Considering the title of this forum, I am suprised that no one has thought of this

[CelticMuscle]

Back in 1931, an author called Edmond Hamilton wrote a short story called "The Man who Evolved" and told of a scientist who had worked out that evolution was controlled by cosmic radiation and so came to the conclusion "What would happen if that radiation was concentrated into a single area?" and so built a contraption to do just that and being the erstwhile scientist tested it on himself with two other scientists as witnesses. He did the evolution in fifty million year doses (about 15 minutes) and the first one would appeal to a lot of members here:

Pollard stood inside the cube, staggering as though still dazed by the impact of the experience, but he was not the Pollard who had entered the chamber! He was transfigured, godlike! His body had literally expanded into a great figure of such physical power and beauty as we had not imagined could exist! He was many inches taller and broader, his skin a clear pink, every limb and muscle molded as though by some master sculptor.

The greatest change, though, was in his face. Pollard's homely, good-humored features were gone, replaced by a face whose perfectly-cut features held the stamp of immense intellectual power that shone almost overpoweringly from the dear dark eyes. It was not Pollard who stood before us, I told myself, but a being as far above us as the most advanced man of today is above the troglodyte!

He was stepping out of the cube and his voice reached our ears, clear and bell-like, triumphant.

"You see? It worked as I knew it would work! I'm fifty million years ahead of the rest of humanity in evolutionary development!"

"Pollard!" My lips moved with difficulty. "Pollard, this is terrible?this change?"

His radiant eyes flashed. "Terrible? It's wonderful! Do you two realize what I now am, can you realize it? This body of mine is the kind of body all men will have in fifty million years, and the brain inside it is a brain fifty million years ahead of yours in development!"

[falseyedee]

great premise. i'll have to look it up. given the date it is probably still covered by copyright.

[pizzadaddy]

well the problem with this is that its not at all how evolution works... change it with supersoldier serum and its right on

[BigBen]

Where can I get hold of this story? (UK)

[nnnrg]

Yeah, evolution doesn't work that way, but it would be cool if it did. If everything were an improvement rather than a lazy adaptation.

Seriously, the movie Idiocracy is a much better model of the short-term evolutionary adjustment humanity is pushing on itself. Evolution is the statistical model of changes to a species as stresses on the species affect its reproduction. The famous law of evolution - survival of the fittest - was a bad rephrase. A species changes because the members of the species who reproduce more effectively - their offspring survive to reproduce - carry traits, via genetic AND socialization (for smarter vertebrates) that allow them to continue to reproduce effectively when something in the environment makes it harder for others to do so. That's all it is. No brains involved. In fact, the less change that's required to the animals the easier the evolution is. There hasn't been much in the way of study of the social aspects of change because they're not 'speciated' by DNA or epigenetic factors, but lions on one side of the Serengeti behave differently than those on the other, because of differences in their learned social behaviors, and they interact with humans differently because of it. And that has had a distinct effect on how well they survive.

Evolution goes FAST for things that reproduce quickly, slow for things that do not, except when humans get into it. Humans like to select what gets to breed, and so we have freaky teacup dogs and giant wolfhounds, all the same "species" who could in theory interbreed. We have been breeding against intelligence and training against reason - smarter people don't have kids, and television is generally controlled by people who do not want their viewers to think objectively about what they buy. And this is part of the ongoing money game.

A few years ago I attended ARGFest, an alternate reality gaming convention - and learned a lot about how people perceive reality, how games and abstractions form so much of what we think is real, and how conscious creation of games and conscious awareness of how they reward and entice has been used to make them more effective tools for advertising and selling - because they're fun.

The "I Love Bees" campaign which introduced Halo2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Love_Bees ) was exactly this kind of thing.

The thing is, once I realized the basic concept I started seeing Reality Games everywhere. Politics especially, but money. Money is a self-evolving reatlity game that humanity has been playing for about 4000 years. The attempts to break it or divert from it have failed because it works better at motivating its players and helps their survival better than any of the alternatives that have been devised - because it's a "selfish" game and doesn't appear to be a zero-sum game.

Evolution is not a smart thing. We can tweak it. The question is, do we want to, will it make us survive better? In the "Transform" stories, humanity is on the brink of becoming highly durable and much more individually powerful, adaptable, and of course sexier, but it's only half of humanity that gets to do this and the change is causing social transformation such that the "games" being played are purely based on changing the rest of humanity, inventing new ways to have mind-blowing sex, or becoming 'one with the universe' - i.e. disappearing. And the more they do this, the less likely it becomes that humanity will survive. (2525, if man is still alive?)

There have been a number of similar stories, but one of my favorites is actually something that recurs. Leigh Brackett, the woman with the ambiguous pen name that let her thrive in the years when Only Men Wrote Science Fiction, and the woman who wrote the basis (along with Lawrence Kasdan) of the GOOD star wars movies - she died partway through the screenwriting process for Empire Strikes Back - wrote a number of Mars stories with a space-opera techno-grit feel, and with the original Martians.

One of those was "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" - at https://archive.org/details/TheBeast-jewelOfMars - with the following scene of "evolution" - actually 'de-evolution'...

(description from the beginning of the story)
Burk Winters was a big man, and a tough man, tempered by years of deep-space flying. The same glare of naked light that had burned his skin so dark had bleached his hair until it was almost white, and just in the last few months his gray eyes seemed to have caught and held a spark of that pitiless radiance. The easy good nature was gone out of them, and the lines that laughter had shaped around his mouth had deepened now into bitter scars.

