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Next Step in Human Evolution
PrivateDonut writes "Where is evolution taking our species? MSNBC has up an article that examines where evolution could take the human race. The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups." From the article: "Such ideas may sound like little more than science-fiction plot lines. But trend-watchers point out that we're already wrestling with real-world aspects of future human development, ranging from stem-cell research to the implantation of biocompatible computer chips. The debates are likely to become increasingly divisive once all the scientific implications sink in." Class, please read Transmetropolitan for homework.
I would think that the tech haves and have nots would be the first split the the tech folks would split into mech and bio only engineering.
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We all know that Human evolution is shorty to be off shored to Mars because martians are a dime a dozen and grow faster in the reduced gravity.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
OK, that little useless thing on your foot commonly referred to as "the pinky toe" has to go. Other than ramming it into doors and such (causing great pain on colorful metaphors) I have found no practical use for it, so, according to Darwin. It has to go.
And hopefully the creationists stay out of this one, lets leave the flame wars to Fark.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Human evolution has reached the point where other then learning to breathe in a low oxygen area (like underwater) or being able to fly we've pretty much at the peak we can be at.
Over the years we've evolved to use tools and tools have kept us up with the latest evolutionary fad. We're pretty much a stable mutation of a monkey (with other obvious mutations still happening once in a while). Other then learning to fly or breathing water we can't adapt any more to our planet.
When humans move to another world with more problems we will probably start evolving again. Untill then why risk evolving and screwing ourselvs over if we take the wrong path?
I like muppets.
"The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups." Well, if we are seperated into seperate environments that would probably have the same effect as being seperated into seperate groups. That probably means that we will evolve in space. It makes sense as well, we could still evolve to "work better" in microgravity... we could still evolve to run better on different air, maybe purer or less pure oxygen. And since we're in smaller gruops in space, according to this, we are going to have an even greater chance of evolution. So, is space travel going to bring on the next stage of human evolution?
Adamantium claws. Telepathy. Electromagnetism. Weather control. Yeah you read it right, they'll discover that there is a gene that controls weather.
And they'll dress in spandex and fight each other for survival and/or world supremecy.
I for one, will be very entertained by our new mutant overlords.
Pass the popcorn.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Why can't people EVER use the "Not Safe For Church" tag on these things?
Actually, there are still a few isolated groups of humans living in the world today - the two that immediately come to mind are the bushmen and pygmies of Africa. Does this mean that "civilized" men are doomed to be an evolutionary dead-end, while groups that seem primitive in our eyes will make the next leap forward?
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
From the summary: ...no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups.
:P
Evolution will continue as long as DNA continues to mutate. To say that human evolution is at a standstill is ridiculous. We have been mutating (and remaining mostly unchanged, too) for hundreds of thousands of years. We haven't changed all that much because we're already incredibly well-adapted to our environment. Just look at the population.
In addition, our race has lived in isolated groups for most of its existence. Isolation only leads to inbreeding, which is generally a Bad Thing for evolution, as it limits the availability of new genetic material.
Of course, I have yet to RTFA...
Reality is fluffy!
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups
No, the gist is that we won't have two seperate species of humans without isolation. Evolution doesn't stop.
Not only is that a very basic and obvious concept, it says exactly that in TFA.
FTFA:
"Evolution is still at work. But instead of diverging, our gene pool has been converging for tens of thousands of years -- and Stuart Pimm, an expert on biodiversity at Duke University, says that trend may well be accelerating."
And at this point, not only do we have natural mutations that could be dominant, we also have the ability to alter evolution through our own means.
I highly doubt this: human intervention will outrun 'natural' changes in background radiation.
In general I have the impression that the article assumes human adaptation while engineering will probably be much more important: we unravel the DNA etc and cure diseases and make 'stronger' humans. Drawback of this: I don't want to sound like a Nazi, but I can imagine this counteracts 'natural selection'. If glasses wouldn't have been invented, everybody would have perfect eyesight etc...
