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The future of human evolution
Nov 21, 2006
The future of human evolution
If you ignore the annoying adverts (and I wish I could get rid of them - anything which obscures the text is BAD in my opinion) this article about future human evolution is interesting. It gives a number of possibilities.

1. Unihumans

Everbody on earth interbreeds and racial characteristics are averaged out. So we end up with average skin colour, an average kind of nose, and so on. I think this scenario ignores sexual selection completely, and so is totally unrealistic.

2. Survivalistians

So we all get into lifeboats and bail out from earth, or shack up in some bio-domes or otherwise adopt a survivalist mentality. If this happens you get speciation. Quelle surprise!

3. Numans (superhumans)

We start altering our own germline and end up looking like 1950s comic book heroes. Actually we're already doing this to some extent, by selecting out or terminating humans with defective genes such as downs syndrome or spinabiffida.

4. Cyborgians

Beginning with Kevin Warwick, we all keep implanting stuff into ourselves until we're only partly biological. Again, this is already happening and the trend is likely to continue.

5. Astrans

We all bail out of earth in our lifeboats and paddle off towards the stars. This doesn't really explain anything in terms of evolution other than, you guessed it, speciation will occur (gosh!).


Human evolution won't follow only a single path, and apart from (1) all the given scenarios are likely to occur to some extent. There's also one glaringly obvious option which is missing. The elephant in the room. Some humans will become not just cyborgs but entirely non-biological. The advantages of being non-biological are obvious, especially if you want to colonise space or other planets which may be extremely hostile environments for biological creatures. As a side note, the oversight of the possibility of non-biological life in current searches for extra-terrestrials is also somewhat obvious (organic chauvinism!).

Also, not all humans will live pleasantly together. Just like today, different types of human will disslike eachother and engage in fighting or occasionally genocidal wars. If racism today is bad, speciesism will be similar but worse.
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Posted: Nov 21, 2006 6:12am

 
 
 
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