A big man, a hard man, but a man who was no longer in control of himself. All during the voyage out from Earth he had chain-smoked the little Venusian cigarettes that have a sedative effect. He was smoking one now, and even so he could not keep his hands steady nor stop the everlasting tic in his right cheek.

(Burk is looking for his fiance' who became addicted to the "drug" of Shanga. This is the scene where "shanga" is introduced...)

A Martian woman sat in an alcove, behind a glassite desk. She was dark, sophisticatedly lovely. Her costume was the artfully adapted short robe of ancient Mars, and she wore no ornament. Her slanting topaz eyes regarded Burk Winters with professional pleasantness, but deep in them he could see the scorn and the pride of a race so old that the Terran exquisites of the Trade Cities were only crude children beside it.

"Captain Winters." she said. "How nice to see you again."

He was in no mood for conventional pleasantries. "I want to see Kor Hal," he said. "Now."

"I'm afraid . . ." she began. Then she took another look at Winters' face and turned to the intercom. Presently she said, "You may go in."

He pushed open the door that led into the interior of the building, which consisted almost entirely of a huge solarium. Glassite walls enclosed it. Around the sides were many small cells, containing only a padded table. The roofs of the cells were quartz, and acted as mammoth lenses.

Skirting the solarium on the way to Kor Hal's office, Winters' mouth twisted with contempt as he looked through the transparent wall.

An exotic forest blossomed there. Trees, ferns, brilliant flowers, soft green sward, a myriad of birds. And through this mock-primitive playground wandered the men and women who were devotees of Shanga.

They lay first on the padded tables and let the radiation play with them. Winters knew. Neuro-psychic therapy, the doctors called it. Heritage of the lost wisdom of old Mars. Specific for the jangled nerves and overwrought emotions of modern man, who lived too fast in too complex an environment.

You lie there and the radiation tingles through you. Your glandular balance tips a little. Your brain slows down. All sorts of strange and pleasant things happen inside of you, while the radiation tinkers with nerves and reflexes and metabolism. And pretty soon you're a child again, in an evolutionary sort of way.

Shanga, the going-back. Mentally, and just a tiny bit physically, back to the primitive, until the effect wore off and the normal balance restored itself. And even then, for a while, you felt better and happier, because you'd had one hell of a rest, from everything.

Their pampered white bodies incongruously clad in skins and bits of colored cloth, the Earthlings of Kahora played and fought among the trees, and their worries were simple ones concerning food and love and strings of gaudy beads.

Hidden away out of sight were watchful men with shock guns. Sometimes someone went a little bit too far down the road. Winters knew. He had been knocked cold himself, on his last visit here. He remembered that he had tried to kill a man.

Or rather, he had been told that he had tried to kill a man. One did not remember much of the interludes of Shanga. That was one reason people liked it. One was free of inhibitions.

Fashionable vice, made respectable by the cloak of science. It was a new kind of excitement, a new kind of escape from the glittering complexities of life. The Terrans were mad for it.

But only the Terrans. The barbaric Venusians were still too close to the savage to have any need for it, and the Martians were too old and wise in sin to use it. Besides, thought Winters, they made Shanga. They know.

(and the scene in question, in the Dryland city of Valkis, stronghold of the ancient Martian race)

"Everything is ready, Winters. Halk, show him the way."

The Keshi nodded and went off, with Winters at his heels.

This was very different from the Hall of Shanga in Kahora. Within these walls of quarried stone, men and women had lived and loved and died in violence. The blood and tears of centuries had dried in the cracks between the flags. The rugs, the tapestries, and the furnishings were worth a fortune as antiques. Their beauty was worn, but still bright.

At the end of a corridor was a bronze door, pierced by a narrow grille.

Halk stopped. He said to Winters, "Strip."

Winters hesitated. He carried a gun, and he did not like to leave it behind. "Why out here? I'd rather have my clothes with me."

Halk said, "Strip here. It is the rule."

Winters obeyed.

He walked naked into the narrow cell. There was no comfortable table here, only a few skins thrown on the bare floor. A barred opening showed darkly in the opposite wall.

The bronze door rang shut behind him and he heard the great bar drop into place. It was completely dark. He was really afraid, now. Terribly afraid. But it was too late for that. It had been too late, for a long time.

Ever since Jill Leland was lost.

He lay down on the hides. High above, in the vault of the roof, he could make out a faint, vague shimmering. It grew brighter. Presently he saw that it was a prism set into the stone, rather large and cut from a crystalline substance that was the color of fire.

Kor Hal's voice reached him through the grille. "Earthman!"

"Yes?"

"That prism is one of the Jewels of Shanga. The wise men of Caer Dhu carved them half a million years ago. Only they knew the secret of the substance, and the shaping of the facets. There are only three of the jewels left."

Sparks that were more energy than light flickered on the stone walls of the cell. Gold and orange and greenish blue. Little flames, the fire of Shanga, to burn the heart.

Because he was afraid, Winters said, "But the radiation, the ray that comes through the prism. Is it the same as that in Kahora?"

"Yes. The secret of the projectors was lost also with Caer Dhu. Presumably they use cosmic rays. By substituting ordinary quartz for the prisms, we could make the radiation weak enough for our purpose in the Trade Cities."

"Who is 'we,' Kor Hal?"

Laughter, soft and wicked. "Earthman - we are Mars!"

Dancing fire, growing, growing, glinting on his flesh, darting through his blood, his brain. It was not like this in the solariums, with their pretty trees. It was pleasure there, tantalizing, heady pleasure. It was exciting, and strange. But this . . .

