There is still differential production of offspring who produce offspring. The selection is against kind of people who have few children or have few children who go on to have children themselves. That’s how it always has been and always will be unless we abolish natural reproduction.
Again, whatever effect this selection has (with quantized increments of the length of a generation), it's completely drowned in memetic and technological evolution(s) which currently operate at the speed of Tweet. In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations. Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
It’s a messy process, and we may not be able to see where it’s going, but you can bet that there will be changes in human phenotypes and their prominence over the course of many generations.
>Evolution will have hard time identifying genes to promote, when the minimum unit of change is probably "how smart people are" or "how social people are", both having many more reasons for being favoured by natural selection.
If I understand you correctly, that’s just not true. In his seminal work, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins showed that the individual gene is the unit of selection. A genotype that tends to result in a slightly stronger preference for a family life is exactly the kind of thing that could become more prominent, even within one or two generations. I’m sure this is happening right now.
>In your particular example, this arguably derails biological evolution completely - the decision to have kids, and how many kids to have, is dominated by economic and (secondarily) cultural considerations, which change significantly between generations.
I was not making a particular example at all. That is the function of natural selection: it selects for the genotypes had by those who have children who go on to have children themselves.
The selection doesn’t have to happen at the level of a preference for kids. A gene related to diligence or conscientiousness or just about anything else can have effects that ultimately cause differential reproductive success for you and your offspring.
The fact that it’s all too complicated for us to model has bearing on it at all.
10,000 years isn't that short a time in a rapidly changing environment, though it would be in a static one. Human mematic evolution fed into human genetic evolution in a number of ways over that timeframe. As people started getting most of their calories from farming they didn't have as much dietary vitamin D and their skin got lighter. People in Eurasia got more resistant to contagious disease and were able to live together in larger groups, accelerating memetic evolution.
Gould came up with the excellent name "punctuated equilibrium" for the discontinuous nature of genetic change, though the math describing it had existed before he popularized the concept.
It is true, though, that all the big changes of the last 10,000 years seem to have been simple changes in individual genes or their expression rather than more complex changes.