To answer the question, one has to look at which genes are reproducing themselves, and which aren't.
It's pretty clear that the environment has been dysgenic for intelligence in the modern world for at least a century. The more intelligent you are, the better education you get, and the more education you get, the less children you have.
The most likely outcome of future human evolution might be something like Kornbluth's "Marching Morons." Over the next few centuries, the average IQ of the human race will drop to 60-70.
The Flynn effect might be raised as an objection, but the Flynn effect is not genetic, so it can't affect this.
There will be no further naturally occurring evolution of the human race. Since medical science can overcome just about any malady, disfigurement, or defect--allowing anyone to procreate--there is no opportunity for nature to weed out anything. For example, 5000 years ago a man who had a faulty liver would most likely die and his genetic line might die with him. Today, a man with a faulty liver spends a coule of days in a hospital and is able to continue his genetic line. So in essence, science has outsmarted evolution. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply when everyone survives.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Humans have been most counter-productive when it comes to evolutionary improvement.
The short and simple of evolutionary drive is: "the good changes survive and the bad ones die."
Well, with all of our disease curing, deformation correction (not to mention aesthetic surgery), and public welfare the most unworthy humans are reproducing at enormous rates. To further worsen matters, the most worthy humans are, for personal reasons, not reproducing or having only one child furhter decreasing the population of the 'successful.' We're actually backsliding quite a bit.
And as has been pointed out, any improvements in humans are likely to be artificial and if any actual changes in humans arrise, it will be in how suitably humans will accept these additions. (That would be to say, their bodies will be less likely to reject artificial implants, foreign tissue, etc.) That's quite a gruesome picture being painted of our future... some Frankenstein-ish collection of beings with plugs and wires hanging out everywhere. "What? you use KEYBOARDS and MICE? How 21st Century of you!"
But back to the subject, we have all but overcome the forces of evolutionary drive. The only exception to that might be in the area of disease where if some new super-potent plague emerged killing all but the most immune, we might see another tiny step... maybe...
There should be a warning sticker on slashdot stating that evolution is only a theory. You people with your scientific methods, can you not see that there is a perfectly good explanation to it all? What makes you think you have evolved enough to question it? (well, I didn't mean evolved, I mean what makes you think God has granted you enough of a sense of, well not granted, miricaled, yeah, just thought it into being).
Oh, and I will pray for your souls to have a sense of humor.
God is great, God is good, let us thank HIM for our food. (see, you would not even have food if God had not willed it out of the ground because photosynthesis does not exist either, and don't even get me started about the lie of everything not revolving around the earth and that Galileo punk. Just because the church apologized didn't mean the church wasn't right because it can't be wrong because the pope is infallible because if he wasn't, my whole religion would be based on lies, so no way, I now can say that I have conclusivly proved that evolution does not exist because the church told me so.)
Evolution? No.
Evolution works fine until society appears, then it seems to go backwards, as the more inteligent, more dynamic outgoing people who make our world tick decide not to have kids, and those on welfare have 15 or more :)
We might not have that much genetic evolution ahead, but what about a memetic one?
Technology seems to have advanced quite a bit in the last century, and i don't see that stopping soon unless we go dark ages when the oil runs out.
I don't think that coming up with new ideas is fundamentally different from growing a new limb, and with those ideas we could probably change ourselves faster than genetic evolution would.
The gist of it is that no further evolution will occur unless humans can be separated into isolated groups."
You know, back when I was a med student, I asked this doctor I worked with if he agreed that humans - due to their ability to change the world around them so much - had stopped evolving. He said something a bit insightful to that - that we were actually evolving much faster than we ever had before not less. And that makes sense. We don't need to take eons to evolve new bodily ways of fighting infection - we have antibiotics now and can fight infection intelligently. The list goes on and on.
