our lawn, plus the house is on a 4' crawlspace. The bank on the other side of the river is a few feet lower and in flood the river fans out over the valley sparing our local area of 4 homes. We just lucked out when we bought this place. We are one of about 10 properties on the river that doesn't flood. The first property I made an offer on 10 years ago floods big time. Like I said, we lucked out.

Last summer I started a program of reinforcing the bank with shot rock. Every morning for about a month I take my truck and pick up shot rock from along the highway where they blasted the road through a canyon. It takes me 30 minutes to do a return trip. In 5 more years our river bank will be lined with granite. Sand fills in the cracks and it looks very good. We also left the big trees in place and their root structure binds everything together. It is very satisfying. I have to do the work at low tide so I am limited on when I can place the rocks...(done by hand). After July it is good fishing so that is the end of rock Hauling!!

regards

[Fishman]

I think all that GW is driving Bostonians to heavier coats and a lot more snow shoveling

[Shaved Monkey]

and me having to water the garden during the wet season

[JuanP]

Here in Florida, the water keeps creeping up little by little.

The sand in Miami Beach is washing out to the ocean as it always does and the shore is less than ten feet from the dunes during the high tides. My guess is we are no more than three months away from another multimillion dollar sand refill operation. The last time was about three years ago when we imported loads of sand from the Bahamas. Every time they refill it lasts less than the time before and they have to bring the sand from further away. I can see this from the direct oceanfront condo we rent. The beach would be mostly gone in less than a decade without constant refills.

On the bay side of Miami Beach, the situation is completely catastrophic. The uninhabited islands are disappearing very fast. My wife and I observe this first hand on our weekly fishing, sailing, and packrafting trips. We have volunteered with many environmental programs in Biscayne Bay during the last 25 years and the damage we have witnessed has been horrendous. All the mangroves and other trees we planted are dying because of rising sea levels and increased droughts, the birds we rescue have nowhere to go. They do slow down the erosion and provide habitat in the meantime, though, probably buying those uninhabited islands a couple more decades than they would have had otherwise. No matter how much garbage and trash we pick, there is always more the next time we visit. The islands' interior tropical hardwood hammocks are dying, too. Gumbo Limbos are getting killed by a pest, even the largest, oldest strangler figs are dying in large numbers. I saw several trees on their prime dying on the island I slept in with my wife a couple of nights ago. The seawalls are crumbling and sinking all along the surrounding cities' shores. Marine and bird life are increasingly scarce in the area. All the dolphins we see look sick, tired, and are all scared with broken fins.

We are so glad we never had children. The world we are leaving behind to the future generations couldn't possibly be any worse than it is today, yet tomorrow it certainly will be.

[AgentR11]

Nah, we won't evolve further in response to climate change. Our brains alter conditions faster than what changes in our DNA might address. My opinion is that any adaptation we pursue will be in the form of software, not hardware changes; though I suspect some of those adaptations late in the game will be *very* unfriendly to local ecology.

As to kids, I'm glad I had my daughter; she, and even more so any children she might have, will participate in a pivotal moment of human history. Its a grand, existential challenge. I do everything I can to give her every possible advantage of course, but in the end, its her generation that will make the game ending calls.

[GHung]

It's clear that climate change and environmental conditions drove our ancestors to evolve in the past. What makes us different? Have we somehow become immune to these evolutionary drivers? Do you think our technology has short-circuited these processes? If so, what happens when said technology is no longer viable?

[AgentR11]

Technology is simply the expression of what causes the evolutionary process to occur in our brains as opposed to our DNA. DNA is just an information transport mechanism; its potent and flexible enough for basic life propagation. The human brain with the addition of language and mathematics vastly exceeds the ability of DNA to transport and modify information.

Wet bulb temp pops up in existential discussions periodically. It is sorta true that DNA could gradually change our acceptable body temps over the course of thousands of years; but that would presume the existence of a selective pressure causing genetic death of individuals with poorer temperature suitability. But what is the specifically human experience? Humans whose brains have been trained how to avoid and dissipate heat in excess of incidental heating and cooling will have a much greater adaptive response through behavior, than random humans who are reckless or lack sufficient knowledge to understand the problem. And more over, that knowledge/training, when it comes in contact with the set of humans that lack it, can and often is instantly transferred. So instead of generations needed to adapt to a condition, simple observation overwhelms the adaptive response.

Basically, as we are now, there are no conditions which permit the survival of mammalian life that can present a selection pressure to DNA propagation that will not be instantly overwhelmed by brain function adaptation and propagation.

This doesn't imply technology; unless you want to use the term in its widest understanding, which includes everything from sharpened sticks, napped stone, to space probes.

Its language and basic math that do the deed, not computer chips and automobiles.

[dohboi]

Good points. But one of the things those brainy humans of the (not so distant) future might start doing is choosing to expose overly large infants while keeping and fostering the smallest ones, since they will notice that is the smallest that are most able to dissipate heat and so have the highest likelihood of survival. Such active selection, along with direct death of the over-large from wetbulb temps, could fairly quickly drive human stature down to much smaller averages than are currently the norm.

In past heat driven extinction events, dwarfism has been exactly the evolutionary response, and humans could speed up movement in that direction by a lot with some selection. Future restrictions on diet will also do a lot to drive down average size, but that is another thing.

But we are heating up the planet so fast, even active selection of this sort may not be enough to keep up with environmental changes.

Mountain caves will again become the ideal dwelling--high enough to be cooler than the lowlands, and positioned in such a way not to be inundated by the (more and more frequent) periodic biblical deluge that will drown any underground dwellings anywhere near the bottom of valleys or other lowlands.

