• Question: can humans evolve any further physicaly or can they only develope there understanding and tecnoligy?

    Asked by furno47 to Betul, Bridget, Ceri-Wyn, Laurel, Maria on 20 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Bridget Waller

      Bridget Waller answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Evolution will always happen given certain conditions (variation, competition and inheritance), so if we find ourselves in this situation then evolution can certainly happen! One common misunderstanding is that evolution makes things better…which is not true. Evolution simply changes species so that they are better adapted to their environment. It is not ‘progression’ in the sense that species are more advanced, they are just better adapted.

    • Photo: Maria Pawlowska

      Maria Pawlowska answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      Good question furno! As far as we know there really isn’t anything to stop us evolving physically. Every once in a while something pops up in the news about how some scientists modeled future human evolution and came up with taller, or narrower-hipped people. So it’s definitely something people are thinking about!

    • Photo: Laurel Fogarty

      Laurel Fogarty answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Humans may well evolve more and recent research suggests that we have evolved a lot in recent times. Since humans invented dairy farming we have evolved to be able to digest cows milk (humans lost that ability in childhood before we kept cows)

      Developing our technology and understanding of it (just like dairy farming) changes our environment and actively causes us to evolve in different ways. So long as we are changing technology, we will be evolving too.

    • Photo: Ceri-Wyn Thomas

      Ceri-Wyn Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2010:

      It’s so hard to predict whether humans will evolve any further physically so that a new species might branch off from ours. Many evolutionary biologists wonder if this will be possible since for a new species to form a population must be isolated from the rest of the population (through being on an island or having some other form of geographical barrier in the way) so that any new mutations that cause a change in the isolated population won’t be transferred across to the rest of us through reproduction. There are very few truly isolated populations of human beings on Earth today. However, this might still be possible and anyway- we are constantly adapting to our environment and this is a big part of evolution. As for technology- this will definitely keep developing whether we evolve or not!

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