Will our human species change?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just wondering if anyone thinks our human species will ever change and evolve into something quite different from what it is now?

Will our brains grow in size to account for more informational dissemination from our fast paced environs?
Will technology play a more integral role in human evolution to the point of incorporating itself into our biology?
Are we seeing a global change in our children already, menstral cycles starting earlier, skipping grades, smarter kids??

Where could we go from here?

2

It will change and it is* changing. What we’ll change into is anyone’s guess, since our technological environment is changing much faster than evolutionary processes can keep up with. The pressures that select various traits are far different today than they were for our distant ancestors. Traits which once would have been selected out, such as hereditary blindness and other hereditary birth defects and now dealt with medically, and/or through adaptations to society (like the Seeing Eye guide dog program, for example). It would be interesting to peek in on humanity in another 100,000 years and see what changes have occurred.

3

Human evolution is still proceeding, but it’s not all that hard for anyone to survive any more. So now, evolution is mostly being driven by sexual selection. Someone who’s healthy as an ox, strong as an elephant, and smart as Einstein, but who can’t get the opposite sex interested, is just as much of an evolutionary failure as someone who dies at six weeks. If someone has a trait which makes a lot of members of the opposite sex want to have children with that person, then that trait will be a little more common in the next generation. Note that such a trait need not necessarily be “good”, except in so far as it makes the person sexually attractive. Female humans, for instance, have breasts much bigger than needed for feeding babies. Why? Because male humans, by and large, find breasts attractive, and men are more likely to mate with women with large breasts. If people start considering intelligence particularly sexy, then humans will evolve to be more intelligent. But if people start considering stupidity sexy, then humans will evolve to be more stupid.

4

Is it really true that women with naturally large breasts produce a disproportionate number of children?

Some things that may interfere with this theory of natural selection:
– women can get their breasts enlarged, thus attracting the men who like this without actually having the genes for it
– men may be more attracted to such women, but not that much more likely to actually marry & produce children with one
– men in other societies may not have this preference, and may produce plenty of offspring uninfluenced by this selection pressure

5

Off to IMHO.

6

Even if it isn’t true now, it was true for a long enough period of our evolution that the result is now big breasts. Implants are irrelevant, because they haven’t been around for nearly long enough to influence evolution.

7

Another factor that’s necessary for evolution to occur – besides eons of time – is relative isolation of a part of the population. Otherwise, any variations or mutations just get diluted and the population tends to revert toward the norm. In the present day, this is almost impossible, since there are almost no isolated groups of humans, and virtually no place left on earth where a small group could become isolated.

Going back to the time issue, you also have to appreciate the large number of generations necessary for a real change to occur. There is very little, if any, real biological difference between present-day humans and Cro-Magnon man. What does evolve is ideas and technology, all of which are based on a relatively very few biological differences between us and chimpanzees.

8

I am holding out for evolutionary backsliding, bring on the cavepeople, yay to grunting in the place of yucky grammar.

9

Fair enough. I was looking at the future, as the OP’s question suggested. I think you are quite right about the past.

10

Because we are so dependent on technology, we need to have very intelligent people to create this. However, their efforts benefit other people that don’t have these intelligence genes. Therefore, both the people with and without will be passing on their genes. Therefore, I doubt that intelligence/brain size will increase.

11

As MLS mentions, the difficulty in establishing reproductive self-containment of populations in H. sapiens , what with our high mobility and populational density, makes speciation difficult. So what you get is a dilution of mutations and at best a gradual spread of traits within the H. sapiens species, w/o triggering a speciation. And it takes a bit to do that anyway – species, once they exist, are remarkably stable.

Of course, now we can contemplate the possibility of deliberate alterations to the genome – but IMO there would be such severe political and social obstacles to having the “new, improved people” speciated away from the general population, that we would end up instead with with H. sapiens 3.0, or H. sapiens++, but still H. sapiens.

(BTW, as to speciation requiring “eons of time” – not necessarily, on a geologic scale. Gradualism vs. punctuated equilibrium is still a lively debate)

A lot of the biological “changes” we are seeing recently (which the OP mentions) are more the result of genetic " expression" of traits that had been environmentally suppressed – and are triggered by such factors as richer diets, longer lifespans, less physical labor, and environmental exposures. Others, such as how we can react to a faster paced flow of information, but cannot count on recalling from memory entire oral-tradition epics and the histories of our entire families, are the result of brainpower resources being redirected.

Technological improvements, such as integration of technology to the biology, are a potential source for many changes in how the human functions – and this may de-facto create some reproductive incompatibilities if the body is modified enough: but if the birth genes are still in the same 46 chromosomes and you could still breed true with any other human except for physical hindrances, it’s not speciation, it’s specialization.

So yes, man will likely continue to change – adaptation and all that, stagnation and populational uniformity being risky survival strategies and why make work easy for extinction. But macroevolutionary arising of a distinct “Homo somethingelse” is hard to foresee in the near term. In any case, " we" would not actually “evolve into” anything – a population of H. sapiens could give rise to a new speciation event in genus Homo, out of which would evolve H. somethingelse: if it successfully establishes itself, that new species may be fruitful and multiply and outlive H. sapiens’ own extinction so that it would look like sapiens evolved “into” somethinglese.

12

Lisa: Hey, Bart, according to this magazine, in another million years, man will have another finger.

[shows an artist’s conception of a five-fingered hand]

Bart: Five fingers? Ewwww! Freak show!

13

No, implants are irrelevant b/c they’re not an inheritable trait.

Recall that it’s only what you can pass on, genetically, that qualifies (altho I’ve always figured that contributions to the vast body of knowledge count as well, since they’re imposed on future generations).

14

There are many problems with typical evolution occuring within the human race currently. One is that there really isn’t much genetic variation between any of us. There’s more genetic variation within a single group of chimps than the whole human population. Another problem is that we don’t necessarily select a companion for the sole purpose of producing the best children. Yet another problem is with the large selection of people to pass genes on with. Since we all do have so many people to choose from, it is very likely that many of us will find someone to have children with. This tends to take the non-desirable factor of evolution out of the equation.
I think I most agree with JRDelirious’ suggestion that messing with our own genome will be the way of evolution for our species. This type of selection/manipulation will most likely be the source of changes within the human genome – selecting what we want our children to be like. Already we do tests during pregnancy to check the health of the child. There are some people who abort the pregnancy because a genetic defect is discovered. There are even cases now of clinics allowing parents to select the sex of the baby to be.
This type of evolution will not be wide-spread for a long time, if ever. But mistakes/discoveries in genes made with this research will most likely be the area for genetic evolution of humans.

15

I’ve often wondered if the reverse is true. I have no data on how widespread this is, but none of my friends who are college graduates have children, but the people I know who are high-school graduates (or less) often have multiple children. In discussing this with others, some have noted a similar phenomenon.

One person suggested that perhaps “intelligent” or ambitious people delay child-rearing until they are where they want to be in life, wheras those who are not college and career bound often have children earlier.

Poorer people who often cannot afford reliable birth control have more children than those who can. Unfortunately, there seems to be some correlation between poverty and intelligence/academic success. (Some sociologists have theorized poorer parents have less time to spend intellectually stimulating their young.)

What do you guys think?