[AgentR11]

You get the biggest variability in height as a result of diet during puberty. We Americans are so overfed that we're all at our genetic maximum height for the most part. Once food scarcity comes into play, humans will be much shorter and thinner.

Even if you have the action you describe, that is still honestly technology; its GMO/Husbandry, one of the oldest techs of civilization. We do it currently by selecting against various testable genetic defects and kill the kid before delivery.

[dohboi]

"Once food scarcity comes into play, humans will be much shorter and thinner."

True.

"Even if you have the action you describe, that is still honestly technology; its GMO/Husbandry, one of the oldest techs of civilization."

Yeah, that was kind of my intended point (obviously not well articulated).

For humans, there is not necessarily a bright shining line between culture ('brains') and evolution--we can directly and consciously intervene in the selection process and thus shape the evolutionary path. In one way or another, we have been doing this to other species and in some cases to ourselves for a very along time.

[vox_mundi]

This may reflect some of what AgentR11 spoke about.

Evolution is occurring in our 'software' but it requires some 'hardware' tweaking.

We are already evolving to our changing environment. The question is which variant is better suited for our future - or are they complimentary in a ' yin yang' sort of way? Can we change fast enough? Will evolution occur gradually or in a rapid burst - like A.C.Clarke's - 'Childhoods End'? Are we capable of planning our future or are we headed for a knee-jerk brutish existence?

Our hardware is changing.

Specifically, greater activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, or the ACC, correlated with liberalism while it also correlated with increased gray matter volume or a larger ACC, as shown in MRI scans. Additionally, it was found that conservatism was correlated with increased volume of theright amygdala.

The ACC has a variety of functions in the brain, including error detection, conflict monitoring, and evaluating or weighing different competing choices. It’s also very important for both emotion regulation and cognitive control (often referred to as ‘[b]executive functioning’)—controlling the level of emotional arousal or response to an emotional event (keeping it in check), as to allow your cognitive processes to work most effectively.[/b]

Persons with a larger or more active amygdala tend to have stronger emotional reactions to objects and events, and process information initially through that pathway. They would be more likely swayed towards a belief if it touched them on an emotional level.

Too much emotion gets in the way of logical thinking, and disrupts cognitive processing. This is why in times of crisis, we learn to set aside our emotions in order to problem-solve our way out of a dangerous situation. Those with the ability to maintain low emotional arousal and have high cognitive control are generally better at handling conflict in the moment, plus tend to be the least permanently affected by trauma in the long term. They tend to be more adaptable to changing situations (or have a higher tolerance for complexity), and have what we call cognitive flexibility.

It’s ridiculously hard to think logically when you’re all ramped up emotionally. This is why emotion regulation goes hand-in-hand with cognitive control and error detection. For example, Borderline Personality Disorder, characterized by poor and uncontrollable emotion regulation, features a hyperactive amygdala.

I've linked to a couple of articles that explore this question from different angles. Ignore the progressive/conservative labels and substitute doomer/cornicopian or socialist/facist or spiritualist/fundamentalist. The observational validity still seems to remain...

Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives

Reliance on smartphones linked to lazy thinking

[onlooker]

Interesting thread. I believe that a few generations hence, people will act and think very differently then we do now. They will be more humble, less reckless, have low tolerance for frivolous behavior, be more in touch with nature, be more united and generally lack the ego-centric attitudes we have at present. So when you speak of adapting and of evolutionary change obviously we as humans can modify our behavior in ways other creatures cannot. That is what my reference above alludes too. We will change in many of our attitudes, expectations and perspectives. The realities of the world will make us do so. As for the practical challenges of surviving, well that will depend on how badly the habitability of Earth is affected and also how many of us remain and with what remaining infrastructure we can utilize.

[vox_mundi]

Evolution at work ...

Child fitness falls further than feared

Child fitness levels are falling at an even faster rate than first feared - and this time there is evidence it has nothing to do with obesity.

Following up on their 2009 study which showed child fitness declined by 8% over the previous ten years, researchers at the University of Essex have reported an even larger drop in fitness in schoolchildren. This time, however, they found the children who they tested were actually thinner than those measured in 2008.

... "It has got to the stage now that if we took the least fit child from a class of 30 we tested in 1998, they would be one of the five fittest children in a class of the same age today."

In 2009, the team at Essex reported that English children's fitness was declining at twice the global rate - 0.8% per year. These latest findings suggest fitness has been declining even faster over the past six years with an overall drop of 0.95% per year. This time boys' fitness levels are falling much faster than girls.

"Seeing fitness falling independent of BMI tells us for certain that the cause of the decline is a lack of physical activity. Being unfit and being obese are just two symptoms of physical inactivity that we can see – what we can't see is the health problems building up in today's unfit children."

[Newfie]

Too much screen time, not enough time outdoors playing?

[Outcast_Searcher]

Evolution at work ...

... "It has got to the stage now that if we took the least fit child from a class of 30 we tested in 1998, they would be one of the five fittest children in a class of the same age today."

In 2009, the team at Essex reported that English children's fitness was declining at twice the global rate - 0.8% per year. These latest findings suggest fitness has been declining even faster over the past six years with an overall drop of 0.95% per year. This time boys' fitness levels are falling much faster than girls.

This dramatic a change (from least fit to one of the most fit) in only 17 years seems mighty alarming. I thought some schools (like where my girlfriend taught) were having mandatory walking during recess, etc. to promote more fitness. Certainly I hear lots of moaning about diet and fitness in various documentaries about US public schools.

One wonders how bad this has to get before more action is taken. OTOH, looking at the trends for obesity and especially morbid obesity -- never mind.

I guess if you are morbidly obese, walking or biking to work when gasoline gets expensive isn't much of an option.