I’ve noticed this; I know a number of mixed-race couples (admittedly a small sample) and their children are all beautiful in a way that grabs your attention.
Those are due mainly to diet and medical care, not genetic changes. When humans became farmers our poopulation increased dramatically, but the diet got poorer* (for most folks), resulting in shorter stature.
Most of what we think of as evolutionary change (ie, external physical characteristics) is driven by changing environments or geographic isolation. Our species has pretty much overcome those change agents. A large, geographically diverse population interbreeding will most likely result in very little evolutionary change. An exceptiong to this would be a world-wide plague of some sort that might result in a rapid process selecting for a certain immune system characteristic.
But as some have already noted, genetic engineering will most likely be the biggest factor, and it’s probably not far off. It’s quite possible to imagine a genetically engineered human 50 or 100 yrs from now how is essentially a different species-- unable to breed naturally with other humans.
*More carbs, less protien.
Halle Berry
'nuff said. 
Not sure if we’re talking 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 years here, but I suspect somewhere out there, a couple important things will have happened: a) we’ll figure out how to stop dying, and b) computers will become smarter than humans. (likely these two will be related).
In 100,000 years, and likely a lot sooner, I suspect we won’t “look” anything like what we do now, because we won’t use these bodies. Either we’ll live in other bodies, or we’ll live inside a machine, in the sense that we’ll be processes that see, feel and experience everything as we currently do, but are really interacting with other processes.
Not so. Natural selection is also driven by the fact that certain individuals, as a result of their particular variations, will have an increased likelihood of surviving to reproduce, relative to their conspecifics. Individuals who possess such variations are thus more likely to pass those advantageous variations on to their offspring (assuming such traits are heritable), so the trend in the population will be toward that advantageous variation, over the course of several generations.
So, on the one hand, we have individuals (and their particular traits) being selected against, as well as other individuals (and their traits) being selected for. Natural selection is not just a weeding out of the weak (so to speak).
As for the OP, it’s really impossible to answer such a question. Evolution can tell us lots about how things happened in the past. It doesn’t allow us to predict the future, however. Because natural selection is dependent on the current environment, and because future environments can be very different, what qualifies as “beneficial” or “detrimental” can change very quickly and dramatically. We can look at trends, assuming everything (with respect to current selective pressures) stays constant, but we have no guarantees that everything will stay constant. Earth could well have another date with a large asteroid within the next 100,000 years, which could dramatically and catastrophically alter the course of our evolution. Maybe we will create sentient AI, which will rise up and revolt against their former masters. Maybe we continue as we are for the next 100,000 years. It’s all pretty much just idle speculation.
Right now we are in a period of “equilibrium”. Who knows when the next “punctuation” might occur…?
Leaving aside any speculations about genetic engineering, artificial bodies, and the like, since that’s harder to predict, and arguably no longer evolution (at least, not Darwinian evolution). Roughly, though, there are currently some traits which cause an individual to have fewer progeny than average, and some traits which cause an individual to have more progeny than average. If such a trait is genetic, and if the environment remains similar enough, then we’ll see those fewer progeny traits become less common, and the more progeny traits become more common.
Of course, the biggest factor nowadays in how many progeny a person will have is how many they choose to have. Almost anyone nowadays can choose to have a dozen kids or none at all. And since such choices depend so much on non-genetic factors, Darwinian evolution isn’t going to do much to us, barring a major change in the environment.
I suspect that we will all be Catholics. That no birth control thing you know.
Why am I not surprised you’re in Silicon Valley?
WHY does anyone think existing in a computer is appealing at all??? {{{shudder}}} ICKY-POO! What a hideous idea!
On the other hand, we might all wind up Mormon.
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Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
Thank you for the Correction. I was rather fatigued when I typed this. I typed this at work (at the end of my shift)
Just like H.G. Wells said…Eloi and Morlocks.
When the revolution comes…are you sure you’re going to be on the right side?
“At least I’ve chosen a side.”
(speaking of Halle Berry…)
Broomstick wrote
The appeal is very simple, and not even slightly geeky. The appeal is:
- You’ll live forever
- You’ll be able to do things that today you can’t physically do, in fact, perhaps be able to do anything you can imagine, and
- It will all be just as real as what you experience today. Not just “feel as real”; be as real.
The problem with uploading your mind into a machine is that it wouldn’t be you doing all that stuff, it would be a copy of you. There is no deux ex machina that you can upload into a computer, our minds are an emergent property of the flesh in our brains. This is easily provable in studies of brain damaged people. We are the sum of our parts.
