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Asked by flostar2001 to Rachael, Penny, Jennifer, Jean-Paul, Dave on 10 Jan 2014.
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David Christensen answered on 10 Jan 2014:
I think it is unlikely that we will stop using our voices any time soon as we don’t have a replacement for talking to people when actually face-to-face. And I love talking!
An important point about evolution is that an organism changes over time as competition makes certain adaptations better than others and more likely to be passed on to any offspring. A predator that is faster is more likely to catch its food, so is more likely to survive longer and have faster offspring. With humans, I think changes to our hands are only going to happen across the whole species if there is an advantage to having a differently shaped hand. I can’t think of any reason why a differently shaped hand would be better, especially as the things we use most with our hands now, like phones and keyboards, are designed to fit our hands easily. Even if a person with fewer fingers found texting on their phone easier, would that help them survive longer?! Only if we really start to run out of food and resources could that be a real problem. But then why has this guy with no food got a smart phone?!
This is why I think it is unlikely we will lose any body part that we don’t use any time soon (like why we haven’t lost our appendix) – there isn’t competition to survive among people and we have adapted the world around us to suit the way we work (handles on doors for opening, shoes to protect our feet, phones that fit in our hands, voice-activated technologies).
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Comments
Karolina commented on :
It’s quite interesting to think about the evolution nowadays.
Some scientists have claimed we have stopped or slowed down evolution as the evolutionary pressures are not as great as they used to be (i.e. we mostly have access to food and medical care so just a random bacteria does not wipe out half of the specie). Other people have claimed that we are actually evolving faster than ever (unfortunately I dont have any links to that, sorry).
I have heard that we are more likely to evolve into something more resembling our idea of an ‘alien’ i.e. bigger heads and eyes and slimmer and shorter bodies due to more sitting down jobs in front of computers etc. But then evolution takes millions of years so who know what our specie ends up looking like.
Karolina commented on :
ah, found a times article you could be interested in: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1931757,00.html
and here is one from scientific American about the faster evolution:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution
Dave commented on :
The problem with that Scientific American piece about faster evolution is that it is measuring how quickly humans were evolving a few thousand years ago. If the argument is that humans aren’t evolving because of access to modern medicine, such as antibiotics, as well as better nutrition, and longer lifespans, then only a measurement of faster evolution over the last 100 years could prove that wrong. The faster evolution they measure comes before all of the scientific and medical advances that have, in my opinion, stopped evolution happening in humans.
Haihan commented on :
Having checked in after a week or so of being away, I come across this gem of a thought-provoking question (almost sci-fi-like) and can’t help but add my two cents’ worth. Everyone above has written great answers and I’d just like to add a few points for further consideration.
Flostar, your question refers to what we call “macroevolution”, which is a concept that includes change in gross body structure and form. Generally macroevolution happens over tens of millions of year over many many generations, and so I doubt very much that us humans will see gross changes in our body form in the foreseeable future.
But there is another way to look at evolution – “microevolution”. This typically refers to the change in gene variants over short amounts of time (and by short, that’s still tens to hundreds of generations at least). I don’t have references at hand right now, but microevolution is certainly occurring in every species including ours.
Yet one more way to look at evolution, especially in the sociocultural framework of human society, is the fact that evolutionary fitness and therefore what kinds of gene variants are transmitted is not only restricted to the fitness needed to survive in the physical environment. Fitness in the context of human society now includes various cultural and mate choice aspects. So what that means is that the way that the human body form may change eventually may be unexpected, just like Karolina mentioned.