Evolution

Categories: Theories, Science, Starter-class_articles

'''Evolution''' is the phenomenon of reproducing organisms changing through [[Genetics|genetic]] [[mutation]]s and the most successful kinds of organisms (as decided by some selection process) [[reproductive success|outreproducing]] others and hence becoming relatively more prevalent while the least successful tend to become extinct. The fluctuating environment and the competition for survival/reproduction and a limited of resources selects for those organisms which best [[antifragility|resist and adapt]] to changes, [[IQ|outsmart]], [[muscle theory|overpower]] and [[dominance hierarchy|dominate]] others and most effectively [[Moneymaxxing|extract resources]]. In very [[life history|K-selected]] and socially complex species such as humans, investment in the offspring and in social ties are crucial for survival and reproduction (at least they were before [[NEET|welfare]]), meaning quality is more important that quantity in such species. Moreover, organisms depleting their food sources go extent, and overly aggressive ones are at greater risk of self-harm. This explains why animals do not always make as many babies as biologically possible, and why there is sometimes peace and harmony.

== How evolution works ==

[[File:Champagne_vent_white_smokers.jpg|thumb|Hydrothermal vents may been the hotbeds for the first self-replicating molecules that initiated evolution<ref>https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/112179/</ref>]]

On planet Earth, evolution was likely initiated inside a 'primordial soup' near hot shorelines or oceanic hydrothermal vents.<ref name="abogenesis">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41570-020-0196-x</ref>
Molecules in such hot and reactive conditions are in constant random motion and spontaneously assemble in random structures at a high rate.
Waiting long enough, a self-replicating molecule will emerge that can copy or clone itself. Such self-replicators require a ''construction plan'', a genetic code, which is called a ''genome'' which is also copied. Since molecules wiggle, the copied genome will contain a few mistakes ([[mutation]]s) which means the decoded physical structure (the ''phenotype'') is also changed. This allows new structures to be 'discovered' which may win out in the race for survival and hence become more prevalent. Since mutations are small, it takes many generations (the cycles between replications) for meaningful change to occur.

The ecology exerts selection pressure on the evolving structures to become adapted to it. Evolution in animals requires a large population of at least around 4000 individuals so as to maintain a high genetic variability which allows to adapt to environmental changes and avoid genetic defects from inbreeding. Below that minimum viable population size, the population risks becoming diseased and ultimately extinct.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320707002534</ref>

Most animals have sexual reproduction, meaning their individuals do not simply clone themselves like many plants do (asexually), but they combine the genomes of two individuals through [[sex]], i.e. the transmission of the genome from one to the other individual. The offspring will inherit a 'patchwork' of the parent's genetic codes each about equally represented, though without the overall functional order or length of the genome changing very much. It is believed that combining genomes speeds up evolution and makes the resulting animals more resilient to parasites as the parasites will have difficulties adapting to a changing 'patchwork' of different genomes.

Since there are many different ways of surviving and different foods and conditions present in different ecological 'niches', there is an effect of speciation, meaning that organisms specialize on particular niches and become very different from another to the point that they cannot breed with each other.

To summarize, evolution only needs three ingredients: A large population of individuals each of which has a genome, any kind of mutation of the genomes, and selection. Details like sexual recombination of genomes, how the genome is exactly organized, how it is translated into a physical structure, and how selection occurs, are only secondary or optional and are themselves subject to evolutionary pressures (though some basic structures like the ribosome stay unchanged and seem have no good alternatives 'nearby', but they may have evolved initially<ref name="abogenesis"></ref>). A species can be imagined as a collection experiments, each trying out different adaptations and the best adaptations spreading across the entire population (becoming 'fixed') over the curse of many generations such that the population becomes more adapted to the ecology, i.e. has a higher fitness, which means it has a greater expected representation in the future. Fitness can be imperfectly measured by [[reproductive success]], imperfectly because reproductive success does not say anything definite about the future. Under circumstances of very low ecological harshness and selection pressure, normally unfit individuals may reproduce more and hence achieve a high fitness which can have a [[dysgenics|dysgenic]] effect for the overall population viability.

<youtube>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2XOhgRJVb4</youtube>

== Evolutionary psychology ==

Evolutionary psychology concerns evolved behavior, especially behavioral propensities, wants, preferences and emotions. That behavior can be genetically determined is a rather obvious fact in the animal kingdom. Most animals do not have a general intelligence as humans, yet they clearly show emotions and tendencies to act in certain ways. Since humans have evolved from animals, it is highly plausible that many human behaviors are, too, determined by evolution rather than only being the outcome of cognition and social construction. The extreme opposite view, [[social constructionism]], assumes that most such behavior is socially constructed.

