What if human kind underwent another leap in evolution...? What would happen?

Question

I've recently started reading a book called "Darwin's Children", which is about how years from now, children start being born with a "virus" that gives them higher abilities. People consider it the next stage of evolution, and naturally people are afraid of these kids, consider them mutants, etc.

If one year everything seemed to change and kids started being born with abilities that gave them "psychic powers", made them faster than the rest of us, smarter, etc, what do you think would happen? Do you think paranoia would ensue? Would people be terrified of them as they are of the mutants in X-Men? Lol! I think people might harbor prejudices against them as we do people of different cultures, races, etc, nowadays, because they are so different than us. It's an interesting question.

It also reminds me of the "Indigo Children" phenomenon that I read about a couple of years ago while researching a paper on alternative spirituality. Supposedly they are "Children of the New Earth"...?

Answer 1

war. they'd win.we are scared of what we dont understand, and if something was listening to your thoughts i think you'd get paranoid too. i'd be trying to get the same virus to make me smarter too. the main problem would be the workforce, it would be like gataca. only the infected would get work.

Answer 2

For an animal which reproduces as we do, it's likely that lengthy isolation of peripheral populations is necessary for big genetic changes to become significant. That is unlikely for modern humans because lengthy reproductive isolation of human groups is essentially no longer occurring.

Answer 3

Look around you.  Can you not help but notice how our children seem to have evolved conducts that solve problems that the generations before them only imagined.  A man born two hundred years ago will not even be able to conceptualize present reality and things are mutating so fast you cant even fully grasp the most complicated realities of present time.

Answer 4

Your question contains the classical mistake given to evolution that it is progressive... it is NOT progressive. Evolution is based on variance within the population allowing adaptation to fill new environmental niche. 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 an environment that would be different enough and that we would habituate for long enough to allow natural selection to act upon the effected population for long enough to create any kind of significant visual 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 also 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 containing 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 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. 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 naturally, won't. So that is what our environment has in store for us...

But what about technology, if it is allowed to persist and becomes an enpowered agent towards our development. If on top of the fertility drugs, people take medical-engineering so far that they also have their fetus' genetically altered to bring out the "preferred" characteristics. Well it sounds great on the surface, this is actually a dangerous game of Russian roulette. First of all, if the procedure becomes too widespread we would in essence be eradicating variability within our gene pool. It is this same variance which is the mobilizer of natural selection that gives us our ability to adapt to new environments. Now lets say a bacteria or virus evolves to exploit a now homogenous niche that our scientists have now placed in EVERYONE. Not a single person will have the variance to counteract that virus/bacteria... whoops. Secondly, if genetic altering is only a thing for the rich, then we might find that if two genetically altered children were to fall from the economic status of their parents that either they could not have children at all as they have so many recessives combining inutero that the fetus is continually rejected, or if a new baby is conceived without the same genetic tinkering that the parents underwent, that the resulting child may have severe genetic defects, again by two recessives that matched up in the new baby for the fact that that recessive with a different dominant in both parents had allowed a benificial trait in their parents genetic engineering procedure. Simply put, genetic engineering may create a circumstance where it becomes a neccesary procedure for genetically engineered people to have healthy offspring and the Human race would be up the creek without a paddle if we somehow lost the ability to continue the procedure, once started.

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)

So what are we evolving into... What environment are we heading towards and how will our biology enpowered by natural selection and our sociopolitical and medical progress, which cheat the processes of natural selection, shape our evolution, our sucess within this new environment? This is the question. The answer is everything above.

Answer 5

Such evolution leaps can occur around every 1000 generations, which means about 10000 years for mankinds.

I guess it already happen before, and I am pretty sure that those more skilled persons, manage to reach the top of their society in a way or another, and are mostly responsible for the exterminations of the normal breeds... A little like Hitler has done before... It did happen many times in human history, so I guess it happens in human history as well!!

Population on earth has always been directed and renewed over eons, to to preserved the most adapted specimens and thus insure the preservations of the human race.

This is a normal behavior and its not because we are supposedly advanced, that it will not happen in a way or another!

Answer 6

The problem with evolution recorded in the fossil record is that an abrupt change in a metre (yard) of strata can represent a few thousand years. Human generational cycles are 33 years.

So this change, which is rapid in the geological record is imperceptible in a single generation. One instance of rapid evolution compared with our Australopithecine progenitors is that our jaws continue to get smaller and smaller.

Even a century, dentists have noted that the jaws are smaller while the tooth size hasn't gotten smaller. This leads to the myriad of dental problems that plague modern humans. This has been measured over only three generations. It is a rapid change. It is a widespread change concurrent in all racial types.

However the fossil record does indicate that if a species establishes a success they are less likely to evolve. The prototype works. This has been indicated in humans too. The evolution of humans has slowed.

Both the basic genomes of the chimpanzee and the human have been examined. What has been a revelation is that since the split from the common ancestor humans have had about 180+ genetic mutations while the chimpanzees have averaged 230+ splits I believe.

The split occurs an estimated 4 million years ago. In that time humans adapted to vocal language. Such data indicates that not only is quantity important but quality remains a critical factor in evolution too.

So in a natural world a successful species tend to slow change. In a natural world humans are not likely to change the evolutionary path in the manner you postulate. To make a change of any significance in the human population it would take two or three thousand years.

Further, everything indicates that most mutations are geared towards the procreation. Which is the really nice way of saying its all about s*x. A viral attack such as you describe will more likely effect the sexual features before the thought processes.

Good science always flies in the face of fantasy. This is no different. Sucks huh. Never fear though. You may get your wish.

Now, by the time you get to check the bank for the arrival of your first pension cheque the human genome and the DNA pairs will have been examined. Scientists already manipulate DNA in the test tube already. Stem cells are the subject of study in those countries which allow such research to take place.

In order to change DNA pairs, RNA, which is 1/2 a DNA string or primitive DNA must be introduced to alter a specific string location. In this way humans will have artificially generated an evolutionary vector. So all that you described will not come from a natural virus. Rather it will be the deliberate introduction of an artificial virus that will be an attempt to alter evolution in to build a human for a specific role in society.

Not an if. It will come to pass. Genetic medicine will overtake today's pharmaceutical and surgical medicine. Things like Cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, ALS, will be treated by genetic nanosurgery. Genetic nanosurgery such a nice word which means that in reality humans adapted compatible virus as carrier for DNA strings for genetic repair at the cellular level. Imagine undergoing surgical repair and you only check into the hospital maybe once per day for a physical. Three weeks later you're changed.

Will these artificial genetic engineering medical practice ever  do the things you describe. An out of control genetic change could very well occur. Human science has a sorry record in controlling scientific change especially in the early phases of the technology.

So the things you describe could very well occur, not from natural causes but deliberate human action. All other species must mutate and adapt using natural regeneration.  In the future humans will step across the next scientific obstruction which is self control of evolution. And such changes could very well occur with mastering genetic nanosurgery.