''Natural selection still applies, it's just that we can't expect adaptations to remain limited to certain populations and not others. Adaptation can still occur, it's just that it seems unlikely to me that any population would become isolated from any other, which is a requirement for a speciation event to occur. As long as people can meet up, you can probably count on at least some of them having sex.''

A slightly incomplete answer on several levels I am afraid, but never mind I have enjoyed the debate, thank you.

I don't see why? You can't accumulate any kind of genetic difference if you don't have a population that is isolated. It just can't happen.

I don't think Hitler's economic policies did work - massive government spending on the military and public works with borrowed money. If it appeared to be working, it was an illusion, and it was unsustainable. Germany was in deep trouble just before the outbreak of WW2.
I'll support my claim with a quote from Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers":
"By 1936, however, economic recovery was being increasingly affected by fantastic expenditure upon armaments. In the short term, this spending was yet another quasi-Keynesian government boost to capital investment and industrial growth. In the medium, let alone the long term, the economic consequences were frightening. Probably only the US economy could, without major difficulty,have withstood the strain placed upon it by this level of arms spending; the German economy could not.
Faces349 you have already cited your admiration of the Chicago School's influence on the Chilean Economy - Hitler's policies were the opposite of what Milton Friedman would have advocated.

Here is a link to an article which addresses the myth of the German economic miracle:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/nazis_and_the_german_economy.htm

''I don't see why? You can't accumulate any kind of genetic difference if you don't have a population that is isolated. It just can't happen. ''

Firstly the Innuit and Malaria resistant populations would be mutually isolated, in the sort of scenario we describe. Secondly you are probably wrong -

Sympatric speciation in Nicaraguan crater lake cichlid fish.

and

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6742/abs/400354a0.html

The other points about Darwin and anthropocentrism remain unansewed.

All best David

Isn't this all beside the point? This genetic isolation of the human race is not happening. It could have happened to the point where new species evolved, hypothetically, but it didn't; it could still happen, hypothetically, but its not happening now.
So there are not multiple human species. There is one species, Homo sapiens sapiens; and as has been already pointed out, race is arbitrary, and the differences are superficial.

"One adapted to live in cold but malaria-free conditions, while the other would be adapted to live in hot conditio ns where malaria was endemic. As time went by differences would grow and they would definatively speciate." - but seperate species are not able to create fertile offspring - horses and donkeys can breed together but their mules are always sterile (likely because while the mule has 50/50 chromosones, one FULL set of chromosones for both species, but then you get a mix, which may be missing some chromosones if they happen to be in a different order...)

No humans have gotten so distantly related... So i fail to get the D of your demonstrandum.

''but seperate species are not able to create fertile offspring ''

I completely agree thats my point. We would have an Innuit species and a ''sickle-cell'' species, in time as different as humans and chimps.

OK the main point made against my view on the affect of Natural Selection on the human species is one of anthrocentricity. To paraphrase - It cant happen to us because we are different to every animal that has is alive now or has ever lived. Do I have it chaps?

So your point is that natural selection applies to the human race. Not exactly controversial. Has anyone in this thread stated otherwise?

@fullhamish: great link, ' sympatric speciation' - i havne't gone beyond the abstract, but where 'individuals mate preferentially with like individuals' - that impllies you COULD force a separation of species by segregation (or if people naturally felt like mating only with their own 'race') I wonder how many generations it would take...

I believe that this has happened with Killer Whales. There are separate species (or on their way to becoming separate species) of Killer Whales that do not interbreed.

''So your point is that natural selection applies to the human race. Not exactly controversial. Has anyone in this thread stated otherwise?''

OK so if you agree on that then you must agree that it is possible, under the dictates of NS, that we will almost certainly under some form of severe environmental stress divide into groups (or races if you prefer) and there is a possibility of speciation. To quote Darwin ''and eliminate the weaker races''. (this is not mining the whole quote is actually more extreme).

