Future Human Evolution... Discussion

I think that there are two separate points to be debated here:

1 If there is a cataclysmic event that wipes out a substantial proportion of humanity the genes of the remainder will be naturally selected for;

2 If humanity is capable of cosmetic-genetic changes then the population will depend on the whims of an individual. Remember that any changes to muscular strength, eye colour depend on a knowledge of the genes involved and also injection of the genes into a fertilised egg to 'take over' the inherited gene.

For 1, if there is a cataclysmic event will any survive? If an asteroid hits the Earth ( at approx. 45,000 miles per hour), the dust cloud would cover the Earth's atmosphere, photosynthesis would stop and life may not last very long. However, this is debatable and I am interested in other views.

For 2 These genes will be inheritable but what if the children do not want to be blue eyed, blond-haired giant athletes with a high IQ? It is not their choice and they may wish to play the original cards they were given. Who should have the choice to play God?

However, there is an interesting additional point. Survivors of the European Black Death apparently had genes for extraordinarily strong immune systems. However, their genes have not been naturally selected for in Europe showing that other factors are also important in the gene pool apart from 'survivability'.

Originally posted by Heronumber0
I think that there are two separate points to be debated here:

1 If there is a cataclysmic event that wipes out a substantial proportion of humanity the genes of the remainder will be naturally selected for;

2 If humanity is capable of cosmetic-genetic changes then the population will depend on the whims of an individual. Remember that any changes to muscular strength, eye colour depend on a knowledge of the genes involved and also injection of the genes into a fertilised egg to 'take over' the inherited gene.

For 1, if there is a cataclysmic event will any survive? If an asteroid hits the Earth ( at approx. 45,000 miles per hour), the dust cloud would cover the Earth's atmosphere, photosynthesis would stop and life may not last very long. However, this is debatable and I am interested in other views.

For 2 These genes will be inheritable but what if the children do not want to be blue eyed, blond-haired giant athletes with a high IQ? It is not their choice and they may wish to play the original cards they were given. Who should have the choice to play God?

However, there is an interesting additional point. Survivors of the European Black Death apparently had genes for extraordinarily strong immune systems. However, their genes have not been naturally selected for in Europe showing that other factors are also important in the gene pool apart from 'survivability'.

With the way the world is going these days I think you may be right on the genetic engineering side. With the current research being carries out on the subject, I doubt there will be long before this becomes common practice (not necessarily on strength (yet!!) etc but maybe immunity etc). Who knows, it could already be taking place in some government installation somewhere!

Originally posted by GrimUK

How do you think humans could evolve?

I think the humans will use cybernetical implants more and more often, mechanical limbs, mechanical organs that work better than organic ones, maybe even nanorobots to replace white blood cells and massively improve our immune system. These robotic blood cells could be programmed in a way to identify and destroy many more viruses and bacteria than our natural defense cells can. We would then be much more resilient to disease. That's one example.

Nanorobots might also replace platelets (imagine a metallic-like scab forming instantly at any cut) or to replace red blood cells, maybe nanorobots could transport more oxygen, improving our stamina, etc.

Our lifespan would go through the roof. We could even slow down or stop aging.

As it was said, we are reaching a point where we create the environment we live in, and also we are attaining a level of understanding of genetics that will allow us to modify ourselves in the near future.

[edit on 20-5-2007 by DarkSide]

[edit on 20-5-2007 by DarkSide]

Great thread topic,
I happen to be a physician and I would like to think I have a "boots on the ground" idea of what is currently driving human evolution. Basically, all you need to do is look at how we live and extrapolate.