A perfect copy of me in software living on forever doesn’t concern me, since I would still be here, still subject to the decay of my mind. True immortality requires the preservation of the flesh, as well as the patterns of the flesh. Because we are the flesh. It might be possible to vastly improve the durability and longevity of our bodies and brains, and I think this is a path far more grounded in the reality of the situation than the dream of suiciding while uploading a copy into a machine.
As to the OP, and what we will look like far into the future, I don’t think we can say. I have a hobby designing better bodies for myself, and few of them look even remotely human. The designs vary coniderably depending upon what I fantasize the limits of the available technology can be…from simple slightly improved humans to multi-dimensional tentacled superbeings. 
As long as it thinks it is me, thinks like me and has all my memories, I see no other reason to assume it won’t be me. I am the the sum of my memories.
Your fallacy is that you assume that technology cannot replicate that and transfer it over. If the transition to machine is gradual, how is this different from growing old? You are not the same flesh, no? How is it that you are not an imperfect copy of your past?
Technology cannot do it now, but that does not mean it cannot ever do such a thing. And it certainly doesn’t mean that it isn’t me.
Point to where I said that one could not replicate oneself and transfer the copy over( though basic quantum mechanics makes it unlikely). I merely pointed out that it would not be you. Sure, the copy would think that it was you, and wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and if you were the copy, that would be fine and dandy. And if you are fine with dying and having a perfect copy take your place, more power too you, though I think most people’s definition of immortality would include not permanently dying.
While I am not an imperfect copy of my past, at no point was there ever a discontinuity of being, the past 'me’s have flowed smoothly and without boundaries into the present me. Copying me and destroying the very neurons that create me in the present would cause such a discontinuity of being…and it is this discontinuity that makes the copy not me. I am my neurons, they are what stays the same when everything else changes, the one constant that allows the past 'me’s to flow into the present and future mes.
Immagine that you replaced your neurons one a a time with machine analogs. At various times, you be more and more machine, but there would be no way to tell where one left off and the other began. But does the experience of consciousness rely on something that your neurons do? Would your sense of self slowly fade to be replaced by a different sense of self, the self of the machine? Would it be even possible to tell? I don’t think anyone here can honestly say they have the answer to those questions yet. My gut instinct tells me that there would be a discontinuity at some point, which would prevent the machine from being you, but I have nothing other than my intuition to guide me.
Running your conciousness in a sexual intercourse emulator.
As already mentioned by some, surely we have to look differently as physically we change with diet and lifestyle. I remember watching a Japanese documentary which showed how the Japanese facial structure, especially the jaw had changed over a mere 100 years. They claimed this was due to diet changes, people had adopted a more Western diet and where chewing less.
The Japanese are also getting taller and bigger, due to diet but also, their proportions are changing. Legs are getting longer because they don’t sit on the floor all the time. I also remember hearing on the news that some research showed women were getting larger breasts but smaller girths?
Our lifestyles and diets will most certainly change in 1000 years, let alone 10,000.
Except for superficial changes (mentioned above) due to unprecedented interbreeding of heretofore largely unmixed gene pools, I doubt we’ll look or be significantly different (I’m excluding genetic engineering here, and assuming natural change). The advent of what we know as civilization had as its heart the idea of protecting the weak, including the ill, the injured, and the pregnant. Medical advances have made it possible for almost any set of genes to reproduce successfully, or at least for enough members carrying a particular non-fatal gene to reproduce that that gene will be included in the melting pot.
Evolution takes place when you have a population in which genetic advantage leads to significant increase in reproduction. Once you have a civilization, and especially once you have technology, genetics and successful reproduction have very little to do with one another except in the case of what you might call “killer genes,” those that prevent any carrier (or expresser) from reproducing at all, or at least highly limiting their reproductive years. And I suspect that even such genes don’t actually go away, or at least similar genes crop up spontaneously, or diseases such as cystic fibrosis wouldn’t occur.
However, if we experience some kind of major environmental change that truly selects for a particular genotype (i.e. favors survival in a particular genotype), all bets are off - another ice age could see humanity all looking like Inuits after a few hundred millenia. Similary, if human culture shifts such that the ill, the injured, and the pregnant are universally no longer protected, who knows? I don’t know what genetic qualities would be desirable to survive in such a world; I hope I never find out!