Have we (humans) stopped evolving?

To demonstrate taking a photo today, I made a clicky movement with my finger up near my eye… I wonder how long before that movement becomes meaningless…

GQ ucme! :¬)

I think we might be devolving.

I think the way technologies are going, we’ll have no use for our legs let alone our hands, everything will be controlled through thought patterns….. :-/

@Scooby Like in the movie Wall-E

@harple, yeah, pretty much, I saw that too. :-/

More like this though…. great stuff.

Survival of the fittest no longer applies; technology and modern medicine has eliminated the effects. I would argue that we are indeed devolving.

Absolutely we are evolving. Math abilities are decreasing. The ability to collect information will be more valuable than generating it.
Diet and weather changes, (ozone holes, warming, etc) will favor a certain body type. Hairless with a touch more melanin?
Education and brain capacity will be more important than brawn.

But until women stop dating and mating with big, dumb, rude men we will always have a fresh supply of stupid.

Some of us have, but I won’t be naming names.

Evolving never stops. It’s just such a long drawn out process that you will never live to see a highly pronounced change.

I can’t imagine major changes in the future for us. The human brain hasn’t changed much at all since ancient Rome, but we are significantly different from the Neanderthals and other early human forms. If I remember correctly, we experienced a rapid period of evolution, which ultimately slowed to the point where we are now. If I had to guess what the future human would be like.. I would assume that our bodies will adapt to technologies, like described above. I think we may become less prone to dangerous weight gain (assuming food supplies remain as accessible as they are now), and perhaps designed for sitting for long periods of time, rather than for running. I also figure that society and culture will never stop evolving, which ultimately creates the chance for physical evolution, assuming these things affect how we mate and who we mate with.

Just to stand up for the opposing side in @worriedguy‘s analysis: Unless men stop dating and mating with airheaded women, we’ll be adding to the supply of stupid from that side, too.

But I agree with @tedd here. The process (for the most part) is so slow and happens on such a sub-microscopic level that we won’t “see” changes until long after the fact.

I read once that the primary difference between American eels and European eels, for example (which are now separate species) had to do with the widening of the mid-Atlantic rift, which widens at about 1.5 – 2 inches per year. At one time it was thought that all of the Atlantic eels were a single species, meeting at mid-ocean for mating purposes once a year. Over time, the widening gap in the rift, which favored the European side, meant that American eels were having to travel longer and longer distances to mate. (That 2” per year, over tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of years, adds up to a lot more travel for their nookie.) This started to select for bigger and stronger American eels, since it took that extra bit of strength to be more successful at mating.

No one would have seen that “as it happened” (and it’s a change that one might have expected anyway – presumably modern European eels are also more successful at making that migration than ancient eels, too – at least, more successful given today’s conditions). I don’t think we’ll be able to see the changes in our own species, either.

Yes, we are still evolving. It is too soon to say what the changes are. Changes to hand-eye coordination seem likely though.

Yes we are evolving. We are evolving as a whole earth community too. Not only have we made gigantic technological advances in science in the past decade but we’ve also gained a large understanding of how the Earth works. In the next twenty years you will see the average lifespan of humans jump as much as twenty years for some, cancer will become more frequent however it will also be easier for us to beat when found, even at stage 4a.
Math is at our strongest point ever. We can calculate distances in terms of trillions of light years. We understand theories of time travel, cell manipulation, grafting, organ transplants with stem cells, the list goes on and on and on. We surely are evolving and to say so other wise is to not look beyond obvious problems in society that we now are working globally to fix and understand. If you’re not seeing the evolution then you are not paying attention to the past twenty years and the fifty predicted years in front of us.

I don’t think by caring for our weak and disabled, thereby letting them reproduce, we nullify survival of the fittest. We just modify it. And we probably sit on the brink of taking evolution of our species into our own hands, thereby greatly accelerating evolution rather than stalling it.

We don’t know the exact timetable yet, but life as we know it on this planet is doomed. At some point, we will be hit by a truly massive asteroid or interstellar object. And even if we develop technology to defend us from that, in about 7 billion years our sun will supernova. Far before that, it will become so hot that it evaporates all the water on earth and its corona will eventually expand beyond Earth’s orbit, melting our planet into its internal thermonuclear furnace. .

If we are to survive past the certain catastrophic end of Earth, we must either evolve to be able to withstand such extreme conditions, or evolve so we can undertake a life of interstellar travel and adapt to conditions on far-flung planets in other solar systems. We may need to genetically engineer ourselves for life in numerous diverse environments.

We are still evolving, although in different ways and perhaps to a lesser extent than in the distant past. Consider that about 10,000 years ago, our lifestyle was fairly stagnant. Traits like speed and strength which made one a good hunter and fighter were consistently valuable, for instance, and therefore favored by natural selection. Evolution, being a very slow process, generally requires many generations before real change occurs, so it is helpful when certain traits remain favorable for a very long time. Now consider the present and the rapidly changing lifestyles we live. A hundred years ago in the US, traits which made one a good factory worker were favored. Now traits which make one a good worker in the service sector are generally favored. There is hardly time for natural selection to work consistently for several generations, which is necessary for much evolution to occur.

But we’re still evolving. Despite our changing lifestyles, some traits consistently remain advantageous.

Really good question.
That’s all I have.

@ETpro I like it ;-)

@Scooby I like it too. Great link. Thanks.

Good stuff folks, cheers for that!
Oh & @harple @Ayesha an extra helping of thanks, I have my moments :¬)

No, with time comes change, no matter what. That’s just the law of physics.

Humans are evolving more rapidly than ever.

This makes sense because humans in recent centuries have been thrust into increasingly changing environments dominated by technology (which also rapidly changes). Since environmental change is a major factor in driving evolution, of course we’re still evolving and doing it faster than when we stayed in an unchanging natural environment.