Here are some of my observations:

Stimulus & Effect
1. AIDS-selects for the CCR varient mentioned above in Black Death survival; also behaviors that tend to produce monogamy, resistant to IV heroin addiction; also selects for the non-african and non-asian subtypes of humans as the latter 2 groups are being most heavily hit by the disease
2. Massive obesity/malnutrition in western societies-selects for ability to manufacture own nutrients as diet is very poor compared to the past in terms of vitamin content, selects for ability to digest trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup and soy products, refined grain products as food source.
3. Toxic pollutants- selects for more efficent detoxification enzymes and DNA protection enzymes, which in the long term will reduce the incidence of cancer.
4. Poor diet and environmental toxins-selects for shorter lifespan and earlier puberty and reproduction; this is because those who wait to have children, find that they cannot due to DNA damage in germ cells while those who have kids at an early age, are successful.
5. Decreased reproduction by highly educated women in West-selects for stupidity in those who reproduce fastest(non working, single, welfare women)
6. Rampant drug use-selects for tolerance of drug use or for non-interest in drug use
7. Alcohol abuse-selects for genes to easily digest and detoxify alcohgol
8. Higher CO2 and CO levels-selects for fetal hemoglobin expressed as adult
9. Worldwide starvation due to food shortages from global warming- selects for, paradoxically, obese people as they can store food easily as fat and save it for times of hardship
10. Pandemics due to excess population burden and rapid global travel-selects for more robust immune system
11. Availability of drugs for all sorts of ailments-selects for general frailty in all body systems; this may seem to contradict some of the above, but it depends on the timing.
12. Television-selects for short attention span, nearsightedness
etc

Bottom line: The West will transiently become stupider, but with more robust resistance to cancer and mutation and ability to eat junk and thrive on it; we will better tolerate a poisonous environment. The rest of the world (that is without our medical and mechanical supports) will simply get smarter, tougher, more tolerant of starvation and disease without medical care, though there will be huge die-offs before that point is reached. I doubt we will be doing any fancy genetic engineering; we will be desperately trying to survive a ruined, highly toxic world wracked with disease, overpopulation and a toxic soup of poisons in the oceans, plants and whatever crops we can eke out. It's not pretty, but it is the future. In 500 to 1000 years, we will probably resemble Cro-Magnon again, since without all of our technology that is dependent on fossil fuels, we are really no different.

[edit on 20-5-2007 by j_kalin]

[edit on 20-5-2007 by j_kalin]

"Should We Play God?"
We've been doing that with animals for hundreds of years. A slow form of Genetic Engineering, breeding animals to enhance certain characteristics. Breeding dogs to look like Cute babies (big eyes, small nose, small size, playful temperament... your Maltese Terrier for example). Breeding cattle ruthlessly optimizing for milk and meat.

So we already do it.
Live is quite bendable.
Even if you believe in Creation, whatever God created 6000 years ago has been quite modified by us humans already.

So, why not ourselves? Mere physical attributes, and even the computing and memory portions of our bodies are not "The Soul". We modify them, we damage them already by design and accident.

New technology only lets us do it better and more efficiently.

j_kalin pointed out quite a few valid concerns, but I think his suggestion that genetic engineering won't be a major component is inaccurate. Rather, I think the wealthier people will be able to pay for modifying the genes of their offspring to compensate for many of those problems.

I do think much of genetic engineering will be misused to give their offspring better appearance, more athletic ability and musculature, bigger secondary and primary genitalia, etc. However, I do think that higher intelligence and better immune systems can and will be engineered in.

The next thing is the cyborg concept. For example, computers are being miniaturized at a great rate. We could engineer a fetus to have two sets of ocular nerves, one set going to the eyes as normal, and one set ending inside the sinuses. Then, very early, small computers could be surgically inserted into the sinus cavities and connected to the secondary ocular nerve endings. Now the child could access huge amounts of information, multiple languages, the information required for a dozen different PhDs.

Next, modems could be installed so that people modified this way could communicate almost as if they were telepathic.

At first, this technology would only be available to the wealthy, but once modified, their children would pass on these new genetics. Since those changes would be strongly advantageous they would replace the non-modified humans in a few generations.

I would guess, that if the human race survives, anyone who traveled, say, five hundred years in the future would occupy the ecological niche we presently reserve for house cats.

