Future Human Evolution

[The Keasbey Knight]

The way I see things, humans have done relatively little evolving over the past thousand years give or take a few centuries. I think it's because instead of us evolving to overcome a problem, we invent something or use a tool to deal with it.

With that in mind, how similar are humans likely to be to us 5,000, 10,000, and 25,000 years from now?



I believe humans will stay largely the same as they are right now. It would be interesting to see how humans evolve when/if cybernetics become common.

I do, however, think that with the(in my opinion) eventual colonization of other worlds we'll see large variation in that respect. Different air mixtures would necessitate bigger/better lungs, higher gravity would have shorter, less massive, but stronger people have the advantage and so on.

[Vannak]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Recent_and_current_human_evolution

[Der schlect man]

Here is the thing; every branch of the human ancestral line before homo sapiens had something to adapt to. We've adapted to every climate, almost every terrain, you name it, we've adapted to where we are now.

[DXnobodyX]

Larger arteries to overcome schlerotic plaques.

[Dieu des hommes]

We'll be succeeded by the transhumans and singularities we create.

[Suicidesoldier#1]

Technology isn't evolution, but yeah, that's where we would go.

[Shirunai]

We have already evolved to an equilibrium, to a point where further evolution is pointless.

[Scarlet Flandre]

[Draco_REX7]

Well I think that humans may bite the dust sometime but not any time soon. Most likely a millenia or two from now. But just think, nothing every lasts forever, technology or no technology eventually the human race, just like every other complex creature on this planter Earth, will one day become extinct, and something else will most likely take over. Whatever it may be.

[Shokushu]

Der schlect man

Here is the thing; every branch of the human ancestral line before homo sapiens had something to adapt to. We've adapted to every climate, almost every terrain, you name it, we've adapted to where we are now.

Shirunai

We have already evolved to an equilibrium, to a point where further evolution is pointless.

-I've got a college Biology degree. This doesn't magically mean what I have to say is important but take it into consideration when I say: There is a lot more depth to human evolution that I don't think you have looked into.


Ok so we spent 50,000+ years* as roaming hunter gatherers in groups of 50 to 200 or so individuals. Then we spent about ten thousand years working a lot harder to grow crops for more stable food supply (and yeah, our diets got worse with that early on but we've got nutrition up to a land-of-plenty sort of state at this point,) to, finally, city life.
* Subsistence living for more like 1 million years but the early technology of hunter gatherers that made it quite how we picture it is a 50k sort of figure, if my memory serves.

We HAVE NOT fully adapted to this. Our genetics are much more suited to hunter-gatherer life: assuming everyone you meet living around you is related to you (so you cooperate with them instead of driving them out or killing them,) autoimmune disease, obesity, etc.


Now there's an idea that is easy to overlook: the environment you are adapted to may not be the environment you do best in. Cactus are well suited to the desert but if you give them some nice pots in windows with guaranteed water they can thrive to a greater degree. If you kept it up with many generations of plants they might adapt to the houseplant life and change a great deal to make the most of it, but in the very immediate sense the one environment is better, so long as they can get into it.


So if you've been paying attention you'll know that our immune system has actually been doing quite a lot of evolution in the last however many centuries. Europeans having greater resistance to cold/flu type viruses is why the Native Americans didn't really devastate them with the native diseases (there's a fair share of nasty stuff from this continent but it just doesn't compare.) Nowadays there's nobody left without a lot of adaptation to colds- so much so that it seems strange that a cold could kill anyone.

We've also got some subtle things going on like straightening our spines a bit and other stuff that isn't as dramatic as what you want to see. Well honestly you probably don't think the immune system thing was that dramatic but I don't want to teach everyone molecular biology today so too bad.


As for something a little less firmly established, a lot of the aggression against each other is probably on the way out. With early farming we had a lot of evolutionary pressure to kill our neighbors- "who knows what such clever opponents might do tomorrow? We had better do a preemptive strike on them!"
This is actually a behavior we have in common with chimps so it's no surprise that it goes back way past farming, but with agriculture there was a more concrete ownership of land so we really wanted to weaken the farmer families near us in order to drive the remnants off of their land.

The situation is a bit different now and murder is really difficult to get away with- we're at a point where we almost never see people even try without having a deeply fragmented view of society, where they think they can get away with it, or just emotional overload.