Also, you guys really need to keep in mind that evolution is not a ladder. “More evolved” doesn’t mean “better.” It means your genes have undergone a greater number of mutations.

I think our brains will get much better at processing images faster. Considering how much editing goes into films and TV these days. I just can’t handle a new frame every 0.4 seconds. I’m still trying to take in the previous image. It’s insane and really annoying. I just want to shout, “calm the fuck down!” at the TV. Um…I’ll end my rant now.

@Qingu made two important observations in two posts:

1. “Upset conditions” in global environments lead to quantum changes in evolution. That is, when a more or less steady state environment is upset quickly (as opposed to the tectonic rate of change that I mentioned earlier), then major changes in several organisms’ physiology can lead to radical changes in a specie’s makeup. That is, the “better adapted” changes may be the only ones to survive in the new environment. It’s one of the reason that species have changed so much over the course of the Earth’s development, because of the many mass extinction events that have occurred on the planet. To the extent that global warming is happening and continues to happen, we may be witnessing such an upset event.

2. Evolution isn’t a “tree” with “humans at the top”. As Stephen Jay Gould has presented very well in several of his books (such as “Evolution and the .400 Hitter”), species development is more of a “bush”. Just because humans have evolved from apes and other primates, for example, doesn’t mean that we (humans) evolved from “what we now recognize as monkeys and apes”, and it doesn’t mean that monkeys and other apes have ceased evolving (in their own environments and in their own ways), and it doesn’t mean that humans are “more advanced” than any other primate. We’re also not “more advanced”, except perhaps in terms of complexity and behavior, than any other species on Earth, including bacteria, worms and any plant you’d care to mention. We’re simply different in recognizable and notable ways that allow us to say, “Oh, that’s a human, and not an oak tree or a paramecium.” Not “more” or “better”, simply “different”.

I think biological evolution has pretty well stopped for the moment but cultural, or technological evolution is obviously happening at breakneck speed. Humans are adapting in response to these changes but this isn’t what Darwin meant by evolution as the adaptations will not be passed on to our children.

@flutherother, but you’re wrong. Biological evolution in humans has accelerated. (see my post above) It’s been scientifically proven—we can look at the rate of genetic mutations across populuations over time.

And it’s exactly as Darwin would have meant. Our environment is changing rapidly and so we are changing to adapt.

@CWOTUS, I don’t think global warming has been or will be a major driver of evolutionary change in humans. Rather, our agriculture and technology has apparently driven most of that change. The most famous example is lactose tolerance in adults (ie the ability to drink milk without getting sick). Without farming, there would not be large populations of humans where those genes are favored. Farming is a technological innovation that has, in turn, driven biological evolution in humans.

As far as “not better, different,” I’ll add another famous example: the sickle cell gene. Black Africans often have a genetic mutation that makes them susceptible to sickle cell malaria. So that’s bad. But that same gene increases resistance to malaria. So that’s good—particularly if you are in an environment where malaria is common, like in much of Africa. Which is why black Africans tend to have this gene while white Europeans do not. “Better” or “worse” are determined by environmental fitness in this case, there’s no objective standard.

@ETpro you’re welcome…. :-)

The more technology evolves, the less our intelligence does.

@Keep_on_running I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one.

@ETpro :-)

@Qingu Your article looked at human evolution over the last 40,000 years and found that humanity has been rapidly changing but I don’t see any evidence for humans evolving in more recent times, particularly post industrial revolution. Darwin’s theory said that individuals with traits that are suited to the environment will survive and breed and those that don’t will die and won’t breed. The environment humans live in is changing but I don’t see how the changes can force evolutionary adaptation when they are benign and don’t threaten survival.

The only evolutionary change I am aware of is that humans are becoming taller and heavier as food supply ceases to be a problem. Why that should happen I don’t know and I don’t know how Darwinism can explain it.

@flutherother desperately clinging to survival is not the only evolutionary force. Look at sexual selection among birds of paradise.

@flutherother “The only evolutionary change I am aware of is that humans are becoming taller and heavier as food supply ceases to be a problem.”

That actually can be explained because of a trait we evolved long ago that doesn’t apply well to modern society. We are “programmed” to eat food whenever it is available because food didn’t used to always be available so readily and becoming overweight was not an issue people contended with. Now that food is not scarce in the US, this trait doesn’t serve us well and people get overweight. Obesity-related heart disease being a top killer in the US, I imagine this trait is starting to change. But it hasn’t been a problem for enough generations for the change to be apparent yet.

Relatedly, have you ever wondered why unhealthy foods like sugars and fats taste so good, and healthy foods like vegetables taste less good? Why would we evolve such tastes, that seem to be disadvantageous? The truth is, sugars and fats provide a lot of immediate energy and are only unhealthy in large quantities over the long term. In the distant past, sugars and fats weren’t so readily available that we could overeat them, and because of their benefits in the short term, it was beneficial to eat them when one came across them. Now that we have the luxury of being able to overeat, they are not so beneficial anymore, and I suspect that our tastes are changing, too.

Evolution is a slow process, so we hold onto some traits for a long time after they cease to be beneficial.

@Mariah That would explain why humans are becoming more obese, and so less healthy, but it doesn’t explain why they should be so much taller than their recent ancestors. Every generation seems taller than the previous one.

@Qingu Good point, though it seemed to trouble Darwin a little when he said ”“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!” Having said that though, don’t women prefer tall men?

Women seem to prefer tall men, wealthy men, and/or rock stars… two of those things are cultural, and those cultural traits can, in turn, be amplified by underlying genetic traits (cunning intelligence/innate musical ability).

Just an example of how throwing a culture that makes it easier to survive doesn’t stop genetic selection forces, it can actually encourage novel new forces to arise.