If you use Darwin's Theory Of Evolution ...?

Question

... what Human being will look like in the future?

Answer 1

no one is quite sure what the environment will look like in the future, so its impossible to know. My guess is that we will have a larger lung capacity, but idk.

Answer 2

Fat toothless, hairless things, incapable of motion without the aid of motorised vehicles and with far to much intellegence to be doing stuff like work. That is where the clone comes in.

Answer 3

As far as what we will look like in the future - it greatly depends on what happens in the future with our environment.  Our socio-political systems - as secure as they may seem, are quite fragile - and if we had a series of disasters - as people like Gore etc. talk about where we have flooding and droughts and all such manner of terrible things - or just as bad, a super-volcano event where it caused a "nuclear winter" that killed crops... the sick and decrepit - the people who rely on pills, as well as the many in so called "civilized" nations who have c**p immune systems because we sanitize everything we touch now - would die of a variety of illneses, and those of us left would be left to let evolution do it's thing of changing as conditions dictate, and not what some geneticist can do in a lab now - no matter how pretty or athletic they can make your child, it will depend on conditions for survival.  If the earth increasingly became warmer and dryer, perhaps the dominant traits would be darker skins, leaner bodies with very efficiant cooling systems... if there is another ice age, we could very well resort to the almost Neanderthalic build of very short, stocky, well insulated bodies who though we would consider "fat" are very healthy and strong, but just built for the environment.  They would have the ability to burn high ammounts of carbohydrates and calories and use protienes to create heat energy to help them survive.  Humans as a species may eventually come close to extinction - or possibly will become extinct - due to crisis events, but when our populations come under check; the weak die and the strong survive, and pass those strong traits to the next generation. Humans have the capacity to adapt (not evolve) fairly rapidly to become masters of the environment.  Remember, even though we have been homo sapiens sapeiens for the past couple hundred thousand years - we as a species have changed to adapt to different climes, and it has only been in the past one hundred years that we have come to rely on computers, cars and gagets - much less reliable medicine - to help us along.  realistically, we may appear a bit different, but we will remain for the most part unchanged.

Answer 4

There's no reason to believe we're still evolving.

Most critters don't, once they've acheived success in their environments.

Since our environment is most of the land mass on the planet, and we are successful, it's unlikely we'll change.

Besides, we're too numerous and spread out for any advantageous mutation to take hold in the population as a whole.

Answer 5

Evolution has no destination, end point, or direction. It's based on environmental and or genetic circumstances presented to a species.

Answer 6

Darwin himself stated in his later years that everyone perverted his studies and he knew that all his work was in vain! When near death he confessed that there is a God and all his work was meaningless! They won't teach ya that in school!

Answer 7

Evolution is conditional on variability within a population, and how this variation is selected for within the environment via reproductive success.  Fortunately for humans we are the most generalized mammal on the planet and as of such have found a nearly universal sucess throughout most of the environments that we encounter. That said it is difficult to imagine a figurative future environment that would be different enough to allow natural selection to act upon the effected population for long enough to create any kind of significant morphological change in our species. At the same time we as a species are truly defeating the few acts of natural selection that were acting upon us with advances in medicine. With this in mind the changes that might occur could be much like your thanksgiving Turkey, a creature who has been put under so much unnatural selection that it no longer is capable of mating due to humans artificially breeding them for nothing else but size. If humans were no longer present to do this service for Turkeys, they would go extinct. Through "unnatural selection" humans are doing very similiar things to themselves. Undoubtedly a woman who goes in for infertility medicines has a greater chance of having children who would require the same, children that have severe enough allergies/asthma that may have killed them in the past will now grow to a reproductive age with the assistance of asthma/allergy medicines will produce offspring who have higher occurances of asthma/allergies. This is a bit of a concern, seeing as at the same time we are making ourselves more susceptible to asthma and allergies we are also taking actions that are converting the environment that we will have to adapt to, to contain more contaminants. If it gets serious enough those who are persevering with the assistance of medicine may be the first to become too sick to be reproductively successful such that the power of natural selection might overbear unnatural medical selection once again in this area? Some areas where medicine is making slow progress, like cancer and Aids, there will be a continued evolutionary process. Already there have been a few case studies that have shown a truckstop in Africa where the prostitutes, despite an alarming exposure rate, are not catching or dying from Aids suggesting that natural selection has already discovered a variant within one ethnic group that appears to have selected for white blood cells which are not as susceptible to the AIDS virus, much like sickle cell trait does the same red blood cells resistance for Malaria. As this gene now becomes more prominent due to the pressure of AIDS we may also see the advance of a new genetic disorder if a person is born with two recessives, much like two recessive copies of sickle cell results in anemia instead of trait. So if people do begin to die from a worse environment that causes worse Asthma/Cancer/AIDS, undoubtedly natural selection will find many variants within our population which now far exceeds 6 billion people and will come up with the needed solutions to combat these problems so that enough people make it to a reproductive age and then... go to the doctor to get their fertility drugs haha. If there is also enough disruption in the sociopolitical structure such that medicine is no longer readilly available, at least to the poor, then natural selection will also reclaim the realm of fertility and those who can't reproduce naturally, won't. So depending on what our actual environment and our sociopolitical and medical environment has in store for us, our aesthetic changes will be minimal, although there may be some significant microbiological changes, seeing as that seems to be the only realm of our existance where Darwin's natural selection still has a footing (antibiotic resistant bacteria, AIDS, possibly cancer if the uv becomes harsh enough that it begins to affect our reproductive success on a larger scale?)