All of these technologies may work together, of course. It may be that human genetic engineering would help a person be more compatible with synthetic augmentations, for example. I also believe these are all good things. The core of what makes us us is our minds, and it seems tragic that so many people are restricted by the box their brain must travel in. I hope to be able to help make it so that losing limbs and getting paralyzed are simply no longer problems that need to be worried about beyond some inconvenience. I think that transferring to artificial bodies, or at least advanced gene therapy, will be important for future efforts to colonize space. It appears that in many ways, the primary threat is luddites shutting the research down. Fortunately, so far most of this has passed under their radar, so I am hopeful that will continue to be the case until actual products are ready to go. At that point, it will be too late to stop it. It is an exciting time to be alive though, and I encourage everyone to go and do some research on the subject, especially if you have access to a college or corporate net that has subscriptions to primary research engines, like ScienceDirect or JStor. Also, everyone can look at becoming a member of the AAAS, which will get you online access to Science.
Some links:
University of California Neuroelectric Research Group. Some interesting information, with PDFs available, on BCI.
Gene Delivery Systems. A free quick intro (from a lecture/course) on some of the different vector systems being studied for gene therapy, and desirable characteristics.
Those of you with access to journals can go read a very interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(6):1022-1035. "Optimizing a Linear Algorithm for Real-Time Robotic Control using Chronic Cortical Ensemble Recordings in Monkeys," by Wessberg and Nicolelis.
Evolution is driven by selection pressure. Selection occurs because some individuals die or otherwise fail to breed. Their heritable traits tend not to be found in the next generation.
So, ask yourself, what consistent selection pressures are acting on us now? Note that things that would have killed us in the past are now regularly taken care of by medical science. In just a couple of generations we have a significant subpopulation that can't breed at all without medical intervention. Some of these traits are heritable, such as difficulties in childbirth or needing IVF techniques to overcome fertility problems.
Other traits which seem to universally pop up in domestic animals are also showing up in humans. The modern urban environment is just as alien and stressful to us as modern farms are to the animals we keep there. So we are seeing hypersexuality, earlier and earlier puberty, obesity, and a lot of neurosis. THAT is the evolutionary future of the human race, and it's already well on its way.
The only way out of this situation is to start applying deliberate selective pressure. Given that this would essentially mean giving up the right of individuals to reproduce at will, I don't see it happening any time soon. Plus, I would imagine that a lot of effort would be thrown at hot-button traits like homosexuality or intelligence which probably aren't even heritable. (I know there are a lot of people who say otherwise; there are good reasons for doubting them, starting with their very eagerness.)
The world's population is already effectively split into two major groups, those who can afford radical medical intervention and those who can't. For another idea on how that might work out check out H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Some things are so basic that they're easier to call before you're well into the trend.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I'll probably get flamed for this but I have to say it anyway...
Why does anyone still expect evolution in our society? With the social system and the way our economy works there is no reason for evolution anymore. If you take a pack of lions... The top is the strongest animal, then the second tier is the ones that are almost as strong and so on. Now I look at where I work - the richest and most powerful guy has his job cause he started almost at the top and had the right backing... The next level down are all his friends - most of them completly incompetent idiots. Evolution? No thanks!
Now the other side - and that's the really scary one - since when do we weed out bad genes? Today most people die a natural death, no matter if they were stupid, disabled or had any other issues. In the past, those would have been the first to get killed by lack of food, deciese or wild animals. That kept the gene pool cleaner. Today, they have kids just like everyone else - and that has severe negative impact on the human race.
I'm not saying that there is any ethical way of changing that or that it even should be changed, but if the topic of evolution comes up, most people just silently ignore these two facts most of the time...
Peter.
Darwinian evolution (in which the genes affect reproductive success) will have a decreasing role in future. The ability to repair congenital defects, correct metabolic disorders, and cure life-threatening conditions means that natural selection does not occur with the same intensity as in the past. More people survive and reproduce would not of in the past.
