What will human become? A Chinese girl needs your help

Ryan_m_b

Yes, white populations lost their melanin because it was energy intensive and not an advantage in colder climates (don't have a ref right now, remembering some evolution classes I did at uni). For black populations more melanin is an advantage.

Melanin gives you a higher resistance to skin cancer so mutations that give higher basal levels are selected for in hot/sunnier climates.

thorium1010

The loss of melanin has to do with vit d and folic acid. I think the hypothesis was put forward by dr jablonnski and others. don't have ref to her work. But there is a Ted talk by her.

Ryan_m_b

Fair enough, cheers for the name I'd say this was a fairly good example of homo sapiens evolution

ZealScience

But change like that is not as drastic as changing from homo erectus to homo sapiens. I heard that homo sapiens and homo erectus both originates from Africa. I can't see any chance for there to be a new form of human appearing and survive the competition with homo sapiens, though 20,000 years is too short to say that maybe

Ryan_m_b

The only difference between speciation and adaptation is that for speciation to occur one population has to split into two (by becoming separated by geography usually). Then all you have to do is wait for one population to adapt to the point that makes them incapable of breeding with the other.

Again it's not 20,000 years it's 200,000 years. Our species as a low amount of diversity in it due to events like the Toba catastrophe and (in recent history) due to our high level of gene flow.

If gene flow was decreased then it is easily conceivable that we would speciate. In fact this probably would eventually have happened if it wasn't for the rise of global transport over the past few centuries/millennium

gf11221

Human Evolution in our distant future will become slower and slower as time pass through our knowledge, some beliefs saids that human will be able to control natural elements or create something from nothing just like how the universe began.

I think human will not going to evolve from its form but will evolve on our very own knowledge, think about something related to human hybrid...

Since Synthetic Life creation is very possible, so maybe somehow we can create our very own human being or human hybrid w/ different ability and form but for me, i won't let technology control everything because human should!

RufusDawes

My opinion is that evolution has already essentially stopped as practically everyone in the west at least reproduces. China has 2 billion people, meaning they also have a high rate of re-production so any affects of evolution will be minimal.

I think there is no sexual selection going on so no evolution.

I hope this is not a homework question as I don't know what I am talkign about. I just have an opinion.

Antiphon

I think we'll be tall, pale, grey-skinned with highly advanced technology. Because we will have messed around with our genes and screwed things up, we will have to travel back in time in silvery flying machines and take genetic material from our distant ancestors.

Ryan_m_b

The following must occur for evolution to stop

The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium describes the necessary events for evolution to stop
1) A population must be large
2) No mutations may occur
3) Mating must be random
4) No migration
5) No differential reproductive success

mishrashubham

You might want to recheck your figures. China's population is 1.3 billion, not 2.

avtodorov

I have read some papers that some researchers believe with the development of technology, our evolution will come to a halt.

1 - What is your oppinion about it?
2 - What will our brain turn to be?
3 - What about of our other organs?
4 - Is there any possibility that we can control the evolution and may become to be what we want us to be?
5 - Or is it possible that we will become extinct without disasters of nature?

1 - Evolution, or evolutionary process is the property of life, all life-forms evolve and homo sapiens (humans) will continue to evolve;
2 - There will be no changes in the short term and when one ventures into longer term horizon of millions of years any pronouncements become highly speculative.
3 - the same answer as in 2
4 - Controlling our own evolution is _inevitable_. From the moment one strain of primates became deliberatively capable the classical evolutionary process changed. Humans actively disturb the environment and all the relationships in the biosphere _in the absence_ of understanding how those relationships work. Our socio-economic system is very primitive and reflects our evolutionary origins as warm blooded verterbrates. At the moment "all phenomenon and things human" are driven by institutions that evolved out of ignorance. Mankind has been long in the overshoot: the planet has been overpopulated for quite some time. We continue to add people because the world is the collection of autonomos nations that are governed by politicians who are _not_ scientists. Eventually scientists will realize that the only way for our species continuos survival is to control population on the global scale. Scientists will organize and eventually move into governemnt to implement population control.
All of this of course will not happen any time soon and most likely only happen when all the biodiversity is lost, air and water polluted and the society as we know it now has collapsed into aristocracy appropriating all resources and the rest of people living outside of the protected enclaves fighting each other for food and clean water.
5 - it is highly unlikely that we will become extinct in the abscence of some natural catastrophe (like asteroid hitting the planet); of course the planet will rebalance over time and there will be slow and uneven die-off of the drone/burden overpopulation whcih by some account is well under way (war, hunger, environmental disasters)