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Old 08-09-2010, 05:46 PM   #21 (permalink)
kramus
loving the curves
 
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Location: my Lady's manor
I have no idea how we are evolving right now. There is a chance that there is an unseen/invisible change that is happening. That is, the change is subtle, pervasive, and without a large scale physical footprint. Perhaps some social accommodation or intellectual domain or new way of intuiting emotional reactions among our fellows.

There was an explosion in the arts and in the abstract concerns of humans about 50,000 years ago which we see in the sudden existence of petroglyphs, paintings and carvings that have survived. These things didn't exist for the first 150,000 years of our species as homo sapiens sapiens. Coincidence? Maybe, but there are people who image fossil skulls and dig up caves and look for physical characteristics who don't yet see the gross physical changes that possibly would accompany some major evolutionary shift in our immediate ancestors. There could simply have been a series of geniuses who managed to bootstrap our ancestors into the the amazing, creative people that have left us such things as the Altamira, Lascaux and Chauvet paintings. Or it was a brain evolution of a more subtle sort than we can currently determine.

Evolution in the future. Count on it. So long as we don't exterminate ourselves through war, get eliminated through some souless lottery (solar hiccup, dinosaur killer or inner-mantle shrug that flips the planets crust upside down) or run into an insidious killer like the degraded plastics that are finding their way into our very cells.

If humanity can get a permanent foothold away from Mother Earth evolution will be a certainty. Don't tell me that the folks who's ancestors have lived in the Asteroid Belt for 30,000 years will be genetically identical to the ground huggers who never left the Earth. Not to mention the micro environments that will exist in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud. The folks who eventually live out there will be totally different from us. Radically different environmental pressures coupled with an enormous variety of mutation agencies allowing evolutionary alternatives to spring up.

I think the self-directed evolution that genetic tinkering may lead to will be less impactful in some ways because it will be inside the box. Unless of course some of the results escape the box and evolve again outside of the labs. That could be pretty freaky, actually.

As Baraka points out so clearly we are adaptive as opposed to specialized. Which allows us to explore environments and changes in those environments that kill off more specialized species. That adaptability will allow evolutionary change in one way or another.

As for height - at least in the British Isles over the last 1,000 years it has been shown that diet and opportunity have a greater impact than anything else. Tall Medieval Men People in the time of Alfred the Great were on average the same height as today's average Englishman. If a general population tends to be short that does not reflect an evolutionary change except that poplulations with a lessened dietary surplus tend on average to not grow as tall as populations where the amount of food available is a non-issue.
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Last edited by kramus; 08-09-2010 at 05:49 PM..
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