Breaking news - NEW SPECIES OF HUMAN!

[Cowboy Thunder]

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[Punpun]

Wrong thread. And wow, Sun making the DNA grow, like flowers. Sh1t is deep.

[tmacattack33]

Evolution is the wrong word, it's advances in nutrition, training and medicine.

Nope. Humans can evolve within 15 years (shorter than our generation span of 25-30 years). Especially when there is no natural selection going on for basketball players with a vertical of 35 inches or more.

[CelticBaller]

Cowboy thunder ruining the thread

[Pushxx]

It's fact, what Wilt did in his day is impressive but nowadays every team has a Wilt.

WTF? Name one team with a Wilt...right.......

Disrespect.

[TheMan]

you should win some award for that shit

[Profound]

This thread is full of win and even more at the people who are either playing stupid or just are.

[KingBeasley08]

[CelticBaller]

what I dont get is looking at the rapid rate we are evolving in, shouldn't there be a tons of Shaqticus in next year's draft?

[bdreason]

Evolution of a league that was ~90% white in 1960, and ~90% black in 2012.



1960's Championship squad





2000's Championship squad

[CavaliersFTW]

Evolution of a league that was ~90% white in 1960, and ~90% black in 2012.



1960's Championship squad





2000's Championship squad

By 1966 there were already significantly more black players starting for teams than white ones, and more black all-stars - and the disparity was was basically the same as the 1980's. Then you have the 1986 Celtics, one of the greatest if not the greatest team of all time, looking as milky white as a late 50's team:



1966 Boston Celtics


1969 Boston Celtics



So if you think the photograph you cherry picked "encapsulatse" the way 60's basketball was, than you don't understand 60's basketball. The density of Black players in the 60's exploded incredibly rapidly, the NBA was way ahead of it's time as far integration is concerned. The picture you posted encapsulates what late 50's basketball teams looked like more than it encapsulates 60's ball. Around either '66 or '67 the Celtics 5 black starters would play the 76ers 5 black starters meaning before that decade was out there were many games in the 60's that were playing without a single white person on the floor.



And anyways... what does any of that have to do with the exciting discovery of a new species?

[CavaliersFTW]

Are we humans evolving into better athletes?


I'll answer it with another question: Are the less athletic humans dying out before they have a chance to sire offspring? Extended answer below.



There are a lot of off-base interpretations of what human evolution is right now, even being said by the people who know that it is stupid to suggest that today's NBA players evolved from MJ's era. So I will help clear this up for everyone just so people can come back to this post for reference. You need a driving force for a species to gradually diverge from it's original form. The less athletic humans need to be (in large numbers, and for a long time) dead before they have a chance to breed for changes to even be seen in the population thousands of years from now.

And 50,000 years ago, humans born that were less athletic than their peers were being killed in such a manner. The bone density and muscle attachments prove that paleolithic (yet intellectually fully modern) Homo sapiens were stronger and more athletic. Their bones are significantly thicker - more torqued and grooved with muscle attachments, than is seen in modern Homo sapiens from the last few thousand years til present. This is because their lives, and their ancestors lives, depended on hunting mammoth and large megafauna, then defending it against large carnivores such as lions, smilodon, and giant extinct forms of bear and hyena that existed. Not until about 10,000 years ago did all of this - world wide - gradually shift to agricultural community driven lifestyles, where bending over and planting seeds took the place of running down and getting in close contact with very large dangerous animals. That lifestyle shift meant that any genetic mutations that resulted in say, individuals possessing genetic strands that contributed to a lesser athletic frame, would continue to persist w/o issue as they successfully sired offspring - who would then pass that DNA to their offspring etc etc etc. None of them would have the prior heightened chance of being killed or starved to death because of being athletically incapable of hunting the massive dangerous shit.

Make sense? There literally is no argument whatsoever that any humans born today are athletically superior to humans born 20, 50, 100, 1,000, or even 5,000 years ago. And the skeletons of Homo sapiens 20,000, 50,000, and 100,000 years ago were indeed -by necessity- physically superior to our population today.

What's more? Now our lifestyles involve sitting on computers at 9-5 jobs and even the meekest of humans (such as Steven Hawking) can potentially live and/or produce offspring by the age of sexual maturity just as easily as any super-athlete, and these awe-inspiring athletes that come and go throughout sports such as the NBA today - marry slim frail women and make babies with them who incidentally will have her genetics too and there will still be no pressure for the DNA of their athletic fathers to be the "predominantly found DNA" seen in the future of mankind. There will be no evolution of better athletes at any time in our future be it hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of years from now. None, notta, zilch. Not unless an apocalypse happens and humans are forced to become strictly hunter gatherers chasing down, and fighting wildlife for our food again.



If you think I'm shitting you:




These are Homo sapiens skulls from 30,000 years ago, their brain cases actually have about 1,600cm of internal volume, larger than modern Homo sapiens that avgs ~1,450 so it was no dimwitted cave-man. Note the thickness of the ocular bones (around the eyes), a slight bulge around the brow ridge, thicker jaw, and more "rounded" shape with no little fragile bone edges jutting out. Now compare to modern human skulls below:



Angular in comparison with frail looking bits flaring out here and there, the ocular bone is much thinner and fragile looking, brow ridge is less pronounced. Jaw is not as strong in appearance. Basically, this is a lesser armored skull for protecting our brain, because we don't get kicked in the face by the hooves of giant herbivores anymore, and we don't chew tough sinew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon
Read about them, read about our other recent hominid ancestors, read why they had the physiques that they had and what pressures had mandated that they have these physiques. Homo neanderthalensis were (much) stronger than Homo sapiens. Homo ergaster were not only taller than Homo sapiens (averaging 6'2), but were also engineered as superior runners. (linked) http://www.boneclones.com/sc-012-a.htm

Our ancestors are the better athletes, not us, and this trend of an ever relaxed Homo sapiens physique is not going to stop just because of "modern medicine" - modern medicine isn't as powerful as DNA and using it as we do today will actually enable our gene pool (specifically the genes of our physiology) to relax even more in the span of the next few thousands of years.

Make sense? Link this post to any ignorant fan that attempts to say that modern NBA players are evolved humans that are "better athletes" than the ones of the past

[jlauber]

We are already seeing the "devolution"...

In the 50's the 6-10 Mikan was leading the NBA in rebounding, and the 6-1 Cousy was leading the league in assists.

In 2011 the 6-9 Kevin Love led the league in rebounding, and the 37 year old 6-2 Steve Nash led the league in assists.

[oh the horror]

Its an evolution of the way athletes train, and how they tune their bodies for their specific crafts now rather than the human himself.


Some of you cant be this stupid.

[CavaliersFTW]

We are already seeing the "devolution"...

In the 50's the 6-10 Mikan was leading the NBA in rebounding, and the 6-1 Cousy was leading the league in assists.

In 2011 the 6-9 Kevin Love led the league in rebounding, and the 37 year old 6-2 Steve Nash led the league in assists.

There's no such thing as de-evolution, because evolution is merely change, even if that change is a less robust physique - it also takes a helluva long time for any noticeable difference and as I said it requires pressure to wipe out (on a massive scale, for a long time) any individuals with a "bad" trait before they have a chance to breed... Mikan and Cousy are genetically the same humans as a Nash and Love.

Also, Love is 6'7.75, Nash is 6'1, Cousy is 6'1, and Mikan is 6'10. Barefoot heights. Either way, this is not an example of evolution, it's literally just a random figure you could have picked 6'6 Dennis Rodman or 6'5 Charles Barkley then again you could have noted 6'10 Hakeem Olajuwon or 6'11 Kevin Garnett...