There are very few situations where it is worth it to kill each other so we avoid the family scale killings from the age of agriculture. Now there is the matter of leaders sending nations to war or genocide. Generally these gambles don't have good payouts so we can solve that with some better systems that give alternative options for dealing with enemies. It seems killing each other is on the way out in all but the most extreme situations.

If you want more example I could ramble some more but this is getting very tldr; as it is so I'll leave it at that.

[Sparatcus]

Evolution, the beautiful, slow process that shapes out bodies like a glacier shapes a continent, over millions of years.

"OMG IN DEH PAST 2000 YEERS WE HAVUNT EVULVED A NEW LEG, EVULUSHIN IS SLOOOWINNNGGGG DOOOOWNNNNNN"

[Suicidesoldier#1]

Shokushu

Der schlect man

Here is the thing; every branch of the human ancestral line before homo sapiens had something to adapt to. We've adapted to every climate, almost every terrain, you name it, we've adapted to where we are now.

Shirunai

We have already evolved to an equilibrium, to a point where further evolution is pointless.

-I've got a college Biology degree. This doesn't magically mean what I have to say is important but take it into consideration when I say: There is a lot more depth to human evolution that I don't think you have looked into.


Ok so we spent 50,000+ years* as roaming hunter gatherers in groups of 50 to 200 or so individuals. Then we spent about ten thousand years working a lot harder to grow crops for more stable food supply (and yeah, our diets got worse with that early on but we've got nutrition up to a land-of-plenty sort of state at this point,) to, finally, city life.
* Subsistence living for more like 1 million years but the early technology of hunter gatherers that made it quite how we picture it is a 50k sort of figure, if my memory serves.

We HAVE NOT fully adapted to this. Our genetics are much more suited to hunter-gatherer life: assuming everyone you meet living around you is related to you (so you cooperate with them instead of driving them out or killing them,) autoimmune disease, obesity, etc.


Now there's an idea that is easy to overlook: the environment you are adapted to may not be the environment you do best in. Cactus are well suited to the desert but if you give them some nice pots in windows with guaranteed water they can thrive to a greater degree. If you kept it up with many generations of plants they might adapt to the houseplant life and change a great deal to make the most of it, but in the very immediate sense the one environment is better, so long as they can get into it.


So if you've been paying attention you'll know that our immune system has actually been doing quite a lot of evolution in the last however many centuries. Europeans having greater resistance to cold/flu type viruses is why the Native Americans didn't really devastate them with the native diseases (there's a fair share of nasty stuff from this continent but it just doesn't compare.) Nowadays there's nobody left without a lot of adaptation to colds- so much so that it seems strange that a cold could kill anyone.

We've also got some subtle things going on like straightening our spines a bit and other stuff that isn't as dramatic as what you want to see. Well honestly you probably don't think the immune system thing was that dramatic but I don't want to teach everyone molecular biology today so too bad.


As for something a little less firmly established, a lot of the aggression against each other is probably on the way out. With early farming we had a lot of evolutionary pressure to kill our neighbors- "who knows what such clever opponents might do tomorrow? We had better do a preemptive strike on them!"
This is actually a behavior we have in common with chimps so it's no surprise that it goes back way past farming, but with agriculture there was a more concrete ownership of land so we really wanted to weaken the farmer families near us in order to drive the remnants off of their land.

The situation is a bit different now and murder is really difficult to get away with- we're at a point where we almost never see people even try without having a deeply fragmented view of society, where they think they can get away with it, or just emotional overload.

There are very few situations where it is worth it to kill each other so we avoid the family scale killings from the age of agriculture. Now there is the matter of leaders sending nations to war or genocide. Generally these gambles don't have good payouts so we can solve that with some better systems that give alternative options for dealing with enemies. It seems killing each other is on the way out in all but the most extreme situations.

If you want more example I could ramble some more but this is getting very tldr; as it is so I'll leave it at that.

Blah blah blah paleo diet blah blah blah life was so much easier back then despite all the diseases and the fact we could have died at any moment from the cold, twisting our ankle or just the ******** weather without an AC.

Yeah yeah, this crap is crap.


As far as the immune system goes, a lot of it is not really genetic.

Mother's a lot of the times physically pass down resistances and we can get flu shots and stuff.

