How can humans evolve?

Nothing just ‘evolves’ and changes in a second. What you’re saying, if I’m not mistaken is natural selection. All animals do it, and that’s how we’ve evolved into from homo erectus or whatever into homo sapiens. Evolution is a slow process, it takes thousands or even millions of years, it really is a waste of time to speculate what humans will become in the future, you and your children and your children’s children will be long dead by then.

I tend to think that these days human evolution has to do with higher reasoning skills. Not that people will get smarter and smarter in general, but maybe they will become more and more cooperative, and learn how to get along with each other on a bigger scale (globally). If that doesn’t happen, how much longer will the human species will be around at all?

Think about the differences between humans and other animals. Think about the criteria we use to select mates. Think about what kills us.

Now alot of people arent getting there wisdom teeth, there is no longer a need for them (dont know what they were ever used for) but now you just have to get them pulled. I had a friend who didnt even have the buds where the wisdom teeth were suppose to grow out from. I only had the buds for my top wisdom teeth, but my brother had all 4 of the buds for his wisdom teeth. I think that slowly over time people will just stop getting there wisdom teeth, like my friends sister.

Humans are getting prettier and taller due to natural selection.

Evolution is more than just survival of the fittest, at its basis is the frequency of genes (alleles) in the population being considered. So for humans, being so widespread, with multiple populations which may interbreed or remain isolated (eg. religious sects that only marry within group or isolated amazonian tribes) or something in between, it raises the immediate question as to which human populations you are talking about.

But for any given population it is likely that differences in reproductive output, and additions from outside populations are going to shift the genome somewhat. But unless this shift is consistent in terms of selection pressure (natural selection or sexual selection) it is unlikely to result in dramatic and directed changes in gene frequency in the population. BUT, nonetheless this is still evolution at the population level regardless of whether we see “dramatic” changes.

So, it’s complex…right now HIV is having a very strong selection pressure on some human populations in Africa. That selection pressure is working against those who are promiscuous and practice unsafe sex and do not have any genetic resistence to the disease (there appears to be some in the population…as there is in Scandinavians due to past high impacts of small pox selecting for a gene which seems to also provide some protection against HIV). If there are genes associated with those risky behaviours and those genes are being selected against in those populations exposed to high levels of potential infection then evolution is directed by this selection pressure. As such those genes may be less frequent in future populations in the region than they are now.

So, humans are evolving but the unit of interest is more the population being considered than the species as a whole.