Continuing decline of the house of Adam
Every generations has 50-100 mutations that their parents did not. Every once in great while these mutations are useful. Mostly they are defective. Luckily the organism has many redundancies to provide for continual functioning in the presences of so many defective genes. The greatest of these is to have redundant copies of DNA, one from your mom, and one from your dad. That is why inbreeding can be so deleterious - if the redundant copies are both from the same source, there is no correcting errors.
Of course these errors only get eliminated in extreme cases. So mutations pile up generation after generation, gumming up the normal biological processes like sand in the gears of a machine. (Ironically, inbred populations will, in the long run, have less of these bad mutations, as they are more exposed to them - except most of these cultures have mechanisms to get their idiot children married off despite their shortcomings.)
Thus it is reasonable to expect that each generation is a little less healthy, a little more emotionally messed up, a little sicker, a little weaker, a little less athletic, a little slower - yes a little dumber and less creative.
In fact we could reasonably expect that Adam and Eve would, in todays world be supermodels, who would easily win most any event in the olympics with minimal training. They would absolutely radiate vigor and health (provided we could keep them from being exposed to the various nasty bugs that have arisen since their time). They would be socially adept, in a way that we could not fathom. Likely superb musicians and artists.
Its true we may have picked up a number of useful minor things since then - disease resistance to the black plague for example, or to malaria. Possibly some adaptations to a unvarying grain based diet. Also possibly an ability to learn to read easily. There is some evidence that that is a recent gain of function for mankind, repurposing some of our ability to read faces to being able to effortlessly recognize written characters.
This post then is a place for me to capture evidences of this. Either general loss of function, or information about specific traits that have been gained since the dawn of history. I will add links as I come across them.
they indicate the hunter who made them was running at 23 mph, the speed of a modern Olympic sprinter, but barefoot and in sand.
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