Occam

Occam,

I hope your version comes to pass, but I doubt it. For one, laws are passed in the west by the uneducated politicians who represent uneducated masses, not the elite. They have no incentive to promote germ line genetic engineering in humans. Currently, doing any genetic engineering in humans is opposed by virtually everyone and is illegal in most places. It might happen in China or India some day, but not for a LONG time. Those countries have neither the money nor the scientific knowlegde to do such work. You also underestimate mans ability to modify the genetic code of any organism; it is far more difficult that you can think. Even today, we understand only the most basic mechanisms of how genes are regulated and we have no idea at all how such polygenetic traits as IQ or optic nerves, etc are programmed into our DNA. It will likely be centuries if not a millenium before we know enough to reprogram ourselves succesfully. Unfortunately, man has run out of time. We are due for a crash of civilization/population for all the reasons I listed up above. I don't wish it to happen, but it will. Man is an animal and when animals outgrow their environment's ability to support them, there is a masive die off due to mass starvation, disease, infighting(war). We are seeing it now in the form of disease, terrorism, fighting over oil, environmental devastation due to poor people trying to grow crops, hunt food, etc. Earth cannot support 10 billion humans. Period. We need the high tech infrastructure which is powered totally by fossil fuels to do such genetic research and it wont be available for much longer. Politicians will turn to martial law and war will become the method of controlling our overpopulation, getting rid of people starvation and disease missed. In such a world, I doubt that financially, improving humans will be a priority.

scary predictions there j_kalin. I agree with you a lot. I doubt it will happen, but the evolution I would like to see is an evolution in our thinking. We truly have the means and willpower to make the most of this beautiful gem called earth, but most don't take the time to stop and smell the roses. I don't know if we hit the point of no return yet, but I'm afraid to say a major depopulation of the human species will benefit later generations as well as the planets ecosystem.

Originally posted by j_kalin
5. Decreased reproduction by highly educated women in West-selects for stupidity in those who reproduce fastest(non working, single, welfare women)

Education or knowledge is not intelligence. There are intelligent people that decide not to/ or can't get higher education and stupid people that do.
While intelligence maybe inherited, education certainly isn't.

However I agree with your vision of the near immediate future, altough I hope at least some of us will survive, and with a lesson learned with great difficulty for the future.

[edit on 21-5-2007 by DarkSide]

Bottom line: The West will transiently become stupider, but with more robust resistance to cancer and mutation and ability to eat junk and thrive on it; we will better tolerate a poisonous environment. The rest of the world (that is without our medical and mechanical supports) will simply get smarter, tougher, more tolerant of starvation and disease without medical care, though there will be huge die-offs before that point is reached. I doubt we will be doing any fancy genetic engineering; we will be desperately trying to survive a ruined, highly toxic world wracked with disease, overpopulation and a toxic soup of poisons in the oceans, plants and whatever crops we can eke out. It's not pretty, but it is the future. In 500 to 1000 years, we will probably resemble Cro-Magnon again, since without all of our technology that is dependent on fossil fuels, we are really no different.

j_kalin

Doc -you know your Biology as well as, if not better, than anyone. Is the obesity genetic or is due to a lifestyle choice. If the latter, then it is an environmental trait and not genetic. Even if it is genetic, the genes are likely to be passed on before death of the individual. The rest of the free world is dying prematurely from hunger - I don't see any selection fro hunger-resistance when the body simultaneously becomes susceptible to parasites due to a weakened cellular or humoral immunity.

You have assumed that many of the deleterious habits that you listed will have an overpopulation with these characteristics with death as the selector of the fittest. I'm sorry to say that these are erroneous assumptions. Within a generation, this is from memory, people in Brazil who lived in mercury soaked swamps had resistance to mercury - presumably down to some metallothionein analogue in humans. Was this a genetically fixed trait or down to environmental reaction?

Selection for stupidity would suggest a neo-Lamarckian feed back to the germline by retroviral gene capture and delivery to gametes and to a large number of gametes to be successful. In a polygenic genetic environment, this is highly unlikely. It's like hitting a hole-in-one from the 1st to the 18th green - or were you just joshing? C'mon Doc!

