Hi, there is a common trend among people in both physical and online circles: the idea that not reproducing means less reproductive success, so it means less "evolutionary success" for the individual. On an isolated level, the first part is true. However, a lot of people attach value-judgements to this, and wonder whether they are betraying the species by choosing not to reproduce. A lot of intellectual people even consider if they're "dumbing down" the species. And a lot of people think this must constitute some kind of paradox: more intelligence means less reproduction.

There's a lot to be said about this. First is the good ol' (and kind of boring) idea that evolution is not going toward "higher" beings, but simply a change in inherited traits in a population among generations. However, this is not my point in this post.

What I want people to consider is how much variety there is between individuals: only 0.1% of DNA differ between two individuals from the species Homo sapiens. This means the other 99.9% is the same. Despite however much media, intellectuals, and individuals might focus on differences between people, the genome is 99.9% the same.

But what if the 0.1% is so vital that it exerts an outsized influence on the rest of the genome? Well, first of all, at some level it doesn't matter. There is a reason the phrase "evolution by natural selection" is often used, instead of just using the term natural selection. It's because evolution and natural selection are not interchangeable. As stated before, evolution is a change in inherited traits in the population between generations. This includes four forces: selection, mutation, migration, and genetic drift.

Selection, as is known, tends to preserve traits that are more adapted to their environment. Mutation is the spontaneous origination of a new variation in the genome. Migration is individuals migrating to or out of a population. And genetic drift is random variation that happens between generations due to chance.

These mechanisms, taken together, determine the change of inherited traits between generations. However vital, natural selection is by far not the only means.

But-wait?! You were talking about populations, and not individuals. Why?

Well, it's because evolution makes the most sense at population level. You can't really examine the change of traits on an individual level. It's micro of the micro of the microevolution. Furthermore, at macro level (species to species evolution; speciation) it's populations that evolve, not individuals.

This is another key takeaway: in evolution, populations matter the most, not individuals.

Other than the 99.9% sameness in DNA, you can also see this in the genome structure. For the most part, we share the same number of chromosomes, structured in the same way, with genes interspersed at places that are mostly at the same part.

Supporting this, here are the current known numbers of genes in the genome, according to different sources. There is no evidence that the number of these genes differ significantly between individuals. Sure, the variations (alleles) of the exact content change very often. But not the existence of the genes themselves.

So, we not only share vast majority of the same DNA, but the way DNA and genes are structured is also almost exactly the same.

Let's summarize what I've said so far.

• Population level evolution matters the most in evolution.
• We share 99.9% of our DNA.
• We have almost the exact same genome structure.
• We have virtually the same genes (but not alleles).

Why have I said all this? Created this topic?

It's to counter the perspective that is so pervasive in culture, including intellectual spaces. The idea that not reproducing somehow makes you "unnatural", or "against laws of nature". There is, of course, already the ethical rebuttal against these claims: that natural doesn't mean good. However, what I've laid out here is also a different side of nature that is rarely talked about: in evolutionary terms, we are almost the same.

Following this logic, it can be seen that, even if you don't personally reproduce, contributing to the well-being of the population or the species means you are contributing to the inheritence of 99.9% of your DNA, its overall structure, and its gene structure. After all, your contributions make it so that other people can reproduce, and pass on these commonalities they share with you. You are not, in normative terms, "an evolutionary failure". It can even be argued that, at the current connected level of internationality where populations are quite dependent on each other, and exchange DNA with each other frequently, a global cooperative approach can even be considered the most succesful strategy.

As with most things in culture, when interpreting biology, the role of competition and dissimilarity is overemphasized, and the role of cooperation and similarity is overlooked, even when it runs counter to a lot of scientific findings. Funnily enough, Peter Kropotkin, who lived most of his life in the second part of the 19th century, realized this. Of course, he didn't have even remotely enough scientific evidence. But looking at nature, he had realized how much the role of cooperation was ignored, due to a fixation on competition. So, this is not a new problem, and my reasoning is not entirely new.

