Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe it takes 10,000 years for serious changes to evolve in humans. So my guess is in 10,000 years we will see humans with the ability to remain sedentary for long periods without gaining weight or developing metabolic disorders. Of course humans will all be 8'0 tall and smarter of course. What other changes are scientists predicting? Anything else relevant to future human evolution feel free to share, pretty interested in the topic even though i'll be dead by then.

Lamarckian evolution one time.

From Gene Roddenberry, "The Menagerie"


http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:A...2whCwg6sHibz3R

Genetic engineering and/or transhumanism will make human evolution a thing of the past within the next 100 years.

That's if of course Mother Earth allows us humans to remain on her planet,

Otherwise hopefully we'll be able to use our full brain capacity and telekinesis would be freakin awesome.

Agreed that we would of course be super sedentary and machines will do all the work

Almost no natural resistance to diseases, short and fragile with lots of genetic "hindrances", if let without genetic engineering.

Mostly this.

The problem with imagining that we will have better metabolisms or better brainpower etc is that it imagines that evolution is heading to a target instead of working through natural selection. To give an example, medical infertility treatment is almost certainly increasing genetic infertility by circumventing natural selection. Similarly, a tendency to get a bit porky when living a sedentary lifestyle doesn't usually prevent a person from being able to reproduce, so selection pressure is unlikely to 'fix' this problem.

10000 yrs in which part of the galaxy?

Cool song FnD...surprised I've never heard it before. Pretty much sums up this thread.

This made me lol...

In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube

But this verse is off by about -7000 years...

In the year 9595
I'm kinda wondering if man's gonna be alive
He's taken everything this old earth can give
And he ain't put back nothing

I think this movie sums it up pretty good.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

depends on if we survive the reptilian age in 7865

Wow how do I keep hitting the worst threads ever? This is pretty good though:

OP, there's pretty much no way to predict the trajectory of human evolution without some insight into environmental (and sociological, I suppose) conditions. Two points are salient in this conversation:
1) h**o sapiens is arguably the most adaptable species to ever inhabit this planet.
2) the current rate of human evolution is greater than it has been in the history of the species.

Discuss. If you dare.

Same with intelligence. Smart people aren't out-breeding dumb people. Quite the opposite, actually.

Evolution requires mutation and selection. Since we don't select anymore (basically anybody and everybody is replicating these days) the human species is no longer evolving, it's just mutating.

1) definitely
2) wtf

You might just want to get a 20th century edition of that Evolution text you've been reading.

<sigh> This is like the eighty billionth time I've cited this paper in this forum.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/52/20753.long

cliffs:

We had stop evolving a long time ago and haven't evolved in the last 10,000 years so I doubt we will in the next 10,000.

[QUOTE=Andz;33046218]hmmm...an "evolutionary psychologist"...

....and a theoretical physicist.

Guess neither of them had time to read that paper.

wrong

You might just want to [insert random statement] instead of adressing the point. If I would be reading up on scientific literature about this kind of subject there would be no need for me to open these threads now would there. Please do explain, though.

I'll leave it to that fine example of the scientific literature, "Annals of Wikipedia..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#Mechanisms

pretty sure traditional evolution, natural selection, will do almost nothing to our gene pool. there is no big difference in reproduction rate between people with terrible genes and those with great genes.

evolution through other means, genetic manipulation, cloning, etc.. sure. I think we shouldn't be too optimistic about our predictive abilities though. I personally think a 90% confidence interval for when you can "get" genetically engineered kids is [right now, in 1000 years] for me.

I am with Zoltan here and wouldn't trust instantly Kaku on this or any theoretical physicist anyway unless they spent time to study modern biology and you knew they did carefully. In fact its possible that his argument about gross evolution is true but his reasoning is simplistic even if that is the case. Our environment changes dramatically from the food we eat to the air we breath to all kinds of chemicals that surround us etc to how we spend our time and so many other things. Who is to say all these are not having a dramatic fast impact (eg on males for sure).

I think its simplistic to argue that because there is no life threatening population stress (but is this even true) on a particular group that relative selection is not taking place etc. Says who? Has anyone studied how many kids particular people tend to have or how early some people die (or addictions they develop or other mental conditions etc) creating all kinds of stress to their families etc effectively modifying allele frequencies if these relate to the conditions i mentioned above? Its not only if a group feels the instant stress of survival (in the old fashioned evolutionary sense of getting wiped out real fast) but if the relative frequency of having some alleles changes due to all kinds of other forces at play which affect if you have kids or how many if you are rich or poor, active etc. Many genes are correlating with others. The entire thing is very complex and chaotic.

There has to be an objective manner in how you describe evolution. Not by simply looking outside and seeing people that look like they used long time ago! Very possibly we live in such dramatically fast changing world that there are all kinds of changes in our genome distribution or life function properties that without necessarily altering the external key features of the species are nevertheless unprecedented (but is this even true? we dont have the time distance to simplistically observe this, it takes thousands of years to do so and in only a few hundred years for example we have had dramatic rise in height and life expectancy etc). Quite possibly civilization has accelerated the effects instead rather than inhibiting them.

The fact is when i posted earlier in a 1 liner about which part of the galaxy, this was my point. Do you expect the first inhabitants of Mars for example not to dramatically evolve to fit that difference in gravity and possibly higher in background radiation (moreover protection) as well as the limited exposure to the wide variety of life forms (microbes, viruses etc) seen on earth in these protected closed monitored environments?

Most definitely the dramatic change in our environment imposed by the huge pollution and the impact of technology must have affected the mechanisms that lead to changes in allele frequencies like very rarely before.

Without some objective analysis one cannot offer opinion, only speculation and hints of unprecedented complexity like i am doing here.

That said of course the classic idea of evolution in the span of hundreds of thousands of years (thousands of generations) is of course probably over because environment now changes within decades so within 1 generation you have different conditions of life. That has to mean something remarkable. We are no longer waiting patiently for the species to change and adapt, we are taking it to a wild trip actually.

Also notice that key features of our species may change even without DNA changes, simply because the environment allows things to happen like never before (eg food availability, medical care etc)(also see gene expression). That is not strictly change in alleles frequency at all but it is a change in the animal anyway that down the road may find ways to eventually affect also allele frequencies by changing patterns of behavior and mating , all kinds of complicated interactions. People used to marry within their closed limited ethnic groups and even narrower than that (with whatever impact to their DNA this meant) for thousands of years and this has dramatically changed. Don't you expect this to matter too even if all else didn't?