Humans Evolving into Two Different Species... Again

[Xue Sheng]

Hrooom Hooo Bahrooom now Master Xue, lets not be too hasty. They did destroy Isengard!

pffft Isengard... bunch of pansies… I mean really….they were beaten by trees what else COULD they be

 

[Twin Fist]

good lord, in a conversation about MONKEYS tellner has to throw in his political hackery........


give it a rest for just a while, could ya?

 

[spectrex]

good lord, in a conversation about MONKEYS tellner has to throw in his political hackery........


give it a rest for just a while, could ya?

if you mean right wing bible thumping conservative as the rest of us, you're NOT. His point is correct, and in an age of conservative being on the ropes, due to the (thank jeebus) soon departing administration, you dont seem have one (a point that is.

 

[tellner]

Sorry, TF, just calling the BS where I see it. SgtMac was pulling one of the two or three hackneyed conservative political ploys on this one. It's a classic which your sort has been using it for years whenever the implications of irresponsible behavior are pointed out.

 

[theletch1]

Gents, let's head this off at the pass before it results in RTMs and "official" mod warnings. Let's get back to the topic of human evolution and keep politics elsewhere, shall we?

 

[Marginal]

That puts me in mind of an excellent short sci-fi novel that's a particular favourite of mine.

"The Time Mercenaries" by Phillip E. High postulates that we manage to suppress our aggressive natures and come within a hairs-breadth of being wiped out by an alien species because we can't fight back.

Yeah, but Moe singlehandedly defeated the aliens with a board with a nail in it.

 

[matt.m]

This idea has been thought of and done. That is for sure, look at "Demolition Man", I mean the whole world was just "Too safe". Also, look at "Minority Report". You can't take aggression from the human race, that is just a bit crazy.

I have always like "War of the Worlds". The idea that we get wiped out with a few exception but it is our germed bodies that allow us to win is more along the line of how I see it going.

Let's not forget the movie "I Am Legend", the infected vs. the unifected. It's all going to come down to blood antidotes and antibodies.

 

[HeartofJuyoMk2]

I don't think evolution will be taking place really for the forseeable future. No condition on earth is wiping out a select group of members of the human race and favoring others. Our problems are global warming, which will hit everybody in the form of storms and draughts, and aggression, which hasn't really changed the race as a whole.

 

[MA-Caver]

I don't think evolution will be taking place really for the forseeable future. No condition on earth is wiping out a select group of members of the human race and favoring others. Our problems are global warming, which will hit everybody in the form of storms and draughts, and aggression, which hasn't really changed the race as a whole.

Ever heard of Saddam and his attempts to wipe out the Kurds?

Ever hear of Bosnia and their attempts ethnic cleansing?

Ever hear of Hitler, Stalin?

Evolution is happening RIGHT here RIGHT now. We're just too close to it to see it. But it's happening and minutely slowly almost imperceptibly, yet it's happening.

 

[Empty Hands]

But it's happening and minutely slowly almost imperceptibly, yet it's happening.

Sure it is. It won't produce two (or more) different species though unless groups of humans become reproductively isolated from each other. That's why planetary colonization is used by SciFi writers as a mechanism to explain divergent human species.

It can happen though, and it doesn't have to take all that long. Fruit flies have been bred as laboratory strains for about a hundred years now. Lab bred fruit flies and wild fruit flies can no longer breed and produce offspring. They are different species.

 

[tellner]

As I've said before, we're not going to see speciation in humans as long as we're on this planet. Even when the world was a much larger place people from isolated populations met and bred successfully. With travel so much easier the geographic isolation just isn't going to happen. The closest we have to actual by-the-book races among humanity, the San, the !Kung (I believe), one other small group in a godsforsaken part of Africa and everybody else are completely cross-fertile.

The other probable mechanism is behavioral reproductive isolation. Men will attempt to breed with knotholes, barnyard animals and pieces of Swiss cheese as long as the holes are near-enough the right size. Women prefer to get some game theoretically optimized fraction of their children from men who are as genetically different from them as Jacobson's Organ and the human eye can determine. It flat out isn't going to happen because different tribes stop having babies with each other.

 

[elder999]

As I've said before, we're not going to see speciation in humans as long as we're on this planet. .

The environment(s) could change drastically enough to allow it.