No warm-blooded animal species needs to wear clothing to keep warm; they just are.
But humans can’t tolerate going naked in all but the warmest of climates; we get cold. (Clothing is for modesty, too, but that’s irrelevant.)
So is the evolutionary argument that when humans got into the clothing-wearing habit thousands of years ago, that prevented further evolution and now we always need to bundle up? Or is it more that humans are only “meant” to reside in very warm climates and when we live in Norway, Canada, etc. we must wear clothing for warmth because we’re not in our natural habitat?
No warm-blooded animal species needs to wear clothing to keep warm - until they struggle to find shelter or die of exposure. Humans “wear” their shelters, which is a neat little adaptation.
There may be other mammalian species that can survive in both the Arctic and equatorial regions without having to shed a heavy protective coat of fur or migrate, but not many.
Humans use tools. While this is not unique among species, it is not the norm and humans are by far the best at it. Clothing is a tool. Similarly, we do not have the jaw structure and teeth to efficiently kill and eat prey. Instead, we learned to use wood and stone tools for this purpose (as well as for making clothing).
Humans are highly-adaptable generalists. It’s debatable whether we are “meant” to be anywhere. But we’re able to survive in a much broader range of environments than nearly any other vertebrate.
Thousands of years isn’t enough time (by most understanding of the speed of evolution) for evolution to happen in a noticeable way let alone to prevent it.
It might be more helpful to replace the term “evolution” with “natural selection.” Unfortunately, “evolution” carries some baggage, with many people assuming that there is some ultimate goal, objective, or purpose involved.
Is natural selection an ongoing process for human beings at the present time? Absolutely.
No mammal can survive in every climate. Tigers will freeze to death in the arctic. Polar bears will cook to death in the desert. Humans evolved away from being covered in fur, because we evolved a better way of managing heat in hot climates - sweat glands. Then we evolved a way to live in colder climes: our enhanced intelligence and tool use, which gave us the ability to invent clothing.
If humans hadn’t evolved to be smart enough to use tools, we probably wouldn’t be significantly furrier - we’d just be a species of hairless ape confined to a much narrower, warmer portion of Earth’s geography.
Humans can tolerate much colder weather than most people think.
Victor of Aveyron is a famous case of a feral child. As wikipedia states:
Tolerance for cold is not limited to feral children. People who work in arctic-type conditions quickly develop a good tolerance to cold.
When I was young I started going outside with my jacket unzipped in the winter to see how long I could tolerate it. Eventually I got to the point where I didn’t really need a jacket at all except on the coldest days. I currently do not own a winter coat. I owned one when I first moved into this house 25 years ago, but I never wore it. Mrs. Geek threw the coat out about 10 years ago. It took me until fairly recently to notice that it was gone. One thing I have noticed is that I have to get cold a couple of times before my cold tolerance really kicks in. The first couple of cold days of winter I feel cold when I am outside. After that, it’s no biggie.
It’s like asking if a spider web is preventing spiders from evolving to be faster to catch prey or something. Or, if dams have prevented beavers from doing whatever it is that dams help them to do.
Feel free to contradict me, but since modern humans emerged from Africa, the course of our development allowed us to cool ourselves by means of sweat glands all over our bodies. This enabled us to become endurance hunters. As humans migrated northwards and the need to stay warm increased, our big delicious brains allowed us to see the benefit from wrapping ourselves in the pelts of our prey to retain body heat. Those same beefy brains led to tool creation, which made skinning carcasses that much easier.
So wearing clothes is a byproduct of our evolution, both physically and mentally, rather than a dead-end.
Depends what you consider “relatively temperate”, I suppose. There are other macaque species and langurs that live in the Himalayas; some gray langur populations, for example, undergo snowy winters with sub-freezing temperatures at high elevations.
So we’ve mentioned that on a time scale, we’ve had very little time since the arrival of the various flavors of ‘modern’ sapiens, at least in terms of time required for natural selection to have a major effect. During that time, yes it required investment of energy to develop and utilize tools to combat the climates we’ve entered into that we aren’t perfectly adapted for.
Of course, trying to survive in more borderline environments without clothing would have been possible, if risky, but would ALSO have required a great deal of energy / food to maintain our internal temperatures while doing so over the incredibly long time it would take to adapt.
Energy is precious, and multi-tasking by hunting animals for food energy and using their skins to conserve our own biological energy is a twofer.
One could ask if there is anything about humans wearing clothes that would render a mutation resulting in a significant covering of fur being selected against.
That then asks the question about whether such mutations occur. There are odd reports of very hairy humans, but whether this could actually become the basis for adaptation to severe cold is another matter.
To evolve we need mutations and they need to provide an advantage to be selected for, one that at least balances any pressure that selects against it.
Hairy might be attractive for some, not so for others.
That happened before we left Africa. I do think it’s cool that it’s one of the things that humans are good at compared to most other terrestrial animals. There’s very few creatures that can outwalk a (fit) human, even without tools.
Especially for mechanical/physiological changes … like the evolution of hair follicles for wool style fur…when no other primate has wool, it would be a new not a re-activation ? eg for skin and hair colour, its just the amount of melanin to produce … or stopping production of it … not the ability to create something new.
It was intelligence that let early humans spread so far from where they evolved…Intelligence may have evolved quicker… so thats why humans can spread out to different climates faster than they evolve to adapt to the climate they have moved to…
The genetics for tolerating high sugar and alchohol consumption… is about having more of the same genes (perhaps to better guarantee its functional in children.) rather than having a new gene…its far easier to evolve that…
I just want to remind everyone that people tend to use the term ‘evolve’ too loosely. We don’t ‘evolve’ to do anything, much less to achieve some perfect form or function. That way lies “intelligent design”. What happens is creatures (including humans) exists. Mutations happen. In some circumstances, there are advantages to the mutation - more often there are detriments, or a neutral effect.
If, over large periods of time, a specific, heritable mutation gives an advantage to survival, then over time, more descendants of creatures bearing that mutation survive, which may or may not lead to that characteristic to become the dominant genotype.
And for species with a relatively long birth to reproductive age like homo sapiens, it’s going to take a long, long time for such an advantage to become apparent and be selected for. On the flip side, for an intelligent, social creature which can share knowledge, it would take a comparative heartbeat for information on new tools, techniques and skills to be transmitted from whatever ur-source develops a new one. In terms of survival driven advantage, it will therefore always be faster (absent truly obscure circumstances or major, scifi level breakthroughs in genetic engineering) to develop and spread technological (and clothing was a major technology) fixes than genetic adaptations.
Or TL;DR → transmission of knowledge is unspeakably faster than transfer of genetic information.
(ETA - I’m oversimplifying here, and I fully acknowledge that most posters fully understand without my summary, but the sloppy language and implications always bug me and demand that I clarify)