His body began to move, to arch itself into strong writhing curves. He thought he could not endure the lovely, lovely pain.

Kor Hal's voice boomed down some huge fateful distance. "The wise men of Caer Dhu were not so wise. They found the secret of Shanga, and they escaped their wars and their troubles by fleeing backward along the path of evolution. Do you know what happened to them? They perished, Earthman! In one generation, Caer Dhu vanished from the face of Mars." It was getting hard to answer, hard to think. Winters said hoarsely, "Did it matter? They were happy, while they lived."

"Are you happy, Earthman?"

"Yes!" he panted. "Yes!"

The words were only half articulate. Twisting, rolling on the hide rugs, in the grip of such magnificent, unholy sensation as he had never dreamed of before, Burk Winters was happy. The fire of Shanga blazed down upon him like a melting away, and there was nothing left but joy.

Again, Kor Hal laughed.

* * *

After that, Winters was not sure of anything. His mind rocked, and there were periods of darkness. When he was conscious, he knew only a feeling of strangeness. But he carried one memory with him, at least part way down that eerie road.

During a lucid period, a space of only a minute or two, he thought that one of the stones had rolled back to reveal a quartzite screen, and that through the screen a face looked at him, watching as he bathed naked in the beautiful flame.

A woman's face. Martian, highbred, with strong delicate bones and arrogant brows, and a red mouth that would be like a bittersweet fruit to kiss. Her eyes were golden as the fire, and as hot, and proud, and scornful.

There must have been a microphone in the wall, for she spoke and he heard her voice, full of a sweet cruel magic. She called his name. He could not rise, but he managed to crawl toward her, and to his reeling brain she was part of the unearthly force that played with him. A destruction and a fascination, as irresistible as death.

To his alien eyes, she was not as lovely as Jill. But there was a power in her. And her red mouth taunted him, and the curve of her bare shoulders drove him to madness.

"You're strong," she said. "You will live, until the end. And that is well, Burk Winters."

He tried to speak, but he could no longer form the words.

She smiled. "You have challenged me, Earthman. I know. You've challenged Shanga. You're brave, and I like brave men. You're also a fool, and I like fools, because they give me sport. I'm looking forward, Earthman, to the moment when you reach the end of your search!"

He tried again to speak, and failed, and then the night and the silence came to stay. He took the sound of her mocking laughter with him into the dark.

* * *

He did not think of himself now as Captain Burk Winters, but only by the short personal name of Burk. The stones upon which he lay were cold and hard. It was pitch-dark, but his eyes and ears were very keen. He could tell by the sound of his breathing that he was in a closed space, and he did not like it.

A low growl rumbled in his throat. The hairs stiffened at the back of his neck. He tried to remember how he had come here. Something had happened, something to do with fire, but he did not know what, or why.

Only one thing he knew. He was searching for something. It was gone, and he wanted it back. The wanting was a pain in him. He could not remember what the object was that he wanted, but the need for it was greater than any obstacle short of death.

He rose and began to explore his prison.

Almost at once he found an opening. Cautious testing told him that there was a passage beyond. He could see nothing, but the air that blew in to him was very heavy with strange smells. Instinct told him that it was a trap. He crouched resolute, his hands opening and closing in desire for a weapon. There was no weapon. Presently he went into the passage, moving without sound.

He went a long way, his shoulders brushing stone on either side. Then he saw light ahead, red and flickering, and the air brought him the taint of smoke, and the smell of man.

Very, very slowly, the creature called Burk padded toward the light.

He came close to the end of the tunnel, and suddenly a barred gate dropped behind him with a ringing clash. He could not go back.

He did not wish to go back. Enemies were in front of him, and he wished to fight. He knew now that he could not come upon them secretly. Flexing his great chest, he leaped out boldly from the tunnel mouth.

The tossing glare of torches dazzled his eyes, and a wild mob howl deafened him. He stood alone on a great block -- the old slave block of Valkis, though he did not know that. They stared up, jeering at the Earthman who had tasted the forbidden fruit that even the soulless men of the Low Canals would not touch.

The creature called Burk was still a man, but a man already shadowed by the ape. During the hours he had bathed in the light of Shanga, he had changed physically. Bone and flesh had altered under the accelerated urging of glands and increased metabolism.

Already a big, powerful man, he had thickened and coarsened along the lines of brutish strength. His jaw and brow ridges jutted. Thick hair covered his chest and limbs and extended in a rudimentary mane down the back of his neck. His deep-set eyes had a hard and cunning gleam of intelligence, but it was the intelligence of the primitive mind that had learned to speak and make fire and weapons, and no more than that.

Half crouching, he glared down at the crowd. He did not know who these men were; he hated them. They were of another tribe, and their very smell was alien. They hated him, too. The air bristled with their enmity.

His gaze fell on a man who stepped out lightly and proudly into the empty space. He did not remember that this man's name was Kor Hal. He did not notice that Kor Hal had shed the white tunic of the Trade Cities for the kilt and girdle of the Low Canals, nor that he wore in his ears the pierced gold rings of Barrakesh, and was now honestly himself - a bandit, born and bred among a race of bandits who had been civilized for so long that they could afford to forget it.

Burk knew only that this man was his particular enemy.

"Captain Burk Winters," said Kor Hal. "Man of the tribe of Terra, Lords of the spaceways, builders of the Trade Cities, masters of greed and rapine."

------

I found that scene incredibly hot when I was in high school.