Completely agree with everything said. Unless we make some radical changes in the way we live there are going to be dire consequences. Maybe not in the near future but the next hundred years or so are going to be critical.

I also agree with the fact that humans will use genetic engineering, although our knowledge of genetics is still in its infancy I do think that once we have the knowledge it will be used...

Since the industrial revolution we have moslty deforested europe, injected astronomical quantities of carbon dioxide, other green house effect gases and ozone busting chemicals.

We've pourred toxic and radioactive substances into the lakes, rivers and oceans.

The result is, a global temperature that is rising rapidly, the ice is melting, lots of species are going to become extinct because of the rapid climatic change and pollution. Forests including the amazon are being decimated at the rate of several football fields / day.

Let's have a look at the human factor, since a century our population has exploded. From 1 to 6.5 billion in a 100 years, and It is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050.

Now, tell me what happens when there are tons of people, and resources that run short?

That's right, war, since there will not be enough food to feed everyone people will fight to survive. And fresh water is going to get rarer, the most important liquid for life. You can survive perhaps a month or two without food, but you only live for so long without water.

And since we're not willing to control our population (because it's immoral etc), then guess what, nature will do the job for us, and that means famine and disease. Remember the black plague? it scored 75 million people worldwide and eradicated nearly 2 third's of europe's population of the time. If such an outbreak happened nowadays, or worse, in 50 years, I guarantee it will claim at least a few billion (great density of population and very effective transports).

So I guess, if we survive, Postapocalypticus seems the next logical step

Postapocalypticus it is!!!

What comes next? Will humanity be able to learn from previous mistakes or will they just take another path to destruction...

[edit on 21/5/07 by GrimUK]

Obesity is both a genetic and environmental condition. For most of homo sapiens history, if one could store food as fat, then during famine one would have a survival advantage and reproduce. So, the obesity related genes became prevalent. However, people didn't get fat and suffer from the diseases associated with obesity today for the most part because food calories were scarce and we had to work very hard to get them. A good example are the native american tribes before the white men invaded.

However, now there is very easy access to food and calories and minimal effort is spent to get them; ergo, most people become obese because biologically they have the same food calorie storing genes they evolved with. Thin people are the mutants! And thin people will be the first to die off if there is a big famine in the future! (I say this as a thin person, so don't think I am being anti or pro fat/thin). i hope that answers your question.
I vote for homo apocalyptus; he will be able to drink poisoned water, survive radiation like a rat or cockroach, survive on garbage or whatever is handy and be resistant to cancer, UV radiation, heatwaves; in short, man will become the equivalent of the rat or cockroach. Unfortunately, he will live in a Mad-Max like world since, without fossil fuels, he will never make the jump from agrarian life after the massive die-off to the (2nd) industrial revolution. But he will be one tough M***F****. As for those who think the survivors will emerge to rebuild high-tech culture, not possible. The man who can do the high tech stuff depends on a million other humans supporting his endeavors; without that population, any survivor wont be able to maintain our current technology and we will revert to the level of the american colonists within a generation or two(if we are lucky). More likely is, since no one knows how to live at that level anymore, man will revert all the way back to the bottom and just be a skin-clad scavenger like we were 2 million years ago and learn how to make stone tools and fire. Hugh technology requires a big population; that's why the ancient civilizations never developed it. With a small population, there is no need for the technolgy to allow them to survive, so they don't develop it. Overpopulation is thus a pandora's box. While it makes possible all the gadgetry we have today, it also kills the planet. A difficult situation. The only real hope is China; they have the technology, but are forcing down their population in order to keep their culture viable. They are actually quite enlightened. It will be interesting to see how things play out. I think the next 50 years will really determine whether we survive and get to the stars or fall back to the stone age.

[edit on 21-5-2007 by j_kalin]

j_kalin, i think you are absolutely right. Never thought of it in these term before but it makes perfect sense!

As you say, hopefully over the next 50 or so years we can make enough changes to the way we live so that we can save humanity and continue to grow as a society.

So the next question to ask would be this:

If we manage to prevent humanity destroying themselves, what will the next stage in evolution be? Cybernetic man? Genetically engineered man? Both??!!

