What do you think will happen to the human race in the future? How do you think Homo sapiens might evolve years and years and millions of years from now? Do you believe that there could be some sort of superspecie in the future that is adapted to life anywhere (land, air, sea) because it is selectively advantageous to have so many getaway options?
Give your own theory on how today's modern man might evolve. Also, research to see if you can find any other theories on evolution in the future and summarize it.
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I believe because of sexual selection,which Coyne elaborates on, humans will only become more intelligent, but we will eventually go extinct due to pollution and the destruction of the ecosystem. Right now, there is a crisis for lack of water.
ReplyDeleteFrancis Fukuyama believed that through sociocultural evolution there will be one final form of unified government to which everything is universalized, so humans stop evolving.
source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
I partly agree with Jessica, but I think that humans will also evolve some visible traits in the future especially in terms of consistency. According to Coyne, most species are already well adapted because "selection has already brought it into sync with its environment" (Coyne 133). Because there are really no significant environmental pressures affecting the survival of humans, evolution for humans may be part what Coyne calls "stabilizing selection" favoring the optimal size of form of a trait. Coyne uses example baby birth weights.
ReplyDelete"Hospital statistics consistently show that babies having average birth weights, around 7.5 pounds...survive better that either lighter babies...or heavier babies" (133).
In terms of a super-species that could live anywhere, I do not believe that such a species can evolve. Throughout evolution, we have seen the disappearance of certain traits from organisms. We can sometimes see the remains of these traits, called vestiges. species traits are managed by a use-it-or-lose-it policy. If organisms in an area with a certain trait (such as gills for breathing in water) never uses the trait (such as the gilled organisms never encountering a major body of water), then, over time, the trait will disappear from the species. Maintaining organs requires additional energy; it is a selective advantage to not have more organs than an organism needs to survive.
Humans have already begun to see an evolutionary change in terms of wisdom teeth. Because humans have not used wisdom teeth significantly anytime recently, wisdom teeth are often regarded as human vestiges. In fact, there are humans being born now without wisdom teeth!
Going back to a super-species, the idea of being able to live everywhere would require many organs to be able to tolerate all the changes in temperature and pH that would occur on Earth. The organism would have to expend so much energy maintaining all the organs, that it would be hard for the organism
to survive without dropping some traits. The super-species would likely split into many species depending on where the individual organisms reside on Earth because it is a selective advantage to use less energy to survive in a particular environment.
Evolution favors organisms best suited to an environment. This means that the organism uses its energy the most efficient. A super-species is not efficient because it has to maintain all the organs that just sit idle until the right environment comes. Because the super-species is not efficient at using its energy, it would lose to the species that are just adapted to an area, so the super-species would either go extinct or diverge into many species, each adapted for a particular environment.
Sources:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v12/i3/wisdomteeth.asp
http://www.icr.org/article/539/
Humans have been evolving since the day Homo sapiens diverged from the last universal common ancestor of the genus Homo. For example, when European colonists introduced smallpox to the Americas, the aboriginal population was decimated, because while Europeans have lived with smallpox for a long time, some having genetic resistance to smallpox, Native Americans had never before encountered smallpox, and therefore had not evolved resistance to smallpox (Powell, 1999).
ReplyDeleteJessica brings up a good point, that pollution may cause environmental change too rapidly for humans to adapt to the change genetically. This is exactly what happened with the Native Americans, who were exposed to widespread smallpox before smallpox-resistant genes could arise and proliferate among Native American populations. Another example of Jessica's point would be the theory that a comet destroyed the dinosaur population, as the rapid destruction caused by the comet killed dinosaurs rapidly, not giving dinosaur populations time to adapt to the comet (though adapting to a comet is, I believe, impossible, no matter what genes arise). A problem that humans cannot adapt to may cause the end of the human species.
I believe that humans have already become the super-species of which Frank speaks. Humans are found in every continent, and in every terrestrial biome. Living in the ocean would not be practical for humans, but it is not an impossibility. Humans are ultimately capable of suriving in any environment on Earth because humans' use of technology can alter the environment to make it suitable for human habitation.
I believe that humans diverging into multiple species is highly unlikely. Coyne mentions that the divergence of species is ultimately caused by isolation and lack of interbreeding (2009, p. 178). With the advent of global transportation and diverse populations within every country, interbreeding among human races is not uncommon. However, I do not believe the divergence of the human species is an impossibility because there exist isolated populations such as the Ruc people of Vietnam (Uncontacted people", 2010).
Humans have been evolving for millenia and will continue to evolve, developing resistance to pathogens, and, if we are lucky, to environmental change.