How are we still subject to biological evolution, and how do we alter the course of biological evolution?

Question

How are we still subject to biological evolution, and how do we alter the course of biological evolution?

Answer 1

I think we are no longer a part of biological evolution. Our evolution stopped the moment we started using tools. Our technology is now evolving while we remain the same people who hunted mammoths and dodos into extinction.

Answer 2

The people today who believe that we descended from some other pre-human or ape have already stopped evolving and their children's children  are on their way to oblivion, and in fifty thousand years they will be looking back and arguing over why they died out. It was this group split from the main, who believed that humans are unique, and are still evolving.

Answer 3

Death is the usual agent of selection, and evolution will happen everywhere that there are different rates of mortality due to our differing biology, at the very least in cases where it strikes us before we reproduce.  This means we might be evolving most rapidly away from having certain diseases in areas where modern medicine is not intervening to keep everyone alive.  Humans are such a special, complicated case, though.  Mortality is dropping nearly everywhere, and even the infertile are beginning to pass on their genes.

The biggest factor for our evolution, though, is sexual selection - who gets to mate with whom, if at all.  We are educated about s*x and know what we're getting into, and so we are especially choosy about our lifelong mates, and can take into account things that no other species can, like whether there's a history of insanity or diabetes in your mate's family.  Humans are probably evolving in directions that are more attractive in general to the opposite s*x, like fewer huge noses, more large b*****s or muscled frames, greater gifts of humor, talent and intelligence, empathy and drive.  I'd wager that these people tend to get lucky more, not just superficially but when choices are made to start families.  A few papers I wrote in university looked at the level of heritability of things like personality and intelligence, meaning that there are some underlying biological factors for these things (maybe in the brain) that are heritable.

The way we alter the course of it is through our own choices about reproduction as stated above, but also through the emerging science of biotechnology.  This science promises us ways of altering what genes may be passed on to the next generation or not; perhaps even to include some not present in either parent.  Many changes you could think of making in a child would of course be outright objectionable and illegal, but clinics will start offering the option of screening out or even correcting known defective genes in the gamete or zygotic stage.

There have been scads of sci-fi stories published about a post-human era, where humanity has undergone an adaptive radiation into thousands of different directions (sometimes called clades), each group operating under different sets of shared assumptions about the direction in which they wished to evolve, and often living in habitats separate from other clades.

Answer 4

Like it or not we are all participating in evolution.  The choice you make for a spouse will effect your children.  If something beneficial comes out of it that beneficial trait will work its way through the gene pool, slowly and inevitably.  If you chose not to have children then some trait you have will be denied to the gene pool. It is humiliating though to think of how small your  contribution will be, as you are only 1 of some 6,000,000,000 people, each with so far uncounted hundreds of thousands of traits, depending on almost 30,000 genes.

Evolution is being altered constantly by medicine.   Just try to think of the consequences of eyeglasses.  Very few hunter gatherers need eyeglasses, those with weak eyes did not live long enough to contribute to the gene pool often, the others did.  But with eyeglasses and the shift from primitive to modern culture weak eyesight is hardly a negative trait anymore.  It is easy to think of thousands of examples.  People that would have died young of asthma 30 years ago now survive to reproduce.  Asthmatics are becoming more common.

There does not seem to be any rational way to try to "shape" evolution because it is impossible to predict the consequences of what seem to be small changes.  And all possible methods require strict and massive force.

SO forget it.

Answer 5

We aren't and we don't. :)