There was a similar story, using magic rather than science, and not calling it "evolution" but implying it: The Maze of Ma?l Dweb by Clark Ashton Smith

I found it here, but I'm not sure of its legality. http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/130

The key scene, cut and pasted...

It seemed now, as Tiglari went on, that his every step was predestined. He was no longer free to choose his way; for many of the paths were overgrown by things that he did not care to face; and others were blocked by horrid portcullises of cacti, or ended in pools that teemed with leeches larger than tunnies. The second and third suns arose, heightening with their emerald and carmine rays the horror of the strange web closing ineluctably about him.

He climbed on by stairs that reptilian vines had taken, and gradients lined with tossing, clashing aloes. Rarely, could he see the reaches below, or the levels toward which he was tending. Somewhere on the blind path he met one of the ape-like animals of Maal Dweb: a dark, savage creature, sleek and glistening like a wet otter, as if it bathed in one of the pools. It passed him with a hoarse growl, recoiling as the others had done fron his repulsively smeared body... But nowhere could he find the maiden Athl?, or the warrior Mocair, who had preceded him into the maze.

Now he came to a curious little pavement of onyx, oblong, and surrounded by enormous flowers with bronze-like stems and great leaning bells that might have been the mouths of chimeras, yawning to disclose their crimson throats. He stepped forward upon the pavement through a narrow gap in this siagular hedge, and stood staring irresolutely at the serried blooms: for here the way seemed to end.

The onyx beaeath his feet was wet with some unknown, sticky fluid. A quick sense of peril stirred within him, and he turned to retrace his steps. At his first movement toward the opening through which he had entered, a long tendril like a wire of bronze recoiled with lightning rapidity from the base of each of the flower sterns, and closed about his ankles. He stood trapped and helpless at the center of a taut net. Then, while he struggled impotently, the stems began to lean and tilt toward him, till the red mouths of their blossoms were close about his knees like a circle of fawning monsters.

Nearer they came, almost touching him. From their lips a clear, hueless liquid, dripping slowly at first, and then running in little rills, descended on his feet and ankles and shanks. Indescribably, his flesh crawled beneath it; then there was a passing numbness; then a furious stinging like the bites of innumerable insects. Between the crowding heads of the flowers, he saw that his legs had undergone a mysterious and horrifying change. Their natural hairiness had thickened, had assumed a shaggy pile like the fur of apes; the shanks themselves had somehow shortened and the feet had grown longer, with uncouth finger-like toes such as were possessed by the animals of Maal Dweb.

In a frenzy of nameless alarm, he drew his broken-tipped knife and began to slash at the flowers. It was as if he had assailed the armored heads of dragons, or had struck at ringing bells of iron. The blade snapped at the hilt. Then the blossoms, lifting hideously, were leaning about his waist, were laving his hips and thighs in their thin, evil slaver.

With the senses of one who drowns in nightmare, he heard the startled cry of a woman. Above the tilted flowers he beheld a strange scene which the hitherto impenetrable maze, parting as if by magic, had revealed. Fifty feet away, on the same level as the onyx pavement, there stood an elliptic dais of moon-white stone at whose center the maiden Athl?, emerging from the labyrinth on a raised, porphyry walk, had paused in an attitude of wonder. Before her, in the claws of an immense marble lizard that reared above the dais, a round mirror of steely metal was held upright. Athl?, as if fascinated by some strange vision, was peering into the disk. Midway between the pavement and the dais, a row of slender brazen columns rose at broad intervals, topped with graven heads like demoniac Termini.

Tiglari would have called out to Athl?. But at that moment she took a single step toward the mirror, as if drawn by something that she saw in its depths; and the dull disk seemed to brighten with some internal, incandescent flame. The hunter's eyes were blinded by the spiky rays that leapt forth from it for an instant, enveloping and transfixing the maiden. When the dimness cleared away in whirling blots of color, he saw that Athl?, in a pose of statuesque rigidity, was still regarding the mirror with startled eyes. She had not moved; the wonder was frozen on her face; and it came to Tiglari that she was like the women who slept an enchanted slumber in the harem of Maal Dweb. Even as this thought occurred to him, he heard a ringing chorus of metallic voices that seemed to emanate from the graven demon heads of the columns.

'The maiden Athl?,' announced the voices in solemn and portentous tones, 'has beheld herself in the mirror of Eternity, and has passed beyond the changes and corruptions of Time.'

Tiglari felt as if he were sinking into some obscure and terrible fen. He could comprehend nothing of what had befallen Athl?; and his own fate was an equally dark and dreadful enigma, beyond the solution of a simple hunter.

Now the blossoms had lifted about his shoulders, were laving his arms, his body. Beneath their abhorrent alchemy the transformation continued. A long fur sprang up on the thickening torso; the arms lengthened: they became simian; the hands took on a likeness to the feet. From the neck downward, Tiglari differed in no wise from the apish creatures of the garden.

In helpless abject horror, he waited for the completion of the metamorphosis. Then he became aware that a man in sober garments, with eyes and mouth filled with the weariness of strange things, was standing before him. Behind the man were two of the sickle-handed iron automatons. In a somewhat languid voice, the man uttered an unknown word that vibrated in the air with prolonged mysterious aftertones. The circle of craning flowers drew back from Tiglari, resuming their former upright positions in a close hedge; and the wiry tendrils were withdrawn from his ankles. Hardly able to comprehend his release, he heard a sound of brazen voices, and knew dimly that the demon heads of the columns had spoken, saying:

'The hunter Tiglari has been laved in the nectar of the blossoms of primordial life, and has become in all ways, from the neck downward, even as the beasts that he hunted.'

