I sort of think that humanity has reached a point where evolution no longer really applies to a lot of us due to us having more or less ‘out smarted’ most of the evolutionary pressures. Everything else has to rely on evolution to adapt, we just have to change and/or improve our tools. About the only things left are sexual selection and possibly our immune systems since we’re pretty much engaged in a perpetual arms race against disease even with modern medicine.
Tell that to the group who survived the next giant asteroid collision with earth.
Bruce Willis already took care of that.
Giant asteroid collisions are sort of outside context problems with regards to evolution since they can’t be adapted to at an evolutionary rate so most species who encounter them tend to do so in the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop. If humanity was to survive one, it would have very little to do with evolution and a lot to do with our engineering ability. Plus if we ever manage to get our rears in gear and start colonising the solar system we’ll put our species out of the range of even that threat through the application of tech.
I dunno, my mom got very upset when she found out I’d been dittoing my girlfriend back in high school.
No, they are not. It doesn’t matter what the environment is or how quickly an adaptation is needed. An animal that can run is better adapted to such an event than a plant that is rooted in place.
It’s a common misconception to think that “normal” evolutionary pressures no longer to apply to humans. It’s likely that we’re just in our own little equilibrium until the next “punctuation” comes along. How many extant species of mammals, for example, can you name that have come into its own since we did, about 150k years ago?
Except that you can’t out run a giant lump of space rock or the devestation that it causes. Other animals starve and freeze, humans use electricity to power growlights and heaters to stay fed and warm. Who lives and who dies won’t be down to who can run faster, it’ll depend on whether or not they’ve got the necessary tech. Or to put it another way, think of all the animals that were biologically adapted for the ice age that are now exinct while humans, who just started wearing more layers, buildings better shelters and getting creative with fuel sources when the tempreture plummeted, are now the dominant species.
Or, more likely, where they happen to be lucky enough to live, with or without 21st century technology. Maybe the only reason they live there is that some ancient group of people migrated there 20,000 years ago.