I saw an article here about the future of human evolution.
Now personally, I don’t buy it. The main reason being that evolution isn’t a directional process. It’s an adaptive response to environmental changes. (Environmental being used in the broadest sense - the world in which we live in all it’s facets)
As a result it’s simply not possible to speculate on what will happen to the human species. Our descendants could conceivably evolve in many different directions, some more successful than others, just as our ancestors were part of a large spectrum of hominids. (Apologies if my terminology isn’t accurate)
There may not be much of a debate here, but I thought I’d drop this and see who might like to kick it around.
Miller, I was thinking that he just cribbed it from the movie “Twins,” starring Danny DeVito and the Guvernator. But your analogy is better for an austere MB like this one.
Someone ought to take Dr. Curry aside and explain to him that that is exactly what we have been doing for the last few thousand millennia (depending on which Homo ancestor we are happiest to claim as “like” us)–it is exactly the activity that got us the reps as the most homogeneous world-wide species.
Not to mention that it fails to take into count artificial, directed selection in the form of gene therapy, selection against chronic and fatal disease, et cetera. The whole notion of humanity becoming this homogenous, nearly-indifferentiable race of coffee-colored people is ignorant nonsense, too. The genes don’t disappear or meld, and the wider recessive genes are spread the more likely they are to appear in families. (We’ll note that persons of sub-Saharan African origin who were forcably transported to the Americas and subsequently integrated genetically show a much wider variation than the narrow ethnic groups from which they originated. Somehow, the population of Brazil–possibly the most ethnic diverse and integrated large population in the world–hasn’t turned into an indistinguishable mass.
A couple of decades ago, some “genetic futurists” were predicting that in a few tens of thousands of years the brains of Homo sapiens (or more properly, the successor species) would be 1/6 of the total mass of their bodies. Never mind that birthing and physically supporting such large brains would be biomechanically impossible, nor do we really seem to require bigger brains, now that we’ve begun to master the process of building machines to do specific “thinking” tasks for us.
How we evolve and what morphological changes make up that form will strongly depend upon what we, as a collective society, elect to do to ourselves. I’m guessing it’ll involve at least a loose integration of artificial enhancements plus an effort to reduce the incidence of lethal and debilitating defects, but beyond that, I think it’s useless to speculate except as an intellectual exercise.
And Wells’ novel was intended to be as much allegory as story. (Wells himself was a proponent of eugenics, and would no doubt today be considered something of a racist, though the same could be true of many of his esteemed contemporaries.)
I’m less amazed that the speculation exists (Desmond Morris and various others have indulged in similar nonsense in the past) than disappointed that the Beeb decided this constituted “news”.
That reminds me; Campbell Scott’s opening monologue in Roger Dodger has a speculation on the evolution of the human species that is at least equally scientific and far more amusing (bordering on, but never quite jumping the line to obscene). He concludes, however, that longer penises are not in order, and indeed may be well on their way to obsolescence. Better study up on your map reading skills, lads.
I disagree. It is quite possible to speculate - however the quality of the speculation will be garbage, as the linked article clearly demonstrates.
It was done for the British equivalent of Spike? That give me confidence. How can anyone predict the influence of technology without knowing what the technology will be? He could have at least shown he’s familiar with the literature by referencing The Machine Stopped along with The Time Machine..
Some years ago, a book came out entitled Life After Man by Dougal Dixon. It featured speculation on how animals and plants might evolve millions of years in the future if humanity no longer existed. I found it entertaining and thought some of the creatures shown (for example, the Phalanx, a wolf-like predator descended from rats) were plausible. So when Dixon published another book entitled Man After Man, I decided to give it a look.
Big mistake. The contents of Man After Man look like someone had a really bad acid trip. “Macabre” is being polite- “nightmarish” might be more accurate.
Agreed. I should have phrased that as “extremely difficult to make an accurate prediction.” Certainly anybody can speculate on any subject. I myself have often speculated that Krypton was actually settled by time lost humans from the future, which is why Superman looks so human and could possibly have kids with Lois.