When the chorus ceased, the weary man in sober raiment came nearer and addressed him:

'I, Maal Dweb, had planned to deal with you precisely as I dealt with Mocair and many others. Mocair was the beast that you met in the labyrinth, with new-made fur still sleek and wet from the liquor of the flowers; and you saw some of his predcecssors about the palace. However, I find that my whims are not always the same. You, Tiglari, unlike the others shall at least remain a man from the neck upward; you are free to resume your wanderings in the labyrinth, and escape from it if you can. I do not wish to see you again, and my clemency springs from another reasom than esteem for your kind. Go now: the maze has many windings which you are yet to traverse.'

A great awe was upon Tiglari; his native fierceness, his savage volition, were tamed by the enchanter's languid will. With one backward look of concern and wonder at Athl?, he withdrew obediently, slouching like a huge ape. His fur glistening wetly to the three suns, he vanished amid the labyrinth.

--------

Both stories, a manly man made primitive by his attempt to rescue his fair maiden. That's a common theme in the de-evolution stories too, just as forced muscle growth and hyper-sexuality sometimes show up here, as a metaphor of the changes of adolescence. In the first, Burk finds his Jill, but she's trapped in cave-woman state. In the second, Tiglari is sent off to be with the ape-men. Perhaps they'll appreciate him better than the cold, now-sterile beauty of the woman who was playing her many suitors off against each other.

[muscle16a]

Originally Posted by BigBen

Where can I get hold of this story? (UK)

It's not hard to find. Here is the "Kindle" edition


Amazon.com: The Man Who Evolved eBook: Edmond Hamilton: Kindle Store

(personally, I don't use Kindle, as I love the feel of a real book in my hands)

It is also in several collections of his short stories, including his "Best of..." book:


The Best of Edmond Hamilton: Edmond Hamilton, Leigh Brackett:...

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

A species changes because the members of the species who reproduce more effectively - their offspring survive to reproduce - carry traits, via genetic AND socialization (for smarter vertebrates) that allow them to continue to reproduce effectively when something in the environment makes it harder for others to do so.

Close, but not quite. There is no such thing as positive selective pressure, only negative selective pressure. It's not that "trait X helps to reproduce" but rather that "trait X hinders reproduction".

We have been breeding against intelligence and training against reason - smarter people don't have kids

Not actually true, according to statistics. There's a correlation between poverty and reproduction, but if you think "rich people are smart" you haven't been paying attention; rich people tend to be extremely stupid and short-sighted.

television is generally controlled by people who do not want their viewers to think objectively about what they buy. And this is part of the ongoing money game.

Media has been controlled by people who don't want people to think since before there was "media". (Religion has always had a vested interest in keeping people stupid and uninquisitive, and religions were the gatekeepers to the written word before modern media developed. Or have you forgotten things like the way the Catholic Church used to put people to death if they translated the Wholly Babble into the vernacular, for fear that people might begin to notice things like their demonic god ordering genocides throughout the first half of the book, or the way the gospels disagree about who was at "the tomb" after the crucifixion, or that it's specified that everyone but Jesus was asleep in the garden of Gethsemane but we still somehow have a record of his monologue...) The Powers That Be know that they have a choice between dominating each new and popular medium or else losing at least some of their power.

That said, I don't think there has been a medium before the advent of film and TV which so visibly shut down conscious thought. Even with so-called "smart" TV shows, you can almost see people's brains go dormant when they watch. (And then they think they're being clever for passively watching a remake of a remake of a Sherlock Holmes story which wasn't particularly good in the 19th century.)

Look at the bright side: between the fact that we're now a little past Peak Oil by the oil companies' own estimates, the fact that the IPCC reports make it clear that climate change is going to be vastly faster and worse than the media makes it sound, the fact that within a few years the antibiotic-resistant diseases will be everywhere, all the time, thanks to the meat industry, and the fact that our governments now more or less explicitly consider their own citizens to be "the enemy", to be spied upon, shot at, and locked away for life if not killed outright, humanity as a whole is probably going to kill itself within a century or two, maybe even faster.

Both stories, a manly man made primitive by his attempt to rescue his fair maiden. That's a common theme in the de-evolution stories too, just as forced muscle growth and hyper-sexuality sometimes show up here, as a metaphor of the changes of adolescence. In the first, Burk finds his Jill, but she's trapped in cave-woman state. In the second, Tiglari is sent off to be with the ape-men. Perhaps they'll appreciate him better than the cold, now-sterile beauty of the woman who was playing her many suitors off against each other.

Or it could all turn out to be a long dream...

[Mdlftr]

Originally Posted by tekuno

.............................
Look at the bright side: between the fact that we're now a little past Peak Oil by the oil companies' own estimates, the fact that the IPCC reports make it clear that climate change is going to be vastly faster and worse than the media makes it sound, the fact that within a few years the antibiotic-resistant diseases will be everywhere, all the time, thanks to the meat industry, and the fact that our governments now more or less explicitly consider their own citizens to be "the enemy", to be spied upon, shot at, and locked away for life if not killed outright, humanity as a whole is probably going to kill itself within a century or two, maybe even faster.



Or it could all turn out to be a long dream...

I think it's time for Bobby Ewing to come out of the shower and jump the shark with Fonzie!


Reality: depressing in real life
Reality on a fantasy website: Really, REALLY depressing!

