Could a human mother living today give birth to a new species?

Possible but I think we would call it a defect. It would have to happen around the world in such great numbers around the world to different humans that have no genetic link. But the change would probably take hundreds of years. If anything we still are evolving but the change would have to be a drastic change from what we classify as human. Say for instance everyone started to develop a tail. Or develop telepathy abilities. Or the ability to hear and smell like a dog, or lungs that will let us breathe in water and air if land starts to get severely flooded. Or eyes that can see clearly in the dark.
Either way the change would take so long that in the future we would be seen as being a sub species of the human race.

But we aren’t going to live long enough to evolve. We will have destroyed the planet and everything living on it before that can happen.

I’m sure other explanations will involve populations being isolated, and unable to mate with us and produce fertile young.

I propose this is too high a bar. If telepaths exist, for instance, I think that is more than enough to classify them as a new species immediately.

@Ltryptophan That would be and it could be the easiest of them to call a new species but I still think it would take so long because evolution just doesn’t happen overnight, that at first it would be considered just a defect. But you may be right that the first few to be born would be considered freaks of nature that shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. There will be mass fear of people with such an ability that they will either be killed or locked up. Imagine people who could know each passwords and secrets. They would be wiped out before mankind to evolve.

Xmen is not what I had in mind. I’m thinking more like lactose tolerance.

If someone(s) picks up a beneficial trait we can link back to genetics, and noone else seems to have the same trait, aren’t they more than a special individual of a larger species?

If someone can learn a complex language in one month, maybe they are more than just smart. How smart do you have to be, for instance, to say, that’s not even a human trait. That’s a you trait.

@Ltryptophan Plenty of people are lactose tolerant. And we also have child geniuses who can learn to play an instrument without being taught or do complex college-level math at the age of 8 or 9. We also have savants. Neither are considered a new species because they have existed for hundreds of years. Though if anything, I suppose you have proof that the threshold for being considered another species is high.

Let’s say two affable genius prodigies meet (certainly likely), and eventually mate. In a lifetime they produce 7 children. All of these children are far above average intelligence, but the third child, in particular, is slightly smarter than her parents.

This means she will likely never meet a single physical being that is her peer. Her parents, are maybe the only beings she can fully relate to…

Everyone she meets will essentially be handicapped, in comparison.

She may well be able to successfully mate with the other “humans”, but her faculties dramatically alter her ability to find peers.

Eventually she marries an olympian bronze medalist in track. They also have a few kids, and settle in the vicinity of Oxford college. There they typically only meet anyone with less than an IQ of 130, just by the nature of the school tradition of excellence.

Two of their children are impossibly bright. The father decides to personally take on the responsibility of their early education. Before very long they have fully mastered many disciplines, and authored prize winning research. They also participate, and medal in the Olympics.

At what point is this hypothetical family acknowledged as a bit different than everyone else?

Not unless the generics are similar enough. Like, if you tried to fertilize a human egg with the sperm from a dog. It doesn’t work.

But, that’s my point, there was a time when our ancestors might have been pretty close to identical with Chimpanzees, even after we forked off into a new species.

I think, because we are so intelligent already, and now can be so careful about who we choose to mate with, our offspring could quickly, and naturally, advance beyond many other existing humans.

Why shouldn’t non-genetically modified humans, that show traits far outside the norms, not ask for the distinction of being unique?

This might sound like an argument for superiority, but not at all. I don’t think it would make them morally superior, or give them special rights that other humans don’t have. It would simply identify them for being unique.

Let’s say the prodigies had kids, and none of those kids were as smart as they were. Then I think that’s evidence the parents were just statistical anomalies, and neither were necessarily a new species.

Albeit, one of the prodigies might have been a new species, and the new species was recessive, and the other may have likewise been the dominant traited statistical anomaly standard human.

@Ltryptophan Hey, anything is possible, I guess. Supposedly Aids got it’s start when some guy in Africa boinked a monkey. (And a very special monkey she/he must have been, too!)

We painstakingly work to objectively identify all the species on our planet. How foolish if we eventually refuse to make this distinction when a significant difference eventually shows up in our own species.

Why shouldn’t we look for them?

If we don’t then it’s as if we don’t want them to escape the species, with the best traits.

This could go for fastest runners, long sleepers, enhanced night vision… it could be something mundane.

I saw that at the movies !

Actually, as a species, we already have millions of variations. Think of cats. Tiger, lions, house cat. All are classified as cats. They look extraordinarily different from different skill sets and abilities and longevity.
Humans are no different. From bone density to genetic longevity, to height, weight, skin density and color, ailments, and even the food we can tolerate. For instance. Japanese people can tolerate higher amounts of iodine because they eat more seaweed. Their bodies have evolved but they are not considered another species.

If we think of separate species immediately there are fears of the ideology of a Nazi super race.

Not here. I’m saying, there could be people with pointy ears, and inside that pointy ear a new bone configuration that helps hearing a common invertebrate pest. Wow! Reclassify them!

@Pandora

Lions, tigers and cats are separate species. They are within the same family, but they’re separate from one another due to significant genetic difference. Whereas, say, a Grey Wolf and a Chihuahua are still the same species, despite the difference in size and appearence. Those differences are superficial. Generically there is very little difference. Sorta like how there is ultimately next to no genetic difference between any two humans on the planet.

@Darth_Algar You are right, I should’ve used dogs instead. I think it’s funny that the dog is thought to evolve from wolves when I would bet that a wolf will survive the wild better than a house pet in the wild and have better immunity than a house pet that needs all kinds of shots to survive. So isn’t a dog a downgrade of the species?

Nature doesn’t care about “upgrades”, “downgrades” or anything of the sort. Survival is all. And domestic dogs, whether we think of them as a “downgrade” or not, have survived. And yes, genetically they are the same the same species as the wolf.