Further reading on this topic could be made by searching for "evolution cooperation" on the search engine of your choice, and on Google Scholar.

September 2024's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

This about sums it up. I'm looking for good magazines to read. I'm probably going to do a Vogue from Italy, UK, etc, some sort of techy magazines... a wide variety. I've been out of the magazine world for a time, though, so all I seem to know are Conde Nast titles.. which is depressing.

Stuff available in PDF is ideal, since I'll be pulling these from a library. The magazines don't have to be available in Libby or whatever, though.

Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

Edit: Apache OR Nginx? Could someone fix my title - I posted without proofing.

My wife is having half decent success with ecommerce. She's doing great on Etsy and eBay, and now her website is starting to pick up.

It's currently hosted on 20i who pride themselves on being an excellent WordPress and Woocommerce provider, with a half decent CDN. In reality, I think it's pretty shit for what you pay for.

I'm tempted to either grab a VPS or even go as far as a bare metal at a CoLo with public IP and run the full stack myself. If I do, shall I go Apache or Nginx? I've done both and I'm pretty agnostic. OS would be Debian.

Before I go to this length though, does anyone know of a fair priced but good performing Woocommerce platform? She's got hundreds of hours already, the plugins and over 300 products listed, so I'm loathe to move to a different solution, however, I'm not ruling it out.

The reason to not all in on Etsy or eBay is the 25% cut they take of everything. Using a personal site and Stripe payment platform means it's more 1% + 20p for processing.

Ideas, thoughts and suggestions please?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I miss playing D&D with a group, but hanging out for 5+ hours at a time every week just doesn't fit into my schedule. However, I was thinking about how some mobile games have handled this - Words with Friends has (had?) a mode where you would get notified when it was your turn, and you could play whenever you had free time. I think there's at least one chess game that operated this way as well.

I can't imagine many human players would appreciate long waits between moves, when D&D is designed to be very immersive. So I'm being realistic and wondering what options there are as a single player.

Baulder's Gate 3 is fun, but I don't expect anything with that level of graphical fidelity. And something I could play on my phone would be ideal (but not a dealbreaker if I can't).

Are there options like this out there, or do I just have to accept that D&D doesn't have a place in my life?

I love westerns and would like to hear about your favorites and thoughts on the genre. Preferably a bit more than just a list of titles.

What is your relationship with the western genre and do you have some favorites you want to recommend?

Do you prefer spaghetti westerns, neo westerns, animated western or classic John Wayne westerns?

Does the western genre have a future?

How many friends do you have? Good good friends vs more casual friends. What's the dividing line or definition of one vs the other for you? Related question: what life stage are you in, and what was friendship like at a different stage?

How do you keep in touch, esp for friends not in your city? Do you call them randomly or call / video chat with them regularly? Do texts count? Do people welcome phone calls out of the blue or is it more like, "oh gosh you have cancer" if one gets a call from a friend these days?

How much effort are regular people* putting into maintaining/strengthening their friendships in their late-30s onwards? (Regular people being, maybe, folks who aren't terminally online, folks who are neurotypical, folks without social anxiety etc?) [edit: oh no I messed up!! I mean that I super want to hear from others who fit one or more of these boxes as well, but since I'm 3/3 plus all kinds of crazy I am interested to know if these are factors in friendships, particularly because most people are of the "normal" sort who would have to put up with me.....my apologies.]

Do folks suddenly realise maybe they don't have many/any close friends, or they're not as close anymore as they thought they were decades ago? How do folks maintain friendship as people age and move apart? Or is it just normal that once you're not in the same city to hang out, they stop being good friends?

Have you ever made conscious and serious efforts to make / rekindle friendships before? How, and how'd that turn out ?

What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This is the sixth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. Our next book will be This is How You Lose the Time War around the end of September.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.