Dr. Laden, I do not agree with your article. I don’t live on a planet where sapiens are undergoing a “relaxed selection”. I disagree with the extension of the Darwinian scheme that you are trying to make and it particularly becomes clear by the way you discuss sexual selection.

I have already interfered a lot with your blog. Let me end this with some humor. Let me describe a situation on a planet where your article would have been accurate in my opinion.

Guy walks into a bar. Girl talks to him.
-Nice muscle system.
-Haven’t trained a day in my life. All inherited.
-Impressive. Give me your best riddle solving pick-up phrase.
-I have proved Poincare’s Conjecture.
-Are you serious? You’re a genius! That’s a manifestation of tremendous capacity for problem solving. I am so tempted to breed with you. I’m 14, my sex cells are in the best possible shape, your apparent fitness is such that I don’t even dare to ask for any parental investment. What do you think? Come over to my place and breed?
-Sure! Just a bit of time investment for the coitus. That’s practically nothing compared to the benefits. Last week I went for 8 offspring.
-I would do the same if I were in your shoes. Not that you are under immense pressure by predators or you are gonna be in lack of food whatsoever. But still, you are not a bearer, your apparent fitness is more than a fair trade-off for being a nest male, why not propagate your genes accordingly?

If we lived on that planet Dr. Laden, your article would be right on the spot. On our planet (we call it earth), the guy who made 600 pages of proof for the Poincare’s Conjecture lives with his mother and cat, while someone is breeding non-stop in the jungle simply because he hasn’t heard of the term “condom” before. That’s not relaxed selection; our game is a different ball game, governed by an entirely different set of rules that have nothing to do with the Darwinian scheme, not if you tie me and you hold a scorpion above my face! Things that are mainstream in one or another culture of sapiens regarding the breeding dynamics you need to struggle searching in 4 billion years of life to find one counter-example!

What we ever meant by “evolving” has not applied but to a marginal extent in sapiens for the last couple of millennia.

“So Natural Selection is still very much at work in the usual ways.”

No, it is not. When I say generalization in this context, I mean a generous one. E.g. “the probability distribution of DNA sequences on space and time depends on their environment”. That’s an exaggeration, this is a more general definition than what we need, but just to illustrate we need to go far from natural selection as we know it to describe the dynamics of the sapiens gene pool.

Thank you and I apologize for typos and any badly written text (although I believe my messages should be clear).

There you go. That sentence is correct. Now, really, go and read the post for comprehension! You are almost there.

Unlike thales’ words…

Since you are an expert, you should agree upon the very evolutionary reasons that have led to such a dispute. We are “biological robots”, optimized to perform in conflicts, excel, advertise ourselves, intimidate our rivals and so on and so forth (I won’t take the Nobel prize of literature no matter how hard I try, but I hope you are aware of that fact!). Do you really expect that by outsmarting me in this conversation that you are going to convert this victory into offspring? That there’s females reading this that will ask for your babies as a response to this post? Your eagerness to prove me wrong without having the slightest association of such an action contributing in your gene propagation, is actually proving me right. The probability density of sequences (basically 1 dimensional objects in this life tree of this planet) of our replicator is not the outcome of the same algorithm for recent mankind and rest history of life, including protobiology. Haven’t you noticed? How can one extend the Darwinian scheme into a world where the actual reasons of our optimization are projected onto e.g. substitutes, simulations, peripheral phenomena? If your amazing fitness is converted e.g. into a career, where’s the continuity with the Darwinian world?

Allele frequencies of sapiens are subject to change nowadays, but in a way irrelevant to what we mean by conventional natural selection. It is possible to accommodate what’s happening into a theory of natural selection that is generalized appropriately. But the essential piece of information in this conversation, the extract in a handful of words, is that humans are at the moment getting dumber, as well as genetically inferior in almost every conceivable aspect, as compared to themselves in the recent evolutionary past. The fact that you are an expert does not make your claim correct. Your arguments should :).

The answer to that question is yes. As explained in the original post.

I’m not a good writer who happened to write a bad article about a subject I don’t know much about. I’m a PhD wielding evolutionary biologist who wrote an OK article about a topic in which I am an expert. That does not mean what I said was correct. But it does mean that your comments about what sort of writer I am are not relevant!

Go re-read the post and check back with us. Thanks.

Mr. Laden, I think you seem to be an extremely intelligent author who wrote, in my opinion, a bad article about this topic. If you think of an artificial environment for the bison, where if the bison has no fur and thiner skin you put him in air-condition, if it has no horns, has weaker muscles to fight and run, you are gonna have a machine to shoot the wolves, if it can’t chew the grass you will push it throw its mouth with a tube, you let him breathe and claimed that one can appropriately generalize the conventional Darwinian paradigm in order to accommodate this clearly unprecedented situation (a wolf-killing robot is some kind of environmental factor after all), it would be a not so informative accurate thing to say. The average reader of your article would have liked to have an answer to the question “is the bison still really evolving?”, for which he would get the wrong message. But trying to fit elements of a conventional Darwinian approach under the carpet would not be acceptable. In parts of your article I feel we live on a different planet. Sexual selection? You see that handsome guy with the abdomen muscles and you think “oh my, that guy should have at leasts 100 babies”? Or instead that he has greater chances of having several sexual partners? On which planet did you make those observations? A simple alpha male of a simple hunting tribe used to breed with all females of the tribe. The probably most intelligent human of the last couple of thousand years, John von Neumann, had what, one? A fanatic kept alive by drugs and medical equipment designed by a genius in order to put a kerchief and burn the genitals of his spouse has 13. If your approach is right, I don’t mean what I say in any racist way whatsoever, there should be some profound recent changes in fitness of Europeans compared to that for example Nigerians. In a few decades Europeans have seen their relative population on earth from about 20 to about 4 per cent and Nigerians within a few decades will be about 10 out of a tiny fraction. You can not claim that what used to happen with allele frequencies of human populations is still pretty much going on without serious discontinuities. Your model is supposed to describe the dynamics of the sapiens gene pool, not rely on the 5 people that were eaten by lions to reach a verdict.

I will not respond to comments of such level that include the phrase “your mom” in such a conversation.