Editor's Blog
An interview with Timothy Taylor in a recent issue of New Scientist highlights how, contrary to Darwin’s theory, human evolution is more complex than simply “survival of the fittest.” In fact, many of contemporary humanity’s physical features are “weaker” than the earlier model due to the technologies used by our ancestor hominins (australopithecines) and early Homo sapiens. Examples of accumulated biological deficits include soft nails, hairless bodies and weak jaws. It is also now clear that the use of primitive tools to create slings (to carry young infants) may have been a key facilitator allowing for our big brains, as development could continue outside the space-restricting womb.
This is not a new concept, but once again it is interesting to consider how the evolution of the physical human form may change with the advent of new technology.
The next steps in human evolution?
● A complete loss of nails.
● Change in pregnancy duration. Pregnancy is likely to get shorter as more premature children survive with intensive care.
● No eyes? It’s a fact that eyes are among the last features to be disposed of by evolution, even when environmental pressures do not discriminate between those that can see and those that cannot (see the cave fish Astyanax mexicanus). But with the advent of visual neuroprostheses, the eye is a strong candidate to be knocked out. X-ray vision and infrared may well become the norm.
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5 Comments
First, most of these were predictions made by Arthur C Clarke decades ago. And two, they suppose that natural evolution is going to be allowed to run, which is ludicrous in light of our advancing ability to dictate our own genetic evolution.
You lost me at “No eyes.” I would like to keep mine.
depends on a fitness function, which changes. And if nails or whatever does not play an important role in the current fitness function, than it does not matter if it is weaker.
Eyes…? I mean, really? I can see losing nails and shorter pregnancies, but eyes I think are going to be around a long time, even with implants that allow for alternate modes of vision and implants to allow the blind to see. Hell, we’ve had adaptations that allow the blind to survive and even thrive in the world for a long time already, and I’m fairly certain we haven’t seen a large increase in the blind population. I could be wrong about this, but…
And actually by this article’s argument I think we’d see hearing go first, given that we already have implants to allow the deaf to hear…
We might get prosthetic/biomechanical eyes. We might have retinal implants which allow us to see past the small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum we can see now. We might attach tiny cameras into our eyes which feed into our optic nerves.
But eyes we will have.