Wheres the human race headed

Mr.Obvious wrote: »

Humans are not evolving because there is no evolutionary pressure.

Not quite as we are still evolving. More than we ever did in the last 100,000 yrs as a species, if the rate of change of genes is anything to go by. Big hairy things trying to kill you or large scale changes in environment are not the only evolutionary pressures. Plus lack of pressure is an evolutionary pressure in of itself.

Dietary adaptations are an obvious one. The vast majority of humans 10,000 years ago were gluten intolerant. Gluten the protein found in many grains was simply not in the diet until the advent of agriculture. There are still people around today that are gluten intolerant(medically, not some hippie food intolerance BS) and they are a holdover from earlier times. Ireland has a very high rate of the condition and some have theorised that our dependence on the potato, not grains as a primary source of food for centuries may have something to do with it(if true a very short time for a local adaptation). Milk/lactose intolerance is another one. It's much rarer in Europe where we've been ingesting milk for longer, when compared to India where it is very common. The ability to metabolise alcohol is much lower in cultures that didn't use alcohol until recently. American Indians, Australian aborigines, some Asian populations. They're all adaptations and recent ones too. Last 6/7000 years. Who is to say that our very recent increase in foreign foods and proteins in europe is not part of an evolutionary pressure. Things like soya which very very few europeans would have been exposed to a generation ago.

Modern human's bodyshape has changed in the last 30,000 years. Compare a modern european skull to a 30,000 year old european skull and you can see the diffs pretty easily. Our teeth have gotten smaller, as have our palates, we've become less robust over time.

Even if we became overpopulated to the point where survival was no longer easy I doubt society would collapse completely and wealth rather than genes would determine survival. To get natural selection going again you'd need for us all to go back to the stone age.

Again if wealth was the deciding factor it would become a factor too. The ability to become wealthy and the characteristics required would be selected for(cunning, risk taking, social intelligence, etc).

The era of artificial selection has already begun. Although whether we should make the leap from screening embryos to proper genetic engineering is massive issue for future politics and one that we should start thinking about now.

I agree its an issue alright. Interesting one too.