It’s a messy process, and we may not be able to see where it’s going, but you can bet that there will be changes in human phenotypes and their prominence over the course of many generations.
>Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
If I understand you correctly, that’s just not true. In his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins showed that the individual gene is the unit of selection. A genotype that tends to result in a slightly stronger preference for a family life is exactly the kind of thing that could become more prominent, even within one or two generations. I’m sure this is happening right now.
>In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations.
I was not making a particular example at all. That is the function of natural selection: it selects for the genotypes had by those who have children who go on to have children themselves.
The selection doesn’t have to happen at the level of a preference for kids. A gene related to diligence or conscientiousness or just about anything else can have effects that ultimately cause differential reproductive success for you and your offspring.
The fact that it’s all too complicated for us to model has bearing on it at all.
>Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
If I understand you correctly, that’s just not true. In his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins showed that the individual gene is the unit of selection. A genotype that tends to result in a slightly stronger preference for a family life is exactly the kind of thing that could become more prominent, even within one or two generations. I’m sure this is happening right now.
>In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations.
I was not making a particular example at all. That is the function of natural selection: it selects for the genotypes had by those who have children who go on to have children themselves.
The selection doesn’t have to happen at the level of a preference for kids. A gene related to diligence or conscientiousness or just about anything else can have effects that ultimately cause differential reproductive success for you and your offspring.
The fact that it’s all too complicated for us to model has bearing on it at all.