• Question: do you think that humans will ever evolve into something else?

    Asked by FizzyIzzy_ to David, Eva, Kate, Nicholas, Rachel on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Rachel McMullan

      Rachel McMullan answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Hi
      interesting question. Evolution is driven by survival of the fittest, or natural selection. For example over time we have evolved to run faster. This is because the people that could run away from predators survived and passed that ability on to their children. Another example might be that people that could shoot arrows straight survived because they could hunt and feed themselves.
      But we aren’t really hunter/gathers anymore. We don’t really have to run away from predators anymore because we live in cities and we don’t hunt much because we get our food from Waitrose. So the things that meant we evolved in the past probably won’t be that involved in our evolution in the future. The way we use technology has undoubtably changed the way we evolve. I think it’s quite unlikely that we’ll evolve the ability to fly or something similar since there wouldn’t really be any survival advantage for us. Perhaps we’ll evolve new ways to cope with technology?

    • Photo: David Nunan

      David Nunan answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      I think we’ve probably evolved in terms of our bodies and our physiology as much as possible – as in we probably won’t evolve to jump higher or run much faster than we can now.

      The biggest danger is actually we evolve to become used to sitting around not doing much (maybe playing on our computers!). That may be a good thing because at the moment sitting around kills around 4 billion (4,000,000,000) people a year!

      I also think our brains will evolve to become quicker at processing information and at remembering things as more and more information comes at us everyday!

    • Photo: Nicholas Pearce

      Nicholas Pearce answered on 17 Nov 2015:

      Hey,

      I think once we get much better at genetic manipulation we can create out own evolution. Sometime in the future we might just be able to add DNA for things we want, like to be taller, change our hair colour, have better teeth – that kind of thing. As we change our DNA enough, we might consider it evolution into something new, maybe superhumans!

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