How does modern society affect human evolution?
For example, being strong or being smart in the past meant there was more likelihood you could survive, whereas in modern society weak members of society are protected and everyone has equal opportunity to mate.
The other thing in modern society is that people tend to marry people they have similiar qualities. For example, good looking people tend to marry other good looking people, smart people tend to marry other smart people. Short people will marry other short people.
In addition, people who mate will more likely bring up children that have similar qualities to them.
Wouldn’t eventually you would have two human races? One race full of people with really good qualities like being tall, intelligent, good looking etc. and another race with all the bad qualities like being short, ugly, stupid etc. Qualities that once would’ve been weeded out by natural selection, but is kept because modern society provides welfare to.
Bonus aspect – non-educated people tend to have more kids, whilst educated people tend to have less kids. How does that affect the balance of evolution. Would there be a minority of superior people, and a whole bunch of really inferior people?
By: junkette
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Filed under Biology by on Jan 4th, 2010. 
Comments on How does modern society affect human evolution?
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This is a very interesting well-thought out question.
All the points you made are valid but one thing you left out is, Why do you think intellectually and physically superior people protect those who are inferior to them? Let’s look at the distribution of wealth in society, if everyone was rich, who would for them? No one.
And I dont think its remotely possible to eventually have 2 human races. This is where mutation comes in. Nature will take its course, it always does.
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I think you hit the nail on the head in the last paragraph
Looks and personality both play a big part in ‘finding a mate’ but that’s needless to say that more attractive, nicer people would have anymore children than the converse
I think the best way is to look at who has the most children and that is the less educated poorer people, you could argue that the child born from these people could be naturally intelligent (a nature nurture debate for another time). However if this ‘intelligent child’ is brought up in this poor environment it is highly unlikely their potential will be taken advantage of, this is where the rich-poor divide comes in, the poor get poorer the rich get richer and there is little that the poor can do to change this as the education in the poorer areas is not as good as that of richer areas. (Think this is why the three most important things for a country are education, education, education). Nextif you look at birthrates in MEDCs they are very close to deathrate, i.e. and if the poor uneducated are breeding like bunnies that means the richer more educated will deplete in numbers
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You are right that modern society has largely switched off evolution because of medical care, birth control, social rules, etc. Because of this deleterious mutations ought to accumulate in the population over time.
Your idea of two human races appearing is not a new one. H. G. Wells foresaw exactly that in his novel The Time Machine, where humanity has split into the Eloi and the Morlocks.
I don’t think it will happen though. It takes a long period of reproductive isolation for new species to form. If you think about the amount of time that the African Bushmen, the Australian Aborigines, the Scandinavian Sami and the South American Fuegians have been isolated from one another, yet they are all still human. In modern societies there will always be enough crossover between social classes to prevent us becoming different species.