Ladies Only
A favorite topic for "In Progress" are posts showing how females are better looking, smarter, more complicated, and better equipped for handling the world since. . .say, 1,000,000 B.C. Here is an article explaining how the male is simply obsolete. See Why Ladies-Only Species Don't Need Men
Rube Goldberg
Those who have lived in Chicago will recognize some of the schools and I love the idea of this competition. I wonder, however, if it is more imaginative thinking than hard science, mathematics and engineering. Of course there is nothing better than an imaginative engineer. See Rube Goldberg competition gets teens excited about STEM.
4 comments:
Though men are obsolete, parthenogenesis seems to take the fun and comedic value out of sex.
If we humans reproduced by parthenogenesis just think of the vast improvement in the content of advertising.
On the other hand, in all likelihood, with parthenogenesis, there goes the fashion industry. And, if you believe at all Geoffrey Miller's theory that the extraordinarily superior human brain is due to sexual selection and not natural selection ("our minds evolved not as survival machines, but as courtship machines"), there goes the human race period. Without the need to woo women, we're just another dumb primate.
It does seem reasonable that 'sexual selection' contributes to evolution. It is difficult to get a handle on the workings of 'natural selection' and 'sexual selection' however. The extraordinary long time periods involved and the micro changes, both forward (meaning what came about) and backward (what disappeared) make it difficult to grasp. In order to make some sense out of the workings of evolution, I (and I'm sure others) have thought that evolution must rely on crisis periods--times when the species dwindled close to annihilation only to come back with an evolutionary change. Short term disaster in favor of long term survival. Unfortunately (for evolution) or fortunately (for individuals) we now will bring all of our knowledge to keep the species from evolving due to crisis periods.
Thinking about what I wrote, it seems we have approached a remarkable irony: our species will evolve currently less from evolution and more from 'intelligent design' with ourselves and our knowledge of genetics as the 'intelligent' designers.
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