"Faces349 you have already cited your admiration of the Chicago School's influence on the Chilean Economy - Hitler's policies were the opposite of what Milton Friedman would have advocated."
Hence why I said I hated Hitlers economics, but it still partially worked. Did he fix the deficit? No. However what he did do what reduced inflation, reduced unemployment, and everything else. And as most economists today agree, the biggest factor in the economic strength of a country, is the peoples opinion on the economy. If they think its strong, regardless of whether or not it is, it will get stronger, if they think its weak, it will get weaker. If Germany created the illusion that the economy was fine, then people would start spending again, and therefore the economy would get better. Its a simple economic trick that works in the short term and fails miserably in the long term.

Ortathaic....... say it loud and clear if you do not think sympatric speciation exists.

Yes speciation could occur with the human race. Indeed if ever leave the planet and migrate to other worlds it will almost certainly happen. But it won't be Asians evolving into a separate species or inuits evolving into a separate species.

not as different as humans and chimps, humans inherit 23 chromosones from each parent and chimps inherit 24

Faces349 did you take a look at the link I posted?
Hitler reduced unemployment - but only by borrowing huge sones of money and virtually enslaving the former unemployed with conscription (or similar methods) and by fiddling the books (for example he removed women from the unemployment statistics - and Jews as well).
His economic policies did not work. The USA could solve its unemployment problems tomorrow by implementing the same strategy - but this doesn't mean it should. And nor would one argue that it would "work".

i think the biggest and most likely physical seperation would be into a ~zero gravity orbital population, if a permanent base was built orbiting the earth.

There would be many health implications for people as chemical processes are disrupted (concentration of blood in the body depends on gravity, the heart pumps more up to the head, but in Zero-gravity this results in a pressure imbalance... )

"However, there is no doubt that work was created. The Nazis introduced public work schemes for men who worked in the National Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst or RAD). Their work would have included digging ditches on farms to assist irrigation, building the new autobahns, planting new forests etc. The men of the RAD wore a military style uniform, lived in camps near to where they were working and received only what we would term pocket money. However, compared to the lack of success of the Weimar government and the chronic misery of 1931 to 1932, these men felt that at least the Nazi government was making the effort to improve their lot."
It still improved the economy, according to your very own link.

"government income had been 10 billion Reichsmarks in 1928. In 1939, it stood at 15 billion. However, government spending had increased from 12 billion Reichsmarks in 1928 to over 30 billion in 1939 - a difference of 15 billion Reichsmarks. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazi government always spent more than it earned so that by 1939, government debt stood at over 40 billion Resichsmarks."
Thats very misleading, way to take the stats right before the recession in Germany became a depression. Sure the German debt was 40 billion in 1939. In was between 20-30 billion when Hitler took office.

"His economic policies did not work. The USA could solve its unemployment problems tomorrow by implementing the same strategy - but this doesn't mean it should. And nor would one argue that it would "work"."
It would work a lot better then Obama's recovery strategy.

"(for example he removed women from the unemployment statistics - and Jews as well)."
Bullshit. Women where never on the employement stats. Jews on the other hand had jobs, its call concentration camps.

Maybe you are right about women having never been previously counted in the stats (can you support this with a link? Otherwise I'll just take your word).
BUT many women were forced out of their jobs to make way for unemployed men. Thus the stats were improved with actually having to create new jobs. That is cooking the books.

Typo... the stats were improved *without having to actually create new jobs

@Jack: It seems I'm not the only one who manipulates information.

Employment in 1929 (from 2 different wiki articles):
"The unemployment rate was just under 5% at the turn of the decade"
"One in five workers was a woman by the end of the decade.(1929)"
If one if five workers was female, and the unemployment rate was 5%, then less then 25% of the working class has to be female. Which I highly doubt was the case back then.

But yeah, your right about Hitlers miracle being mostly a facade economically speaking. But Germany became the center of technological development in the 30's, which you said couldn't be done under a dictator because all the intellects would move away.