[Kit Werecat]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

A species changes because the members of the species who reproduce more effectively - their offspring survive to reproduce - carry traits, via genetic AND socialization (for smarter vertebrates) that allow them to continue to reproduce effectively when something in the environment makes it harder for others to do so.

So I guess that means that persons that are the most attractive aesthetically, and are most hung physically, and the most promiscuous sexually, are going to be the predominant manipulator of the human species. That means eventually the world will be dominated by cute horny hung teenagers!

Seriously though, CelticMuscle, I think your thread got hijacked!

I really don't think CelticMuscle was putting this out to represent his views of evolution; I think he was just offering it up as a rather interesting plot device to use for growth stories. It also shows that H.G. Wells wasn't the only one back then who dared to think about deliberate enhancing of the human form into very attractive and powerful beings.

You have to admit, it's a little more original than secretly-developed pills or magic potions (not that I don't like those stories - a lot!).



But I guess as long as everyone else has put in their nickel's worth on the subject, I'll toss in my two cents:

How evolution worked on the human species in the past won't amount to a hill of beans in the future. All bets are off, and it's now going to be a whole new paradigm.

I really think that man's knowledge on how to successfully "tinker" with his own physical development will far exceed anything that can be done naturally. It's already happening, with height and longevity.

Considering how long it takes normal evolution to have a noticeable affect, while man's knowledge about DNA manipulation expands almost exponentially on a year-to-year basis, I believe it will ultimately be man's view of an ideal human that will be the ultimate factor as to how we evolve as a species. It will therefore be an evolution based on what society views as ideal (or at minimum, pragmatical), rather than any consequential result of cause and effect.

Although some of us feel horrified by that thought, I'm not sure that I am. Like anything, there are the good and perverse sides to the problem. I'm sure many members on this forum would love it if humans started exhibiting some of the characteristics that they write about. Me too.

CelticMuscle, I'll have to check out the story.

Muscle16a, Thank You for the link. I own a kindle, so I'll probably check it out electronically, as you suggested.

Finally this forum is living up to its name: "The Evolution Forum".

[Reeza]

I think I devolved while reading this thread, me feel so stoopid now. My brain has an owie!

But seriously, who would suspect that intelligent discussions of such depth and insight would be taking place on this forum. Dudes, you rock! I've never been so proud of being a member here.

With regard to our ideas about what a highly evolved species would look like, isn't it interesting that the most common representation of humanoids from an advanced world outside our solar system are the willowy "grays" with huge heads, spindly limbs, and no muscle?

[outsider]

Actually, we're rolling in oil again and should be oil independent in a few years.

[skumbum]

Originally Posted by CelticMuscle

Back in 1931, an author called Edmond Hamilton wrote a short story called "The Man who Evolved" and told of a scientist who had worked out that evolution was controlled by cosmic radiation and so came to the conclusion "What would happen if that radiation was concentrated into a single area?" and so built a contraption to do just that and being the erstwhile scientist tested it on himself with two other scientists as witnesses. He did the evolution in fifty million year doses (about 15 minutes) and the first one would appeal to a lot of members here:

This sounds awesome. I understand that's not how evolution works.

[skumbum]

Pollard stood inside the cube, staggering as though still dazed by the impact of the experience, but he was not the Pollard who had entered the chamber! He was transfigured, godlike! His body had literally expanded into a great figure of such physical power and beauty as we had not imagined could exist! He was many inches taller and broader, his skin a clear pink, every limb and muscle molded as though by some master sculptor.

The greatest change, though, was in his face. Pollard's homely, good-humored features were gone, replaced by a face whose perfectly-cut features held the stamp of immense intellectual power that shone almost overpoweringly from the dear dark eyes. It was not Pollard who stood before us, I told myself, but a being as far above us as the most advanced man of today is above the troglodyte!

He was stepping out of the cube and his voice reached our ears, clear and bell-like, triumphant.

"You see? It worked as I knew it would work! I'm fifty million years ahead of the rest of humanity in evolutionary development!"

"Pollard!" My lips moved with difficulty. "Pollard, this is terrible?this change?"

His radiant eyes flashed. "Terrible? It's wonderful! Do you two realize what I now am, can you realize it? This body of mine is the kind of body all men will have in fifty million years, and the brain inside it is a brain fifty million years ahead of yours in development!"

"I can destroy all life on this earth from this room, if I desire. I can construct a telescope that will allow me to look on the planets the farthest galaxies! I can send my mind forth to make contact with other minds without the slightest material connection. And you think it terrible that I should rule your race! I will not rule them, I will own them and this planet as you might own a farm and animals!"

"You couldn't!" I cried. "Pollard, if there is anything of Pollard left in you, give up that thought! We'll kill you ourselves before we'll let you start a monstrous rule of men!"

"We will--by God, we will!" Dutton cried, his face twitching.

We had started desperately forward toward the great head but stopped suddenly in our tracks as his great eyes met ours. I found myself walking backward to where I had stood, walking back and Dutton with me, like two automatons.

"So you two would try to kill me? Why, I could direct you without a word to kill yourselves and you'd do so in an instant! What chance has your puny will and brain against mine? And what chance will all the force of men have against me when a glance from me will make them puppets of my will?"

The story goes off in a weird direction, but one of our talented authors could do amazing things with this premise.

P.S. It reminds me of this: http://www.musclegrowth.org/forum/sh...ad.php?t=26221

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by outsider

Actually, we're rolling in oil again and should be oil independent in a few years.