What do you guys think?

Originally posted by GrimUK
What do you guys think?

I think we will remain more or less identical for another few hundred years. Genetic engineering and robotics will develop to a very advanced state but will only be used to treat illness and replace defective parts of the body (eyes,limps, internal organs,etc).

During this period I also think there will be lots of migrations around the planet, mixing in different ethnies to a point where ethnic and cultural distinctions will become more and more blurry.

I think that this will allow lots of countries to disappear to form "one world".

I think that only then will modifications come into the scene

Originally posted by DarkSide

Originally posted by GrimUK
What do you guys think?

I think we will remain more or less identical for another few hundred years. Genetic engineering and robotics will develop to a very advanced state but will only be used to treat illness and replace defective parts of the body (eyes,limps, internal organs,etc).

During this period I also think there will be lots of migrations around the planet, mixing in different ethnies to a point where ethnic and cultural distinctions will become more and more blurry.

I think that this will allow lots of countries to disappear to form "one world".

I think that only then will modifications come into the scene

I've thought about the idea of 'one race' before too. With more and more people having interracial realtionships eventaully it will probably come to stand that there is just one intermixed race over the entire planet. That too will have a huge impact on humanity. I imagine that with all the people of the world being of the same race, it should be a big step towards world peace.

I agree about the racial mixing and peace. No one fights wars with their own kind, except for religious wars. With intermarriage and racial mixing, we should eventually end up with a single language, culture, and religion. It will probably take about 1000 years-if we don't kill ourselves off! If you think about it, 2000 years ago, nations were basically city-states; with the advent of the horse and buggy, they grew to contiguous regions, with the railroad, they grew to continents; with airplanes, world government is the logical outcome.
As for genetic engineering of humans, the rich will have access to it; not the poor. Not with HMO medicine--the poor will be lucky to get an antibiotic for a sore throat. Ever see Gattica? That is the likely first step( choosing the optimal embryo from an invitro fertilization). The next step will be tran-species hybridization. For example, one could imagine a human with genes for the eyes of a cat so he could see at night, the hearing organs of a dog so he could hear in ultrasound, the muscle tissue of a cheetah, the skin of a chameleon, the regenerative abilities of an amphibian, the ability to hibernate like a bear, etc...Such a person would not look particularly different, but would have "superhuman" abilities. Remember that people still have to find mates and breed; you can't manipulate the germ line if you want children. And no one wants a beast-like baby. The real treasure of Earth is the immense variety of living species, each with it's own set of specialty genes. Some day, instead of killing and eating other species, we will preserve them for their genetic diversity, if only to improve ourselves. Cybernetics might be useful, but only where we can't use biology to achieve the same ends. Electronic "telepathy" will probably replace the cellphone via a tiny transmitter installed into the ear canal like a hearing aid and a microphone installed in a tooth. The power would be from the body heat of the user converted into a small current. A booster transmitter could be worn like an amulet around the neck. Control would be by voice recognition or thought or even a control on a wristwatch to make or accept calls.

[edit on 22-5-2007 by j_kalin]

Do you guys think that with genetic modifications to humanity, natural evolution will no longer happen? I think that by altering our own genetic makeup natural evolution won't have time to keep up; with each change a new path will have been set, and as natural evolution takes so long the process will effectively be 'reset' each time a change is made.

I like the idea of having superhuman abilities and prolonged life, but I think I would only 'opt' to have any enhancements done once it was proven to be safe, how bout you guys? What would you like change if you had the opportunity?

Originally posted by GrimUKI like the idea of having superhuman abilities and prolonged life, but I think I would only 'opt' to have any enhancements done once it was proven to be safe, how bout you guys?

Of course normal, unmodified, life is eventually fatal too.
Once you hit 40, you start rolling the dice... cancer, heart attack, all sorts of nasty genetic diseases...

It's all playing the odds.
So, maybe yeah. If the situation was "This has a 5% chance of killing you NOW, but if it works, you'll live a healthy live until 120", then I'd take the treatment.