More of a generic engineering quip - if a gadget can't meet a spec, then either it wasn't designed to that spec, or it degraded after it passed QC.
I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.
> ... lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame ...
Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh#Divinity. Ditto ways to rationalize ruling class control over reproduction (and everything else) in the "lower" social classes. My own interest is more on esoterics, such as this unfortunate mutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Synthesis - and things humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.
> I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.
Endurance running in hunting and scavenging does not conflict with the usage of hunting tools and weapons. I am not sure how you got to 50k years, since tools usage predates homo spec. and goes back a few million years, but 50k years is relatively little time on the evolutionary time scale anyway. As I said before, the important relevant innovation isn't tool usage, but sedentism/agriculture, which is far more recent. It's also important to keep in mind how few humans lived on Earth back then, arguing about generations. 10,000BC (emergence of agriculture) there where about 1-15 million humans on all Earth. 70,000BC there may have been a bottleneck event which may have reduced human population to as low as 1,000 individuals. This would have greatly reduced genetic diversity necessary for any rapid changes. There is little genetic variation in humans across the globe. For comparison, the Rarámuri descended from humans arriving in the Americas about 15,000-10,000BC. All very recent.
> Look at parts of the immune system which are needed to fight high-mortality diseases. The classic is ...
I am not sure what you are getting at. Do you suggest eradication of malaria and consequently the frequency normalization due to loss of selective advantage for exclusively heterozygous carriers of a fatal genetic disease is a good example of adaptive timescales? I mean yeah, obviously evolution can happen faster with huge selective pressure. Selective breeding is evidence of that. But that's very different than the suggested degeneration due to mere irrelevance, unless you make the case running adaptations are disadvantageous to modern humans. I mean, failing to push world records is hardly evidence that we, as a species, suck at endurance running. If anything, we suck at not running.
> Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia
So? Humans suck? They didn't use biologisms and I was talking about the pseudoscientific idea of human evolutionary degeneration specifically.
> humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.
Well, good luck. Timing-wise, I wouldn't count on evolution there :D
More of a generic engineering quip - if a gadget can't meet a spec, then either it wasn't designed to that spec, or it degraded after it passed QC.
I'm vaguely aware of the endurance running hypothesis. But a quick Google suggests that most humans had decent stone-age atlatls, bows & arrows, snares, and spears by ~50k years ago. That's >2k generations of selection where endurance running is not the highest-value skill for catching dinner.
> ... lactase persistence is a rare outlier of rapid adaptations within that time frame ...
Look at parts of the immune system which are needed to fight high-mortality diseases. The classic is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease#Genetics
> On a side-note ...
Humans have been concocting excuses to proclaim their own ancestry and blood "superior" for well over 7 millennia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh#Divinity. Ditto ways to rationalize ruling class control over reproduction (and everything else) in the "lower" social classes. My own interest is more on esoterics, such as this unfortunate mutation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_C#Synthesis - and things humanity may desperately need soon, like another 10 °C of heat tolerance.
(FWIW, my immediate association with Born to Run is musical - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_to_Run )