Anyways, don't get your hopes up on some kind of progressive hierarchial structure existing within evolution that will see us become telepathic, telekenetic and whatever else Marvel comics can throw your way.  As much as I appreciated comics in my youth, evolution doesn't work that way!  In truth, mutation only accounts for a small fraction of evolutionary change and most of these changes are thrown out with the trash of generational decay.  (ie causes it's host to die without reproducing or does not result in any significant reproductive advantage)

I have now seen a few questions like this, perhaps if we are looking for more "theoretical" hypothesis then the askers should propose an environment and query as to how our biological make up might adjust to it, although more often then not with humans we takle changing environments with a cultural/scientific evolution rather then a biological one.

Answer 8

No one can predict the course of evolution, but based on the culture and  the  habits of humanity today the future leader might  have a head like George Bush, a body like that of a Neanderthal carrying a large stone axe in one hand, a cell phone in another and walking in a nuked out shopping mall looking for a mate. Actually, in the near future there will be no humans because no species survives forever. And that is the end of our report.........and humanity.

Answer 9

Just the same as today. Human is a species. If there was a radical change or mutation to the human geome, then there would be a new species that does not have a name yet.

Answer 10

After the present genetic reapportioning where all will be radiated beyond any identification if we stay here on the planet.  But if we go into space eventually we will evolve without hair and our bodies will eventually evolve into recptacles of energy capable of surviving in space under certain conditions particular to the need to continue on at that level.

Answer 11

One world-ism will cause the slow disappearance of "the white man". What will remain will be all people of mixed nationalities. Conflicts over race may go away, but trouble will still be caused by economic haves and have nots.

Even now the middle class in the USA is shrinking, replaced by a growing lower class and those fabulously wealthy at the top (which some day the poor will go after, far worse than in the French Revolution).

Answer 12

I agree that as our world gets smaller in a matter of speaking, there is more of a mix of races.  Therefore, many of the racial distinctions can theoretically become fuzzy.  However, as long as the world has such a variety of climates, and even more so if people tend to stay in one place long enough, man will always show racial differences.  All of man's racial features are mostly to do with the part of the surroundings that generations and generations of man have lived in.

I think, if our climate gets warmer and warmer, we will on average get leaner and leaner and our hair may thin or become more curly to allow more ventilation.  As the harmful effects of the sun worsen our skin will most likely darken to filter out it's rays.  That is unless we are eventually forced to stay indoors or underground or something.  Then, we might get lighter.  Who knows.  With more pollutants in the air we may gain more lung capacity with generations, just as those in higher altitudes.  And who knows what our bodies will develop to cope with other harmfull effects of pollutions.  Afterall, those that are not lactose intolerant developed the enzyme to process it through generations of exposure.

Answer 13

If we continue to rapidly destroy the world we live in, we will look like rotting corpses.. because that is what we will be.

In response to tehabwa's answer, organisms NEVER stop evolving.  However, natural selection may not be as strong of an agent.  There are many more agents of evolution my friend - genetic drift, gene flow, mutations, plus the possibility of more we have not yet discovered.

Answer 14

First off, to correct two things, Darwin never recanted his theory of evolution and it is as near proven as any theory and second, America has an increasing middle class, increasing wealth, and so what LtCoronel said was nonsense.  I suspect that genetic engineering will one day be quite possible so that people will be able to ensure their children are smart, pretty, healthy, etc.  The possibilities are kind of scary.

Answer 15

A Chimp! No kidding. I will prove it. Because the Universe was expanding after the Big Bang and the Earth was created after that, humans (according to Darwin - not me), were created due to the pressures and natural reactions of the elements etc etc.

Now, after a long time, the universe will start to die and shrink with the Sun going out (slowly) and all things will lose their potency and humans will shrink and hobble...........etc.

Answer 16

We may never know, as the globalized world, will increase the interbreeding inside multiple races, thus reducing our gene diversity and immunity, and exposing the whole human specie to devastation by pathogens agents... So we may not lived long enough to see it happen...

Answer 17

All that we really know is that human genetics will change.

Answer 18

You MEANT to ask 'what will human beings look like in the future.'

Since we have disturbed the natural course of evolution by introducing artifical means of survival, there is no way to guess.

Answer 19

we do not know.

Unlike religion science does not have all the answers.

Science just gives a way to find the answer - logical reasoning based on hard facts.

One hypothesis is that we become slow fat creatures with excessively agile hands, so we can operate our computers.

But with current stereotypes of beauty and health, this is not likely. Athletic people are still more likely to procreate.

A more probable hypothesis is that brain will continue to develop and become more complex, while physical apperance will remain the same.