Quote:
Originally Posted by jyl
Conversation with a friend tonight.
Question is whether the evolution of human beings has stopped or is in the process of stopping, such that the physical and mental attributes of human beings will not change from now until the species expires?
One argument (mine) is that sometime within the past couple hundred years, an individual's ability to produce offspring ceased to be determined by his physical attributes (how strong, how fast, etc) or mental attributes (how intelligent, how creative, how fast-thinking). A weak, slow, not real bright person with bad eyes and a predisposition to cancer is as likely to have children as a strong, fast, very smart person with 20/20 vision and a low risk of cancer. Those children may not have a very good life and their parents may die prematurely, but as long as the genes get passed on, does it matter how good a life the carrier has?
Another argument (his) is that different races are mixing to an extent never before seen - 1000 years ago, what were the odds that a woman of French descent would bear the children of a Chinese male, yet here we are - which is creating new genetic combinations and may affect future human attributes.
What do you think? 1,000 years from now, will human beings be biologically - their bodies, their brains - different than today? Why and how? How about 10,000 years from now? 100,000 years?
Understand, we're not talking about what the humans of 100,000 years hence will "know". Maybe they will have knowledge and skills inconceivable to us. But if humans have not evolved, then a newborn from 2010 should blend right in, in the year 102,010, and should be able to learn all the same skills and knowledge as the other kids. If humans have evolved, then he'll stick out like a sore thumb.
Try, please, to refrain from doom-saying rants about how the USA is going to hell and this generation is so much worse than the last blah blah blah. I'm asking about evolution over time frames that make the USA irrelevant. In 1,000 years, the USA will be no more relevant than the Holy Roman Empire is today, and in 10,000 years, no-one will ever remember that the USA ever existed. Try to think big here.
|
Evolution is a
process of change over time and cannot be stopped as long as living things exist, be they human or microbe. To argue that the results of evolution are good or bad (will we be smarter or dumber, stronger or weaker) is a human conceit.
For human biology to change to such a degree that current humans would "stand out"
physically, would likely take tens of thousands of year (the current biological form of modern humans dates back 100,000-190,000 years, depending on the veracity of the dating.) The variations in the current human specie is such that physically, if you could drop a 130,000 human into our midst today, they would be virtually indistinguishable from the rest of us.
What must be remembered is that humans have become the dominant specie on earth because of
adaptability to the environment through
culture, not physical changes. The great evolutionary changes in
human history are cultural changes, which will continue to evolve, and they will evolve to best meet the needs of humans
as a specie living in a natural environment. Until mankind completely controls the forces of nature (and I am not arguing that this would ever be possible), his survival is dependent on successful adaption through cultural changes. Here is where we might "stick out like a sore thumb" in a thousand years. We would look the same but behaviorally, socially we would not fit in. You would not be able to recognize a Cro-magnon man if he was dropped in our midst tomorrow--that is, until he began to interact. Then, it would be obvious.
Will the physical human form ever evolve to something far different from today just as pre-humans did? Certainly, given enough time and now were talking millions of years.