The one area where Darwinian evolution may play a role is in how people respond to pharmaceuticals. Not all drugs work on all people -- some people cannot tolerate certain drugs and other people metabolize a medication so quickly that it is ineffective. These people will find themselves part of the orphan disease population -- populations that are too small to be worth the effort to develop drugs for. In time, them may succumb more frequently to medical problems and become less prevalent in the population.
What we will see is more evolution of memes (rather than genes). Memetic evolution is Lamarckian, not Darwinian. Whereas genes are markedly stable (the copy error rate is very low), memes are more malleable and tend to acquire new characteristics that are then passed on.
Thus, I would argue that Lamarckian evolution will play a bigger role in the future than Darwinian evolution. The characteristics that people (and society) acquire will be passed on to the next generation. The new technologies, new terminologies, new ideas, and new ways of living will define humanity's future and a person's life far more than does the genetic sequence of a person's DNA.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Well, I think we're good enough at holding our own these days. Not only do we adapt to our environment, we change it (i like to say 'terraform' but some people have a hard time accepting NYC as proof...). 6+ billion of us folks seems to be a bit more than our planet can handle anyway, so no need for mother nature to worry about people dying off any time soon.
I am, however, looking forward to the Foglet stage of my own personal evolution
eric http://www.ericdfields.com/
I think evolution happens too slowly for anyone alive today to care about it. By the time there are significant and noticeable difference in more evolved humans than the ones alive today, we'll all be long dead.
Unless we're too near-sighted to noticed the more evolved people than us at this point in time...
I'm not a specialist on evolution, but I noticed that it seems to happen more quickly after a massive die-off, with a few pockets of survival here and there.
And then you see new species evolving into the spaces previously unavailable because a previous species occupied it.
As for possible human evolution, the author of the article seems to indicate that the current convergence is a bad thing... not necessarily.
Assuming that various ethnic groups each have enough differences in DNA which can be beneficial to everyone, we could see a global "sharing" of this genetic data... after a while, a global catastrophe drives us a big step backward into the stone age, separates the survivors into tribal groups, and then we can go forward evolving again, for better or worse.
We don't know
The most polymorphic genes in our (actually most any) genome are the MHC genes - genes that are central to the adaptive immune response. These genes are under extreme selective pressure, to the point that we can track how peoples migrated by monitoring how haplotype ratios changed or new ones emerged over time.
New diseases are emerging all the time - as a prime example, HIV is a brand new disease that made the species jump to humans less than 100 years ago. As an immunologist, I fully expect another 'Black Plague' to emerge and wipe out 25% of the world's population within my lifetime.
Evolution by disease clearly isn't as flashy as evolving wings or gills, but it's evolution none the less.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Perhaps because there are a whole lot of church going, very religious people who believe in evolution.
In the future, everyone will be that asshole who stole your girl at the bar.
-mix
Exactly - Sexual Selection occurs every day for humans. Natural selection is very crude - you are either dead or alive.
Sexual selection allows mates to select the best possible candidate based on whatever arbitrary characteristics he or (usually) she desires. Have you noticed some people are more successful in bars than others? This is sexual selection in action.
If you want to learn more, google for "Sexual selection", and even for "peacock" at the same time to see how peacocks are an excellent example of sexual selection in action. Do you thing those giant tails help them fly farther or faster? Or require less energy to maintain? Those tails are about one thing - telling the female you are a healthy male. The female isn't concsious of this, but she selects based on tail size, and the cycle continues.
Evolution is already at work - in that many of the things that killed off the 'not fittest' no longer apply, for instance there has always been a battle between children being born with bigger heads( better able to learn early and survive), and killing the mother during childbirth. Now with hospitals these births all survive. There are probably lots of examples where balancing of two opposing 'forces' has been swayed - another that springs to mind is the onset of early puberty, (good for childbirth rates but bad for killing mothers that are too young), has beens wayed by moderne medicine. It seems crazy to say that evolution has 'stopped' because nothing is killing off people before they can breed - that is a change in evolutionary direction in itself.