[Shokushu]

Suicidesoldier#1

Blah blah blah paleo diet blah blah blah life was so much easier back then despite all the diseases and the fact we could have died at any moment from the cold, twisting our ankle or just the ******** weather without an AC.

Yeah yeah, this crap is crap.


As far as the immune system goes, a lot of it is not really genetic.

Mother's a lot of the times physically pass down resistances and we can get flu shots and stuff.

Well, guess I have to try and describe immunology now-

So the specific step in our immune system that really deal with things like when we've got a cold is mainly in two types of cells. These each have their own goofy little molecules sticking out of them and those molecules have to bind onto the pathogen somehow. Luckily this is possible because a virus or whatnot needs to bind onto things sticking out of our cells in order to infect them- there are already spots ripe for binding.

But chemistry is a complicated jigsaw puzzle. You've got to fold the molecules up into different shapes in order to bind onto that kind of thing and then you've got to have certain building blocks at just the right spot in the shape to do the binding.

It's sort of a lock and key thing- you've got to have a different key for every virus (or even several keys for the same virus since the flu changes so quick.) There's simply no way we could suffer through the generations it would take to build those keys from scratch in the normal genetic way so we do something different.

We've got these things called histocompatibility complexes (named this because they were identified by people trying to do skin grafts and other organ transfers.) When a B or T white blood cell is born it sort of takes a saw and hacks apart those genes then randomly pieces them back together. This means each cell has a different new gene in it to build that binding part out of.

I'll stop there instead of going into how they stop these from binding to stuff naturally in your body or how the two types of cells work together or how we seek out mates with different genes for us and why or lots of other complicated stuff so that I can get to my point:

Imagine if you had a set of genes that just couldn't possibly produce a combination that could bind onto the common cold. Your body couldn't possibly fight it off. You'd have a fever and runny nose and such most likely but in the end the disease would kill you.

This is only the main mechanism for fighting disease. There are a bunch of other little layers of broad protection that I'm sure we've evolved subtle tweaks to that slow things like colds down.


So there you have it (watered way the ******** down.) We don't just magically grow immunity to diseases. We have to wait for those rare cells with the right recombination of DNA to figure out that we've got something for them to fight and then those cells need a little while to grow into a large force to eradicate the infection. Tricky diseases that we don't have good DNA for are often much better at killing us. Since we live so close together now it's easier than ever for disease to jump from person to person- we've had some really nasty epidemics and even pandemics kill off tons of people that didn't have genes that could handle those diseases. Survival of the fittest in the most straightforward way, laid out right in front of us.

*Oh and the immunity mothers give to infants doesn't last very long. The infants get antibodies through breast milk but those molecules decay quickly. After about six months their little bodies start to do the immunity task properly and from then on out you've got the cells that produce antibodies giving you a constant flow any time they find their specific target, after that first time you got sick that is. The delay is an anti-cancer thing but I won't go into that.

As for the flu shot, we're just putting the parts your body would attack into you minus the genetic material (and probably with other critical parts broken just in case,) so that you can't actually become infected but your white blood cells can think you have been and mobilize to fight it. It's the same thing as getting sick minus the part where you can spread it to other or actually have it spread in your own body.

[Suicidesoldier#1]

Shokushu

Suicidesoldier#1

Blah blah blah paleo diet blah blah blah life was so much easier back then despite all the diseases and the fact we could have died at any moment from the cold, twisting our ankle or just the ******** weather without an AC.

Yeah yeah, this crap is crap.


As far as the immune system goes, a lot of it is not really genetic.

Mother's a lot of the times physically pass down resistances and we can get flu shots and stuff.

Well, guess I have to try and describe immunology now-

So the specific step in our immune system that really deal with things like when we've got a cold is mainly in two types of cells. These each have their own goofy little molecules sticking out of them and those molecules have to bind onto the pathogen somehow. Luckily this is possible because a virus or whatnot needs to bind onto things sticking out of our cells in order to infect them- there are already spots ripe for binding.

But chemistry is a complicated jigsaw puzzle. You've got to fold the molecules up into different shapes in order to bind onto that kind of thing and then you've got to have certain building blocks at just the right spot in the shape to do the binding.

It's sort of a lock and key thing- you've got to have a different key for every virus (or even several keys for the same virus since the flu changes so quick.) There's simply no way we could suffer through the generations it would take to build those keys from scratch in the normal genetic way so we do something different.