Human behaviors that occur universally in all cultures are promising candidates for evolutionary adaptations. In 1991, anthropologist Donald E. Brown published a long list of such universal behaviors which is reproduced in reorganized form below.<ref>https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/1991-brown-humanuniversals.pdf</ref><ref>http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversals.pdf</ref> Additions are referenced.

'''Cognition, planning, reasoning and acting'''

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* anticipation
* choice making (choosing alternatives)
* conjectural reasoning
* decision making, collective decision making
* discrepancies between speech, thought, action
* future, attempts to predict
* intention
* interpreting behaviour
* memory
* mentalese (internal thoughts are like spoken language)
* mental maps (spatial representation of the outside world)
* overestimating
* planning, planning for future
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'''Perception, abstraction, semantics, classifications and continua'''

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* abstraction in speech and thought
* actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control
* binary cognitive distinctions
* classification/nomenclature/taxonomy of various categories: age, behavioral propensities, body parts, colors, fauna, flora, inner states, kin, sex, space, tools, weather conditions
* concept of personal names
* continua (ordering as cognitive pattern)
* entification (treating patterns and relations as things)
* logical notions, notion of "and", of "equivalent", "general/particular", of "not", of "opposite", of "part/whole", of "same"
* making comparisons
* meaning, most units of are non-universal measuring
* interpolation
* objectivity of thought
* precedence, concept of (that's how the leopard got its spots)
* recognition of individuals by face
* self distinguished from other, as neither wholly passive nor wholly autonomous, as subject and object, self is responsible
* self-image, awareness of (concern for what others think), manipulation thereof, wanted to be positive
* semantics, semantic category of affecting things and people, dimension, giving, location, motion, speed, other physical properties, semantic components of sex
* senses unified
* true and false distinguished
* word for black (color term), white (color term), one (numeral), two (numeral), face, hand, father and mother (separate kin terms for)

* world view
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'''Language features'''

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* anthropomorphilation
* antonyms
* ambivalence
* contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes (meaningful elements in language)
* figurative speech
* grammar
* imagery
* linguistic redundancy
* marking at phonemic, syntactic, and lexical level
* metaphor
* metonym (similar word in place of another, e.g. Washington is a metonym for the US government)
* morphemes
* nouns
* numerals (counting)
* onomatopoeia
* past/present/future person
* phonemes, defined by sets of minimally contrasting features, merging of phonemes, range from 10 to 70 in number phonemic change, phonemic change, rules of phonemic system
* polysemy (one word has several related meanings)
* pronouns, minimum two numbers, minimum three persons
* proper names
* sememes (unit of meaning carried by a morpheme), commonly used ones are short, infrequently used ones are longer
* states
* stop/nonstop contrasts (in speech sounds)
* synesthetic metaphors 
* synonyms
* vocalic/nonvocalic contrasts in phonemes
* vowel contrasts
* units of time, verbs
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'''Social and asocial behavior'''

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* affection expressed and felt
* attachment
* crying
* directions, giving of, explanations
* empathy
* envy and means of coping with it
* facial communication, expression for anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise; masking/modifying thereof
* fairness (equity)
* fears, ability to overcome fears
* food sharing
* generosity admired
* gestures
* gossip
* healing the sick (or attempting to)
* hospitality, visiting
* insulting
* judging others
* language, employed to manipulate others, employed to misinform or mislead, translation, language not a simple reflection of reality, prestige from proficient use of language
* manipulate social relations
* mourning
* murder
* Oedipus complex (incestuous desires and resulting conflicts)
* pain
* pride
* private inner life
* promise
* psychological defense mechanisms
* reciprocity, negative (revenge, retaliation)
* reciprocity, positive
* role and personality seen in dynamic interrelationship (i.e., departures from role can be explained in terms of individual personality)
* self-control
* shame
* stinginess
* tickling
* triangular awareness (assessing relation-ships among the self and two other people)
* turn-taking
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'''Social organization'''

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* age grades, statuses and terms
* coalitions
* collective identities
* conflict, conflict consultation and mediation
* cooperation, cooperative labor
* corporate (perpetual) statuses
* dispersed groups
* dominance/submission
* economic inequalities, conscious of related emotions, prestige inequalities
* ethnocentrism
* family or household
* government
* group living
* groups that are not based on family
* identity, collective
* ingroup distinguished from outgroup, biases in favor of ingroup, nepotism
* inheritance rules
* institutions (organized co-activities) 
* kin, close distinguished from distant, kin groups, kin terms translatable by basic relations of procreation, kinship statuses
* law (rights and obligations), law (rules of membership)
* leaders
* marriage, arranged marriage as the most dominant form<ref>https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474704919887706</ref>
* oligarchy (de facto)
* preference for own children and close kin (nepotism)
* property
* statuses and roles, ascribed and achieved, distinguished from individuals, on other than sex, age, or kinship bases
* succession
* territoriality
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'''Development'''