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
Perhaps, but even if you're right, it might suffice if there is a nucleus of high intelligence is preserved even as the rest of humanity goes to rot. In fact, I'd say this is precisely what is happening. While some intelligent people are left to mix with the rest of the population, if they are educated, highly intelligent people do tend to cloister themselves with other intelligent people.
Consider yourself for a moment: how much time do you actually spend mixing with people vastly stupider than yourself in any sort of meaningful interaction? When you first meet a woman, even if she's very pretty, will anything kill your initial animal attraction to her faster than if she opens her mouth and says something stupid? Also, consider the brilliant people you know. Though they are perhaps having fewer children than the remainder of the population, what few children they do have are with other brilliant people. How many theoretical mathematicians do you know married to idiot slobs that spend their days on the couch watching NASCAR or football or whatever shouting "DEFENSE" every 10 minutes or so? It just doesn't happen. Though geographic isolation is breaking down, social and professional isolation is strengthening.
I see the "peacock effect" continuing- that is enhancing physical traits that seem sexually attractive amongst us, but with otherwise no survival advantage. Right now we use technology to do this, but may breed or insert this into our genomes. Probably in the last ten thousand years we bred for large breasts and penises, because we have clothing technology now and lessened new to to run after wild animals for dinner. I wouldn't be surprised if we didnt breed for skinny, tan women with huge knockers and fat lips. The long term evolutionary view held chubby girls were fit and fertile. We would also breed guys with muscular chests, never graying-balding pates, and large slongs. The Bushman-type hunter with the skinny runner's build was the long term norm.
A tail, and opposable toes on handlike feet. Totally. Damn lucky apes/monkeys, why did they get tails and opposable toes, while we humans are stuck with useless tailbones and flat feet with pointless toes? Bah.
I mean, seriously, that would be awesome. If I got tired of typing with my hands, I could do it with my feet. And I could use my mouse/trackpad with my tail for maximum efficiency. Wouldn't that rock?
Signature.
You misunderstand evolution if you think it's not working.
The current situation, where everyone survives, works in favor of evolution. It means when the next catastrophe occurs (whether it be killer allergies, poison canaries, pollution, parasitic ants, whatever), we will have a hundredfold more diverse genetic pool than if we were thinned out because less people survived.
To put it succinctly, we are currently in a phase where the geneline is being enriched.
GPL Deconstructed
Isolation is required for speciation (the creation of a new species distinct from the original species) it is not required for evolution to change an existing species.
Evolution is driven by the environment and selective pressures. If the environment changes, the species must adapt or die out.
In the abstract, each species inhabits a 'fitness landscape', think of it as a mountainous landscape - those poorly adapted inhabit the low lands, those well adapted inhabit the summits.
A particular species is ever changing, exploring other peaks, and sometimes getting lost in the valleys. The landscape can change as well, thrusting up the lowlands and making previously ill-adapted specimins quite well adapted (think of the tiny little rodents that did so well after the climate change that killed off the dynosaurs).
So, to the people who claim that human evolution has ended because of our technology's ability to compensate for suboptimal genetic mutations and variation - you couldn't be more wrong. Techonology has merely become integrated into our fitness landscape, like fire and tools have been for millenia.
There are many examples of where technology has massively altered the fitness landscape. The valley of near-sightedness is no longer so deep, and the summit of intelligence has lost a couple thousand feet. This dramatically changing fitness itself will drive evolution. The nature of the changes doesn't matter. Evolution isn't 'trying' to make us smarter. It isn't trying to make us stronger, faster, or more attractive.
Think about it this way. Yes, technology allows women who have narrow hips or large babies to give birth, when in the past they would have died in child birth. The result, there is less selective pressure on the width of hips in women and the size of babies. We can expect to see more variation in hip with, more narrow hips, and larger babies. In the future it might be exceedingly rare for women to give brth without a C-section.
