Ludwig I like your philosophy. We have had children but purely for our own (or at least my) enjoyment - and the objective was met.

I believe the next stage of evolution is going to be silicon based or at least some form of digital intelligence for want of a better word. You can expect your desk top computer (or mobile phone) to have the complexity of your brain within about 15 years and to have what we call consciousness. If complexity of machines continues to advance at the same rate - and why shouldn't it when we put all that brain power at work on the problem - your desktop computer in 2040 may have 1,000,000 times the complexity of the best brain that ever existed.

How good it is that you and I have lived long enough to have left our digital imprint on the world in the form of this online opinion. As a gambler I would lay odds that these thoughts and musings will last a lot longer than any old gene that happens to be accidently left around.

Where we differ is that I believe the over population problem will sort itself out if we put our minds to it. At the moment I think the evidence for the cause of the population explosion shows that poverty of material things and of the mind is the major determinant of how many people are born. Working on ways to do more with less and of allowing all to share in the bounty will solve the population problem and what does it matter as long as our digital descendants survive.

Fickle

“We have had children but purely for our own (or at least my) enjoyment - and the objective was met.”

Excellent.

Those who have kids do so for their own fulfilment. Well, for some of us it just happens without too much forethought. But at least we are not pressured to have kids for fear of being socially outcast, as with many cultures around the world.

It is a selfish thing, no less than my selfish desire to not have kids in order to maintain personal space, and be able to get into my lifelong passion of botany and other acquired passions of ecology, geology, geomorphology and ornithology, and if I had more time, many other related fields. Oh yeah, and environmentalism and sustainability.

No time for kids of this little black Anas superciliosa! Life is tooo good without brats running around your ankles.

Yes I think you are on the right track about the future of evolution. The silicon / digital evolutionary trend will continue to, well, evolve, very rapidly. I think we will be seeing a Hal in the quite near future….if the Mad Max scenario doesn’t beat us to it. But even if peak oil, or the blowout of resource demand vs supply issues do set society back and considerably lower the population, it will only be a temporary setback.

The evolution of artificial intelligence is only a short time away….. and then what on earth will happen? The mind really boggles!

The population problem will sort itself out. But I don’t think it is a matter of putting our minds to it. I think it is too big for us. Besides, if we haven’t put our minds to it by now, then we ain’t gonna, before it hits us where it hurts.

By crikey have we got off topic of what?!

Sorry, I thought this forum was about the effect of cooked food on our physical evolution.
If we were talking about the benefits to mankind, on an over crowded planet, of self-actualised adults voluntarily choosing not to breed I would be applauding you. However, your self fullfilling lifesyle will not have any effect on the physical evolution of the planet. Your attitude is an evolutionary dead end.
The ability to choose whether or not to have children is a product of our medical technology. In the past the choice would have been whether or not to have a sex life. The sexual urge is produced in the reptilian part of our brain and was evolved many millions of years ago. It continues to be perpetuated in humans because it leads to human reproduction which carry on these reptilian genes.

My attitude is only an evolutionary dead-end in the conventional sense of evolution.

That is my main point – there are other much more significant ways of passing on your heritage, memory, or whatever. And anyway, so utterly what if you don’t pass anything on, if you don’t feel the need?

“The ability to choose whether or not to have children is a product of our medical technology.”

Not at all. This ability is a product of our free lifestyle that places no demands on us to have kids nor any disadvantages for not having any, and which offers a wide variety of alternatives to having a family in order to feel fulfilled in life.

The sexual urge doesn’t have to translate into a house full of screaming sproglets. Yes, that stupid urge is primordial, awfully powerful and a bloody nuisance at times! But it can be overridden… by some of us…. especially after a couple of bad experiences with the opposite sex. Anyway, offspring really do get in the way of a good sex life!!

So I’ll continue to eat a wide variety of raw and cooked foods, add to the country’s botanical knowledge, try to have some sort of influence on the big environmental issues…. and stay away from temptation!! :)

"There is new evidence emerging - - that we are still evolving."
Other than for "creation scientists", is it possible that people believe the process has stalled? Just for the human animal alone?
But, discouraging humanity from a life in the raw is fair enough. Who wants our descendants having guts like Gorillas a few million years down the evolutionary track? Blessed be our ancestors one and a half million years past. Those who domesticated fire for cooking and set the direction for our smaller colons and swelled heads.
"Homo sapiens 13,000 years ago were very different from Homo sapiens today". How much, over those 400 generations?
We are not fruit-flies turning over generations with extreme rapidity in closely restricted conditions. Many humans embraced agriculture during this time; others persisted with hunter-gathering lifestyles. Yet what differences have evolved between a true-blue Dutch person and an Indigenous Australian; between Innuit and Ugandan? Hair styles for sure; skin colour; minor variations in food tolerance; and shifting levels of resistance to disease (eg. natural resistance against smallpox no longer exists). Otherwise, we are all much the same nasty brutes and compassionate colleagues, and demonstrably capable of interbreeding. Overall potential for diabetes remains unchanged, as do our hopes, desires, aggression, compassion, and our brain's processing potential.
Evolutionary change rolls on; but slowly, as ever. Don't expect it to escalate. What is needed, however, is redirection of our cerebral processes, and quickly.
Starting at 13,000 years back, Homo sapiens possibly took about 11 thousand years to double their numbers, so that we were about 150 million by the time of Christ. Rabbit-like, we have since progressively shortened the duration for doubling times:
1,350 years; 350; 150; 90; 45. That took us to 5 billion in 1985. We have now slackened off a bit - in this new century we increase from six and a half billion at "only" 1.3% (that is about 50 years doubling time). That is raw data, which needs no cooking to alert us to fierce problems ahead for our little-evolving descendants in this world of limited and rapidly-diminishing environmental resources.