Does technology curb human evolution?

Question

For example, with the invention of shoes, our feet grew weaker. With the invention of the computer, our memory no longer needs to hold as much. Are we unconsciously hurting ourselves?

Answer 1

i think it does curb our evolution by making certain aspects of life 'too easy' and our imagination in some ways has suffered with computers but it's balanced out in terms of medicine and life expectancy. good and bad

Answer 2

I wouldn't say it curbs it...it just influences it.

Answer 3

All the evidence is that we're evolving faster now than we did through all of the stone ages, due to the addition of new foods we didn't eat prior to about 20,000 years ago, like grains and dairy. We eat a lot more vegetable matter now, so we are being forced to adapt to a low protein diet, becoming lactose and glucose tolerant etc.

Also, we have developed a mass of resistances to diseases like smallpox, measles and other diseases you get from large numbers of people living together in cities. If a Cro Magnon man was transported forward in time to now, he probably die from chickenpox inside a year.

The average IQ in the West has gone up by thirty points in the last hundred years, it's called the Flynn effect. I can't see that technology has damaged our intelligence at all. In fact, I think it favors the nerdy.

Answer 4

I make Lotto manually about 30 years in a special way. Now  in parallel with computer too. I have an "electronic" memory. Seriously. Our minds are supercomputers

Answer 5

We didn,t evolve we were created.

Answer 6

I've often wondered why we call it nature when an otter builds a d**n changing the flow of a river.  Yet when humans build a d**n, it's disrupting nature.  Aren't humans just another member of the animal kingdom.  Aren't humans part of nature's creations as well. So it should stand to reason that what humans do is also part of nature.  Therefore, shoes are part of nature with their effect on the environment, including our feet.

Are we harming ourselves?  No. We're adapting to our environment. There isn't anything progressive about evolution. Evolution is about randomly creating choices, and then selecting those choices which best fit the changing environment. It isn't for us to label one as better than the other, shoes/weak feet vs no shoes/strong feet.  It is for nature to select which best fits the world we live in.

And I might add, as far as shoes making feet weaker, I think we need to defer that judgment to a female wearing pumps.

Answer 7

h**l no!

Answer 8

It certainly affects our evolution.  But not to the extent you're suggesting, I don't think.  If you stopped wearing shoes for a few years your feet would toughen up considerably, their relative softness is not purely genetic.

Answer 9

Technology IS a part of human evolution:

- The use of stone tools differentiates Homo habilis from the Australopithecines.

- The development of Acheulean stone tool tradition gave rise to the Homo Erectus

- The Mousterian stone tool tradition gave rise to Homo Neanderthals (cousins of Homo Sapiens)

- The use of pressure flaking and microblades define the beginning of the Homo Sapiens.

Technological progress drives human evolution as much as human evolution drives technological progress.

(i.e. The development of dairying allows many humans to process milk well beyond their normal weaning period)

As for whether technology is making humans weaker, the answer is no:

Technology allows a more diverse population of humans to survive, and genetic diversity is almost always better for the survival of the species as a whole.

Answer 10

Of course. Why bother to evolve ourselves when we can adapt our environment to suit ourselves? Are we hurting ourselves? Of course we are. Over the generations, we are losing the ability to evolve. If there is a world-wide crisis in our food supply, in our air supply, in our water supply, we will have lost the ability to adapt to that changed environment and, if something happens to our technie backups, we are doomed. There was an item in the paper this morning about a frog in Borneo that as retroevolved and has become lungless - it takes in oxygen through its skin. It appears that pollution was making it dangerous to breathe, so the animal retrogressed to a lungless state and is now doing fine.

That doesn't mean humans should aim to become lungless (although, given what we have to breathe during rush hours on the freeway that might not be such a bad idea) but we should retain the ability to change when needed for survival.

Answer 11

Technology is just one component of evolution.  And we are not the only animal that uses it, though our reliance upon it seems, to us, to be extreme.  

All of the examples you mentioned are supposition and are not likely to have evolutionary consequences.  It is very unlikely that stronger feet and powerful memory will be selected out because of the invention of shoes or microprocessors.  Feet and memory have powerful evolutionary consequences and, if natural selection can be said to favor certain characteristics over others (believe it or not there is some debate stretching all the way back to Darwin on whether selection is a positive or negative process), it is highly unlikely that poor memories and weak feet would be selected FOR.  

Ursula K Leguin (a sci fi writer and daughter of famed anthropolgist Alfred Kroeber) wrote a very interesting fictional account of the next step in human evolution in the mid-20th century, which posited technology AS the next step in our evolution.  It's called "Plus" and anybody interested should take a look at it.  It's a bit more fun than most of the futurist essays on the subject.

Answer 12

Not likely since there are evolutionary mechanisms that occur regardless of if we're sitting in front of the television or not.  Modern living challenges us in different ways just as any living species faces different challenges over time.  We are still evolving because it occurs on the molecular level, not the immediate physical.

Answer 13

“Curb” is an opinion, a value judgment, a better way of presenting your question would be:

Does technology have an effect on human evolution?

The capacity of our memory has NOT changed since the appearance of Homo sapiens 10,000 years ago, and our feet have NOT grown weaker as a response to wearing shoes.

People may have become lazier and "softer" due to the conveniences of modern life, but no evolutionary changes have happened because of it.

The industrial age arrived only about 100 years ago, evolution takes way longer than that to show adaptation and change.

Without a doubt humans are moving their own evolution though technology or what is anthropologically called “culture,” technology is part of it.

However it takes a loooong time for the effect of something we humans do to affect a genetic mutation, which is the definition of evolution, without mutation we don’t have evolution.

Life was created and THEN we evolved, it's irrefutable; there is physical evidence all over the planet that conclusively proves that this is fact not a hypothesis.

A THEORY is a PROVEN hypothesis,

First a conjecture is made, then after conducting an EXPERIMENT and EVIDENCE is found it becomes a theory.