Is this good or bad? Who knows, it allows our genome to explore previously unexplored territory - women with smaller hips, or who have larger babies in utero. What will be the result? Who knows. Perhaps there is some hidden adaptive benefit in these traits. Perhaps not. Maybe the genes that cause mutations or disease that used to kill before reproductive age have hidden benefits that are revealed when techology allows these people to survive and reproduce. Or perhaps they just open the path to a different peak in the fitness landscape.
As for those who point to the developed world's most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence of our devolution - I ask you why you assume these people to be inferior? Sure, many are not self-supporting, but many are - raising large families on their own incomes. Seems these people are quite successful at making and raising babies. Their genes will have proportionally higher representation in the coming generations than will those of us who choose to have one or two children.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because these people are poor they are somehow less intelligent or in some way inferior. Less educated certainly. But less intelligent? Remember that current human intelligence evolved in pre-literate societies.
Even the worst of the trailer trash functions at a relatively high level compared to our neolithic progenitors. Jim Bob knows how to operate a complex machine called a pick-up truck, even at high speeds. He can read, has a vocabulary well north of 5,000 words, can do basic math, and is mostly likely required to have highly developed hand-eye coordination in whatever work he does (if it is manual labor). These tax human intelligence far beyond the selective pressures that lead to the evolution of our current level of intelligence. Even the poorest among us need all our vaunted human intelligence just to survive.
Everyone knows evolution is just a "theory" concocted by the liberal media. Since we were all created by a higher being (a superintelligent goat probably), this whole concept is as silly as the separation of church and state.
The next logical stage of human evolution is for women's eye to migrate to their breasts so they can maintain eye contact with men.
Early on human history, strength, dexterity, and physical properties were vital for our survival. Not so at present. The most important element of humans currently is our intellect. And it will become more important in the future while our physical properties won't be as important to our survival.
;-)
It is possible that we might be able to exist in different forms in the future. After all, everything that we are, even the very sense of existance is a creation of our mind. The carrier of our mind, is our brain which is nothing more than a biological quantum computer (there are people who don't share this view, but I believe it will become clear as we advance enough in quantum computing to create a superinteligence). If we could transfer our mind to other mediums, like a quantum computer, a genetically modified body and so forth, we can basically exist in any form we like. So we'd be able to travel the stars, and survive in the most hostile enviroments. When this happens, our physical form won't be as important to us.
However, we will also realise that diversity is vital for our survival. And just to make sure that we didn't take the wrong path, we'll create autonomous human colonies on various star systems and let these people live and evolve on their own. Obviously we will help them in the begining, but when they are capable of surviving we'll let them on their own devices.
Legends will be told about our existance and how we created their world, but eventually the legends will fade out from their memories and they'll be more depended on science, technology and their own capabilities. Eventually they will reach a point where they speculate about their future just like we do and possibly create their own colonies and travel the stars.
Who knows? Maybe this has already happened.
VStrider.
something that the article lightly hits on: there's also a big underground movement about something called "the singularity" which is also a theory that more involves the next step in human evolution rather than evolution itself.
:)
From the http://singinst.org/Singularity Institute: "What is the Singularity? Sometime in the next few years or decades, humanity will become capable of surpassing the upper limit on intelligence that has held since the rise of the human species. We will become capable of technologically creating smarter-than-human intelligence, perhaps through enhancement of the human brain, direct links between computers and the brain, or Artificial Intelligence. This event is called the "Singularity" by analogy with the singularity at the center of a black hole - just as our current model of physics breaks down when it attempts to describe the center of a black hole, our model of the future breaks down once the future contains smarter-than-human minds. Since technology is the product of cognition, the Singularity is an effect that snowballs once it occurs - the first smart minds can create smarter minds, and smarter minds can produce still smarter minds." There's a singularity group at Stanford as well. Pretty important stuff because it can have many possible outcomes, anywhere from some Matrix-like effect to becoming transhuman -- so there's a big underground movement that's trying to ensure a positive outcome. Anyways, it's pretty interesting stuff if you've never checked it out. A good place to start is google
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
I don't want any taste or smell organs on my hands thank you very much. I still have to wipe my ass when I take a shit.