"government income had been 10 billion Reichsmarks in 1928. In 1939, it stood at 15 billion. However, government spending had increased from 12 billion Reichsmarks in 1928 to over 30 billion in 1939 - a difference of 15 billion Reichsmarks. From 1933 to 1939, the Nazi government always spent more than it earned so that by 1939, government debt stood at over 40 billion Resichsmarks."
Thats very misleading, way to take the stats right before the recession in Germany became a depression. Sure the German debt was 40 billion in 1939. In was between 20-30 billion when Hitler took office.

Doesn't it show that while Government income rose, that Government debt rose at an even greater rate? How is that misleading? Its shows that the Nazis were robbing Peter to pay Paul.

But you have already agreed that the Germany economy was a facade. So its a moot point.

The German's did suffer a brain drain under the Nazis. A lot of intellectuals (especially Jewish, but not only Jewish) emigrated.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a very small species, relatively speaking. Compared to most mammal species, there is very little genetic variation across our gene pool. This is because of the bottleneck that we went through roughly 70,000 years ago, when there were only about 15,000 human individuals left.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_human_population_bottleneck_in_Africa

fullhamish, what is the point you're trying to make? It would take some serious selection pressure to speciate humans in a small enough number of generations that even history books would notice it happening. It takes very little breeding between groups, just a couple of times every few generations, to completely halt any speciation. You'd have to be talking some crazy rigid cultural standards that make the caste system in India look lax if you want to see sympatric speciation in humans. No, inuits and Africans wouldn't become like humans and chimpanzees, the amount of variation within humanity and the amount of variation between humans and chimpanzees is several orders of magnitudes off.

Race is a real concept in the sense that races basically represent large interbreeding superfamilies. One East Asian is more related to another East Asian than to a Turk, but an East Asian is more related to a Turk than they are to a Subsaharan African. It's been mentioned before, but yes, individual variation is a larger source for differences than is racial variation. Race is not a real concept in the sense that there are no firm boundaries between races, and you'd just be drawing arbitrary lines on a complex and varied continuum that is constantly shifting and intermingling, especially in modern times.

Yes, there are average differences between races, and while I think the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth liberal response to such notions is misdirected at best, the importance of such differences is overstated by racists. You can easily point out that there is a distinctly higher average IQ amongst people above 6' and those under 6' in height. You can show that there is significantly higher rates of criminality amongst men with faster beard hair growth. Shit, there are dozens of correlates that go ignored because society doesn't organize their ingroups and outgroups on the basis of these physical traits. Race is overstated because it happens that the same parts of us that face the climate are the same parts of us that face other people, such that the "significance" of differences in averages is more related to the saliency of the feature than its actuarial significance.

There are some serious bastardized understandings of evolution here, and that is definitely one of my pet peeves. Evolution does not act on the level of races, it does not even technically act on the level of the individual (as so many would falsely believe). It is simply the changing frequency of various alleles in a gene pool. Eradicating a race isn't evidence that you are evolutionarily superior, it's just evidence of genocide... because races cannot be evolutionarily superior to each other when evolution does not act on that level. There is no driving force behind evolution to create the smartest, strongest race, it is only to produce individuals that are well adapted to their environment such that they have relatively higher chances of reproduction. "Survival of the fittest" is not a moral prescription so much as it is a sorely misunderstood catchphrase. "Fitness" is defined in evolutionary terms as reproductive success. A celibate Nobel Prize Winner or an olympic athlete with an only child is by definition less "fit" than the welfare high school dropout single Mom with six brats.

I have more to say on the disconnect between "is" and "ought", but I have to go for now.

"Doesn't it show that while Government income rose, that Government debt rose at an even greater rate? How is that misleading? Its shows that the Nazis were robbing Peter to pay Paul."
But the following 3 years (Hitler wasn't in power) income went down and spending went up. Hitler turned that around.

huh, how did a thread about racism wind-up talking about Hitler?

@Chrispminis: very good, thanks for putting that much better than i could. +1