• Question: are humans still evolving or has evolution stopped?

    Asked by torres0sucks to Adam, Geoff, Rob, Sheila, Suzie on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      You can’t really see evolution on the timescale of lifetimes – it takes thousands, if not millions of years to notice any real changes. The other interesting thing is, we don’t really have anything like natural predators in our lives now – so how does nature select out bad traits? We are the only race to have machinery on the planet to help our daily lives – so who knows what evolutionary path that might take us down – especially if we can genetically engineer ourselves!

    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Humans are still evolving, I think! But this really isn’t my area…
      But I expect we’re still evolving but it happens on such a slow scale that we don’t really notice!

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 22 Mar 2011:

      I think it might have slowed down because we’ve got what we need to survive, like two hands and two feets etc. But if the conditions on Earth change then I’m sure humans would evolve again, eg growing eyes in the back of our heads so we can keep an eye out for all the billions of other people here on Earth!

    • Photo: Robert Simpson

      Robert Simpson answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      I can see why you ask, but I think we must still be evolving. Evolution is the way that a species changes over many generations. We have improved our diet and standard of living and so there will be things we could evolve out of needing, like hair or something. We may not evolve for the better of course – it might be that we become so comfortable that we become useless without all out technology. Its the stuff of scifi, but it’ll be literally ages before anyone notices anyway.

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