We've got these things called histocompatibility complexes (named this because they were identified by people trying to do skin grafts and other organ transfers.) When a B or T white blood cell is born it sort of takes a saw and hacks apart those genes then randomly pieces them back together. This means each cell has a different new gene in it to build that binding part out of.

I'll stop there instead of going into how they stop these from binding to stuff naturally in your body or how the two types of cells work together or how we seek out mates with different genes for us and why or lots of other complicated stuff so that I can get to my point:

Imagine if you had a set of genes that just couldn't possibly produce a combination that could bind onto the common cold. Your body couldn't possibly fight it off. You'd have a fever and runny nose and such most likely but in the end the disease would kill you.

This is only the main mechanism for fighting disease. There are a bunch of other little layers of broad protection that I'm sure we've evolved subtle tweaks to that slow things like colds down.


So there you have it (watered way the ******** down.) We don't just magically grow immunity to diseases. We have to wait for those rare cells with the right recombination of DNA to figure out that we've got something for them to fight and then those cells need a little while to grow into a large force to eradicate the infection. Tricky diseases that we don't have good DNA for are often much better at killing us. Since we live so close together now it's easier than ever for disease to jump from person to person- we've had some really nasty epidemics and even pandemics kill off tons of people that didn't have genes that could handle those diseases. Survival of the fittest in the most straightforward way, laid out right in front of us.

*Oh and the immunity mothers give to infants doesn't last very long. The infants get antibodies through breast milk but those molecules decay quickly. After about six months their little bodies start to do the immunity task properly and from then on out you've got the cells that produce antibodies giving you a constant flow any time they find their specific target, after that first time you got sick that is. The delay is an anti-cancer thing but I won't go into that.

As for the flu shot, we're just putting the parts your body would attack into you minus the genetic material (and probably with other critical parts broken just in case,) so that you can't actually become infected but your white blood cells can think you have been and mobilize to fight it. It's the same thing as getting sick minus the part where you can spread it to other or actually have it spread in your own body.

Genes don't change as a result of stimuli, that's ludicrous.

Gained traits aren't passed down to children like, ever. :/


However, we can use our genes to do all kinds of stuff.

For instance, if we grew skin cells between our fingers we could have webbed fingers.


Yes, genetics would be used for this, but no more than any other physiological response, and while we would probably see a difference in chromosomal expression, it's no more than any other scar or growth really.

Activating latent genes as a result of say, exercise, can occur too, but technically they are always active it's just their expression and use and whatnot.


In any case your own post presents why vaccinations can work A-okay without genetic crap.

So yeah... sweatdrop

[Shokushu]

Suicidesoldier#1

Genes don't change as a result of stimuli, that's ludicrous.

That's not what I said. You r white blood cells have a specific mechanism for scrambling particular genes in order to generate things like antibodies that will reach the broadest spectrum possible. The cells do this as part of their maturation process before they even enter your blood stream to go looking for pathogens.

However in this case they actually do change it in response to stimulus. After the first infection has been dealt with the vast majority of the cells that fought it die off with just a few sticking around. There is some tweaking of the antibodies involved to make them bind better to that particular virus (and the cells grow faster from then on since they know it's not a fake infection and that this is useful instead of just causing a blood tumor.)

Quote:

Gained traits aren't passed down to children like, ever. :/

In this case you are absolutely correct. It's blood cells that are scrambling some of their DNA, not sperm or eggs. The reproductive cells only contain the full histocompatibility genes that will go on to be chopped up in white blood cell lineages.

Quote:

However, we can use our genes to do all kinds of stuff.

For instance, if we grew skin cells between our fingers we could have webbed fingers.


Yes, genetics would be used for this, but no more than any other physiological response, and while we would probably see a difference in chromosomal expression, it's no more than any other scar or growth really.

Activating latent genes as a result of say, exercise, can occur too, but technically they are always active it's just their expression and use and whatnot.


In any case your own post presents why vaccinations can work A-okay without genetic crap.

So yeah... sweatdrop

It seems you didn't grasp the part about how genetics comes into this. Rather than be long winded yet again I'll ask you the question that leads to it: Sure we make antibodies to fight diseases, but where do those antibodies come from? How does our body actually produce something just right to bind to any of trillions of possible pathogens?