If you examine the study which has produced that headline, it's unrealistically optimistic in a number of ways:

- It assumes that governments worldwide will produce new and more effective energy efficiency mandates well before 2020 (which is unrealistic)

- It assumes that demand will cease to grow with the trend which has been followed for the last several decades as new technologies come online (which is against historical behavior)

- It assumes that the recent rise of 15% in oil production is the basis of a trend which will continue, without specifying where, precisely, the extra oil fields are going to be found (which is pure madness), except by saying "farmland" (look out for food price increases!)

- It assumes that rising prices will force demand downward ? we won't be oil-self-sufficient because we will have enough to meet the uses we currently have, we'll be oil-self-sufficient because oil will be so expensive that many of the things which currently use oil will stop happening at all, so our total usage will fall (which is dishonest)

But hey, if it helps you get to sleep at night, whatever.

[nnnrg]

Originally Posted by tekuno

Close, but not quite. There is no such thing as positive selective pressure, only negative selective pressure. It's not that "trait X helps to reproduce" but rather that "trait X hinders reproduction".

Read it again please. I did not say anything about positive nor negative selective pressure, I only mentioned selective pressure: able to produce offspring that survive to create more offspring. Whether "positive" or "negative" pressures exist meaningfully isn't proven to my satisfaction. YMMV.

Originally Posted by tekuno

Not actually true, according to statistics. There's a correlation between poverty and reproduction, but if you think "rich people are smart" you haven't been paying attention; rich people tend to be extremely stupid and short-sighted.

Actually I haven't double-checked the figures, but census data in the 1990s and early 2000s allegedly showed that there was a significant difference between the educated and uneducated - with uneducated having more children starting younger, and educated having fewer starting later, and the trend increasing over time. What this has to do with wealth? Obviously the rich can afford schooling, but that wasn't what I was saying nor what the statistics I saw said. In any case, please be more careful with your phrasing, you're very close to putting words in my mouth here and I will bite your fingers the fuck off if you try to do that.

Originally Posted by tekuno

Media has been controlled by people who don't want people to think since before there was "media". (Ignorant and frankly insulting rant about Religion deleted.)

I don't care what your religion is, Tekuno. I don't require that you follow or believe mine. This is not the place to argue the details, so I won't.

Originally Posted by tekuno

That said, I don't think there has been a medium before the advent of film and TV which so visibly shut down conscious thought.

I was talking primarily about modern advertising science, and the methods that are used by politicians. But yes, film in theaters overwhelms the conscious filters and television is structured in such a way as to simplify thought to maximize profit. Which kind of what I meant.

Regarding the methods used - In the early 1970s when I was in high school, it was still possible for teachers to teach students in detail about propaganda and how it works, how statistics can be bent and twisted, and how to think about what the government is saying and what advertisers are saying.

For a lot of reasons - probably as chaotic a collection of inputs as those that contribute to the weather from one day to another - this is no longer very likely outside of what are called private schools in America. (I don't know why Britain has it backwards.)

Your prediction of the crapsack world of the future is, unfortunately, not completely impossible. Or improbable. But I suspect, whatever happens, that humanity will survive it, perhaps in reduced numbers. If we can adapt.

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

Read it again please. I did not say anything about positive nor negative selective pressure, I only mentioned selective pressure: able to produce offspring that survive to create more offspring. Whether "positive" or "negative" pressures exist meaningfully isn't proven to my satisfaction. YMMV.

Talk to a biology professor; the phrase used in describing the process is "selected against". (As in "the inability to digest lactose has been selected against in European society thanks to the historical presence of milk as a food source, which is why lactose intolerance is less common among the European population than among the Asian one.") If there's no dying going on and nothing to actually stop reproduction, there is no pressure either for or against. Long necks only help giraffes when food is scarce.

Actually I haven't double-checked the figures, but census data in the 1990s and early 2000s allegedly showed that there was a significant difference between the educated and uneducated - with uneducated having more children starting younger, and educated having fewer starting later, and the trend increasing over time. What this has to do with wealth? Obviously the rich can afford schooling, but that wasn't what I was saying nor what the statistics I saw said. In any case, please be more careful with your phrasing, you're very close to putting words in my mouth here and I will bite your fingers the fuck off if you try to do that.

Not particularly relevant. Since education is not a heritable trait, the thesis of Idiocrasy ? "uneducated people will give birth to more uneducated people, while educated people don't breed and eventually become rare or die out" ? is still wrong. Having parents who had poor education does not mean you will have a poor education yourself, any more than having highly-educated (and even rich) parents will mean you get well-educated (look at George W. Bush!) ? many of the great thinkers and inventors of the 1700s and 1800s came from poor, uneducated families. (Michael Faraday is a very good example.) This still happens today, if you pay attention. Trying to use the mechanics of that movie as a suggestion that society is doomed is, therefore, a faulty argument. (Which is not to say that society isn't doomed ? it's just that society isn't doomed because educated people aren't breeding, any more than it's doomed because everyone has a spot on their back they can't reach.)

I don't care what your religion is, Tekuno. I don't require that you follow or believe mine. This is not the place to argue the details, so I won't.

Amazing! We are in total agreement! I don't care what your religion is, either! No matter which one it is, it's some combination of a fancy way of saying "I'm scared of death" and a scam to let certain people make a living by telling other people lies they want to hear. The idea that religion should be free from criticism or scrutiny is not only silly, it's increasingly dangerous when combined with the way religion imposes its views on society by its very nature.