Nice Marmot
Humans have reached a point where biological evolution is no longer important to us. The current "important" evolution is happening in the mind -- memetic evolution. Next steps will hopefully the creation of new environments able to sustain self-replicating patterns, whether these patterns be computer networks or some other complex ecology.
Your brain and the ecology of all human brains is clearly where the evolutionary action is now (and has been for a relatively long, long time). Where's it gonna be next, and how will we know when it gets there? The first conscious monkeys didn't know they were the first step (or did they?)...
Since I'm a pensive person, I've wondered what the human race will evolve into a few times.
A few years ago a science magazine, I'm thinking it was Sciam, had an article about how the male human is headed towards extinction because of the SRY gene on the X chromosome which is the master switch for determining maleness. This gene is "falling apart". There is speculation intersexuals, those who are born neither male nor female, may be the key to the survival of the human species.
FalconShould there be a Law?
That experiment is like a single organism floating around and waiting till its better, which isn't really what natural selection gives you. A better experiment would be to take 500 dice and 500 counters, roll the dice, update the counters, and now: throw away the lowest 100 counters and replace them with 100 counters taken from the group of 400 remaining. Now repeat. I guarantee you'll get to 20 faster than 222,155,644 generations.
Evolution isn't done with us. Hominids have been around something like 4 million years, and in our current form around 300,000. The entire history of civilization is about 15,000 years - roughly equivalent to a speck of fly shit on the evolutionary time line.
Modern evolution moves at a slow pace, because the threats to human life today are relatively few, and our most significant threats don't prevent us from reproducing. For example, in the US and Europe all roads seem to lead to myocardial infarction. Since this generally doesn't kill us until we reach our fifth decade or so, we can have plenty of fat, diabetic kids before our own metabolic disease kills us. In the poorer parts of the world the biggest threats are AIDS and malnutrition, but again, they manage to crank out puppies well before their inevitable demise.
So, in order for evolution to progress at a higher rate we need greater selection pressures, and in layman's terms that means we need to start dying off faster. I'll offer a handfull of likely scenarios, some that we cause ourselves, others that we have no control over:
All of this to say, basically, that it's not technology's effect on evolution that we should be worried about per se. Eventually, mother nature will have the last word, whether or not we press her hand.
No, birds can stay in the air because they are lightweight.
No, the other fish just died.
The ones without fur, also, died.
The one Really Big Thing about evolution is that there is no purpose. The fittest do not survive, it is just that the least fit die off.
Similarly us humans can only wonder at our own complexity because we are so complex that we are capable of wondering.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
>Where is evolution taking our species?
Answer: Nowhere.
Evolution is pure fiction. Darwin himself admitted that the fossil record does not support evolution.
Natural selection only uses the genetic information that is available and it tends to keep species stable.
Mutations never add additional genetic information. When a mutation occurs information is mistransmitted or lost. Additional DNA information is never added, which would be necessary to produce higher life forms.
It's hard to call genetic engineering a form of evolution but I think people are going to start evolving the ability to survive in ever more diverse conditions. Ideally we should be able to transform a few base elements and a few energy sources into everything we need. The dependence on things like vitamin C should start to disappear over time as long as people are living in harsh environments.
As to mars I think we may be stuck living in enclosed averments for a long time. We might try a combination of terraforming and human modification to let people walk outside of habitats but I think such a terraforming effort is only a few orders of magnitude harder than changing it's orbit and adding enough mass to make it earthlike so we might end up doing that.