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* baby talk, though large racial/cultural variation<ref>https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cdev.12974</ref>
* childhood fears of e.g. loud noises, strangers
* critical learning periods
* play, play to perfect skills
* pretend play
* socialization, expected from senior kin, includes toilet training
* thumb sucking
* toys, playthings
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'''Culture'''

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* aesthetics
* body adornment
* culture
* culture/nature distinction
* customary greetings
* daily routines, diurnality (activity during daytime, with a period of sleeping or other inactivity at night), adjustments to environment, habituation, meal times, time, cyclicity of time
* dance
* death rituals
* feasting
* folklore
* gift giving
* hairstyles
* jokes
* melody
* mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances
* music, children's music, music related in part to dance
* music related in part to religious activity, seen as art (a creation) music, vocal music, vocal, includes speech forms, musical redundancy, repetition and variation 
* myths
* narrative
* nonbodily decorative art
* poetic line, uniform length range, characterized by repetition and variation, demarcated by pauses
* poetry/rhetoric
* proverbs, sayings, in mutually contradictory forms
* rhythm
* special speech for special occasions
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'''Spirituality'''

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* belief in supernatural/religion, death, disease, fortune and misfortune
* divination (practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by supernatural means)
* dreams, dream interpretation
* hope
* magic, magic to increase life, sustain life, win love 
* rituals, rites of passage
* symbolism, symbolic speech
* weather control (attempts to)
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'''Sex differences, gender roles and sexuality'''

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* biological mother and social mother normally the same person
* childbirth customs
* childcare
* division of labour by age and sex
* females do more direct childcare
* females gossip more and is more focused on the private<ref>https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill_(Supplemental)#Historically.2C_there_has_been_strong_concern_about_gossiping_by_females</ref>
* females much more involved in cooking and sometimes other tasks reconcilable with child rearing<ref>https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill_(Supplemental)#Women_were_historically_predominantly_involved_in_cooking_and_they_never_dominated_men</ref>
* women cry more than men<ref>https://incels.wiki/w/Scientific_Blackpill_(Supplemental)#Women_cry_four_times_as_much_as_men_and_never_outgrow_teenage_crying_behavior</ref>
* husband older than wife on average
* male and female and adult and child seen as having different natures
* males dominate public/ political realm, more aggressive, more prone to lethal violence, more prone to theft
* males engage in more coalitional violence
* males, on average, travel longer distances over lifetime
* marriage
* mother normally has consort during child-rearing years
* possessive, intimate possessive
* rape
* sex differences in spatial cognition and behavior 
* sex (gender) terminology is fundamentally binary (rather than respecting some intersex)
* sex status, sexual attraction, attractiveness, jealousy, modesty, regulation sexual regulation includes incest prevention
* sexuality as focus of interest [i.e. interest in who mates with whom]
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'''Technology'''

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* containers
* cooking
* fire
* intertwining (eg. weaving)
* lever
* medicine
* shelter
* spear
* tool dependency, tool making for cutting, to make other tools, patterned tools culturally, permanent tools for pounding trade
* tying material (i.e., something like string)
* wearing weapons 
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'''Norms and values'''

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* copulation normally conducted in privacy
* coyness display
* differential valuations
* distinguishing between right and wrong
* etiquette
* good and bad distinguished
* hygiene
* incest between mother/son unthinkable
* likes and dislikes
* moral sentiments, limited effective range of moral sentiments
* normal distinguished from abnormal
* redress of wrongs
* resistance to abuse of power
* right-handedness as population norm
* sanctions, for crimes against the collectivity, include removal from the social unit
* disapproval of sucking wounds
* taboos, tabooed foods, utterances
* violence, some forms of proscribed
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'''Interests and preferences'''

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* concept of fear of death, sickness and death seen as related
* food preferences
* interest in bioforms (living things or things that resemble them)
* loose practice to improve skills
* materialism
* snakes, wariness around
* sweets preferred
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== See also ==

* [[Reproductive success]]
* [[Life history]]
* [[Sexual selection]]
* [[Fisherian runaway]]
* [[Good genes hypothesis]]

== References ==
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[[Category:Theories]]
[[Category:Science]]
[[Category:Starter-class_articles]]