This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Duckluck: We seem to have a lot of tropes involving the misuse or demonization of evolution. This trope, Evolutionary Levels, Darwinist, Half-Human Hybrids, Lamarck Was Right, and probably others. Certainly enought to merit a blanket/index trope. Evolution Is Evil, perhaps? Actually, scratch that Hollywood Evolution defines the trope better.
Roland: Is Palet really an example? I mean, he plays with nature, yes, but his motives are more personal-gain. While the Evilutionary Biologist may stand to gain from his acts, his core drive is essentially a misreading or warped interpretation of biology and evolution, and to advance the species presumably for our own good no matter the cost.
Fast Eddie: Getting a little worried about the profusion of spoiler-font.
Some Dude: The Videoclip is Evolution by Korn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VntFEWF8I8A
Zorku: Might wanna adjust the bit about humans being unlikely to evolve. It's kind of hard to keep this all in layman terms and admittedly in the years of study I've gone a little bit deaf about what will make sense to the average joe so I'm hoping someone else will be able to follow this and suitably rewrite the main page. Humans spent close to 100,000 years as hunter gatherers so we're very adapted to that. The whole agriculture and big society thing isn't a mass extinction style change in our environment so adapting to it is a slow process and having only even really had governments that could handle policing and military affairs on and off for a couple thousand years it's obvious that we should be a long way from fully adapted to this environment.
Adaptation is kind of one of those things where you can get halfway to perfect in a single step but then the next step you only get half of the rest of the way and the next step you only make it half of the remainder and so on. An old way of picturing it was that it was like trying to hit a bullseye so big steps were probably ok if you were a long ways away from it but as you got closer you had to take very small steps and even then you were probably overshooting it a little bit most of the time. We've sort of realized that they are a lot of ways to hop over to a different dart board so that metaphor gets a little bit mixed.
Or if I'm a total windbag that's irritating everyone who's bothered to read this just make it say that we won't evolve very much.
Blaiser Dude: I just have to nitpick a bit on this one. Granted, evolution generally doesn't have levels ("more evolved" =/= "better"), but, first off, would not making a specie hardier and better able to adapt to a wide variety of environments (via genetic modification or some other "Hollywood Science") make it "better" (more likely to survive and thrive) evolutionarily, and secondly, are not we h. sapiens a unique case in that we have evolved greater intelligence?
I look at it this way: we traded the brute strength of the ancestors our kind shares with the modern ape with greater and greater cranial capacity, more and more complex social systems, and more complicated tools. We are now approaching the point in real life where we will be able to augment ourselves via genetic engineering, cybernetics, etc. (And, of course, in fiction we can do any and all of that). Would not engineering ourselves to be even more intelligent be seen as "an improvement"? In olden times, when food was scarce, we were limited by our available nutrition in size, strength, and brain development, but now, with unlimited calories (in the Western world, at least), why not engineer superhumans who, in exchange for requiring a much higher caloric intake, could have 1.5x larger brains *and* far greater strength and endurance than any unaugmented human?
I guess my point is that, when it comes to the evolution of greater intelligence, there *is* such a thing as "progress". A good example would be the Neanderthal: stronger and sturdier than anatomically modern humans, but we kicked their asses with our superior technology.
