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Post by millis on Sept 18, 2008 11:02:31 GMT -7
Eh, im not so good at starting things, as may be evident before hand, its just something I'm interested in other opinions on, and I hope this is the right place...but here we go...
The human race are very intelligent, or most of them are, and very adaptable when gifted with this intelligence, obviously with cars and all the intricately designed machines and devices we use every day. The thing I'm thinking about is, although we've had a few changes over the years, height wise and some build, it seems that the human race has changed very little over a long period of time.
In your opinion, is that because we're so adaptable we don't need to change, or because we've stumped ourselves from more development by making machines to do the things we cant?
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Post by Pem on Sept 19, 2008 10:31:01 GMT -7
Well this is a fun little topic, I hope I can shed some light on some of the issues while keeping my bias to a minimum. Millis you have observed that it seems like we are no longer evolving due to technology and technological advances. The thing here that is interesting is that we are not evolving as fast as we are developing new technologies. While these two seem related you have to consider that cultural and biological evolution, although superficially similar, are different things. We all know technology has changed a great deal in the last 200 years, more so then the rest of human history combined, in terms of complexity of tools and application. However the human body seems to have made only minor changes, mainly variety in traits on apparent in race.
Now to see very apparent changes on an evolutionary time scale, often one must look at the geological time scale. Discrete evolution does not happen between a few generations. It happens over thousands and millions of generations. It is estimated that civilization began 10 thousand years ago (Correct me if I'm off), in those 10,000 years it does not seem human have changed very much, however if you were to do a very in depth analysis you would probably notice a few differences, height being one of them (although height is greatly impacted by the environment). Another thing you may notice is that brown eyes are the only ones really in existence, blue eyes are caused by a mutation in the HERC2 gene and this mutation didn't enter the human population until 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Evolution in humans is still happening, but at a scale we cannot really comprehend. It is hard to imagine 10,000 years ago let alone the millions of years it take for very apparent evolution to occur. This fact is further compounded in humans by the fact that there are no longer any (or very few), discrete human populations left. Evolution works its fastest when acting on small gene pools isolated genetically from other populations.
I hope this give you an idea of why we don't seem to be changing anymore, but my opinion on the matter is behind the facts, we are still evolving, albeit slower then we can comprehend. I think another topic for another thread would be "Where is evolution going to lead Homo sapiens?"
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