Regarding the methods used - In the early 1970s when I was in high school, it was still possible for teachers to teach students in detail about propaganda and how it works, how statistics can be bent and twisted, and how to think about what the government is saying and what advertisers are saying.

For a lot of reasons - probably as chaotic a collection of inputs as those that contribute to the weather from one day to another - this is no longer very likely outside of what are called private schools in America. (I don't know why Britain has it backwards.)

There was an explicit shift in the mechanics of the whole enterprise, which actually started around World War I (although there were further shifts later, some of which amplified the effect of the initial change). Rather than instilling knowledge in order to make sure that children have that knowledge, it was decided that the purpose of education was to produce students who are (for example) good citizens. Every subject was then forced to justify its existence in terms of the stated goals ? educational methods were judged by the resulting graduating students.

Which sounds perfectly innocent, and possibly beneficial (what harm could there be in a "mission statement"?), but if (to continue the above example) the only officially-admitted reason for teaching history is "to produce good citizenship", then you might as well replace history classes (which are difficult to teach and involve lots of hard-to-remember facts) with "citizenship" classes (which are much easier to teach ? and have the added bonus that they eliminate the risk that the students might learn historical facts and come to the conclusion that what you are calling "good citizenship" is actually undesirable, or might learn ? to tie back up with the topic at hand ? how propaganda works and then apply embarrassing scrutiny to politicians). It's how vocational training and gym classes and home economics and guidance counselors and other not-strictly-academic things got pulled into "education": the goals were changed, and those "classes" satisfied the new goals more effectively than the things they displaced. This is still how education is run, on the level of choosing curricula; if you want to teach something, you need to justify it on the basis of a series of explicit goals which can be remarkably narrow.

Your prediction of the crapsack world of the future is, unfortunately, not completely impossible. Or improbable. But I suspect, whatever happens, that humanity will survive it, perhaps in reduced numbers. If we can adapt.

Our descendants, the Morlocks!

Maybe we'll be like horses; all horses in the entire world descend from a population of a few hundred which survived the last ice age in (apparently) a single herd, and are therefore the result of a certain amount of inbreeding. (Race horses moreso, because they mostly descend from a few specific horses in the last millennium.)

The sad truth is, though, that a window is closing. We're exiting the era of easy-to-generate power and abundant raw materials at exactly the time when a lot of new and difficult conditions are going to begin, some of which would be insanely problematic to deal with even at full capacity. Will humanity be able to deal with these changes when we no longer have ubiquitous electricity or cheap manufacturing or easy transit, crop yields have fallen because of increasingly chaotic weather (which is starting to happen already), the oxygen-producing capacity of the ecosystem has begun to collapse as plants die of climate change and pollinating species die off, and rising sea levels have turned the majority of current major population centers into huge groups of refugees? That I'm not so confident about.

[muscle16a]

Originally Posted by tekuno

Maybe we'll be like horses; all horses in the entire world descend from a population of a few hundred which survived the last ice age in (apparently) a single herd,

My understanding is that this has already happened to humans. Just Google (or Wikipedia) the phrase "Mitochondrial Eve", for a discussion of the issue. Science appears to have determined that ALL currently living human beings are descended from one single woman (the eponymous "Mitochondrial Eve") who lived in Eastern Africa approximately 200,000 years ago.

This is why "Global Warming" doesn't bother me. Oh, I'm SURE that the Al Gore side of the controversy is the correct side - the world is warming, and humans are clearly responsible. But it doesn't worry me in the least, because such catastrophic events are the fundamental engine driving evolution: More global warming disasters TODAY means a more evolved human being 10,000 years from now. (I'm only being a little bit flippant in this regard.)

[tekuno]

Originally Posted by muscle16a

My understanding is that this has already happened to humans. Just Google (or Wikipedia) the phrase "Mitochondrial Eve", for a discussion of the issue. Science appears to have determined that ALL currently living human beings are descended from one single woman (the eponymous "Mitochondrial Eve") who lived in Eastern Africa approximately 200,000 years ago.

This is why "Global Warming" doesn't bother me. Oh, I'm SURE that the Al Gore side of the controversy is the correct side - the world is warming, and humans are clearly responsible. But it doesn't worry me in the least, because such catastrophic events are the fundamental engine driving evolution: More global warming disasters TODAY means a more evolved human being 10,000 years from now. (I'm only being a little bit flippant in this regard.)

As I recall, the actual researchers in the mitochondria study only made the claim of six women, not one. (And I vaguely recall that there's also evidence for a similarly small number of males, too, but because there's no substructure like mitochondria which is inherited only from the male side it involves less accuracy.) Hooray, we're already Morlocks!

As for global warming? This says it all. We're not destroying nature, just changing it to the point where we ourselves can't survive any more.

[Reeza]

Originally Posted by nnnrg

In the early 1970s when I was in high school, it was still possible for teachers to teach students in detail about propaganda and how it works, how statistics can be bent and twisted, and how to think about what the government is saying and what advertisers are saying.

For a lot of reasons - probably as chaotic a collection of inputs as those that contribute to the weather from one day to another - this is no longer very likely outside of what are called private schools in America. (I don't know why Britain has it backwards.)

It's probably a mistake to try to project a ray of sunshine into this bleak conversation, but I know that at least a few public school students are still being taught about propaganda and how to spot bias in media. How do I know this? My sister teaches Media Literacy in an urban public high school, and this is exactly what she is teaching her students.

So, even though we will all die horrible deaths as a result of our own short-sighted choices, some people will still know how to spot propaganda.

I'm sorry . . . was that too hopeful?