Will humans branch into seperate species over time?

Question

Something along the lines of "The Time Machine" with the rich smart people evolving into beautiful but physically helpless and the masses devolving into subhumanoid monsters who feed on them.

Answer 1

Nah...we'll s***w up the planet so bad that we'll wipe out all humanity long before that happens.

Answer 2

We will. some will be known as the Evolutionists who will become extinct,  and some, the more intelligent of the race, will be known as the Intelligent Designers, will be left to carry on. Not a lot of people know that !

Answer 3

More than likely, we will engineer something that will wipe out most of the human race, so what's to say that the future in the book the time machine just wasn't a future where man screwed theirselves over by genetically engineering some other beings that might replace us?

Answer 4

You can expect a large majority of humans to degenerate and regress as the moral values of almost all societies are going down the toilet, and enverything is becoming commoditised and standardised.

Answer 5

You need to watch Wall E... Great movie and it shows exactly what is going to happen to us humans!

Answer 6

Shades of the Morlocks. It´s doubtful as we will probably have killed ourselves off long before that could happen. If you read the Time Machine by H.G.Wells you will see that in the far future he envisaged a world where the race had become extinct.

Answer 7

Probably not.

For speciation to occur a group of humans would have to be isolated long enough for mutations to make it impossible to produce viable offspring with other humans on the planet.

That would require a large enough subgroup so as not to incur the effects of inbreeding - see FLDS genetic diseases.

If the population is large enough to avoid the inbreeding problem they would probably be too large to be isolated.

Answer 8

I just watched a documentary last night that thought that with the ability to do gene reconstruction, people will be able to some day reconstruct the genes of their yet to be borned children to make them smarter, stronger, etc. But considering it would be costly and only available to the rich, the scientist wondered if the rich people with these genetic advances would begin to advance so fast over the poorer population that they would actually start to evolve into a different human species completely. Though they may look the same, their DNA would suggest they where only related to the other people genetically and not exactly the same species anymore.

Answer 9

No.

We're too numerous, widespread, and inter-breed too much.

Answer 10

It’s theoretically possible given a difference in environmental conditions and mating rituals. Traditionally, marriage within one’s social class has been highly encouraged; feudal nobles for instance were not expected to marry peasants and because of this certain genetic traits would remain isolated within a particular social class (the inbreeding-created hemophiliac condition among the Russian czars being perhaps the most famous of cases); this trend has actually increased in recent years in countries such as the U.S., even as racial and nationalistic barriers are crossed (1), mirroring the more noticeable stratification of class boundaries in developed countries. Still, variability between individual humans in their genetic code is absurdly small (2) after 200,000 years and due to the heavy use of technology to solve most of our environmental problems (food, shelter, general survival) our need for genetic adaptation and subsequent evolutionary changes from each other will probably slow dramatically, if not altogether stop before science intervenes.

Answer 11

Given the global migrations of the last 500 years it's unlikely. Most social class structures don't last long enough to impact human evolution. Note the Egyptian pharaohs are long gone as are the Sumerian rulers.

The "Time Machine" plot had humanity involved in a centuries long nuclear war. Very few were left and the race split between those that moved back to the surface and those that remained underground. The problem I always had was how the surface group had the technology to build the large structures whose ruins their descendants lived in.

As for genetic engineering It would be possible to have the future that Robert Heinlein wrote about in "Beyond this Horizon." That is people have benefited but the sub class are the "control naturals" that have falling so far behind, it's not possible for them to ever catch up.