What do you think evolution can do?

[Chikombo]

Like, willl things change in the future, things that you think are written in stone, genetically. Like maybe, dogs will being to speak, or people in the UK will begin to speak french, or whatever.


Is it like the possiblity of the impossible, something that can break traditions, and define new cultures? Or is indicators of the past more in line with what's gonna happen in the future?

Also, I'm sorry if I'm not a weeb enough to post questions about Naruto, the series is over this is more interesting.

 

[Narushima]

Evolution is a completely blind process without global teleological direction. It changes organismic function to suit its local environment and that’s about it – there is no organized global change to an organisms evolutionary span hence why most organisms are extinct.

However, one thing clear about human evolution is that culture, defined as persistent patterns of complex behaviour without direct biological basis, has and continues to greatly accelerate the rates of change.

Agriculture which is only about 10,000 years old has changed humans more than some groups had changed in 50,000 years. Modern society caused still more rapid change in some groups subjected to extraordinary selection pressure, e.g. the Ashkenazi Jews who accumulated extraordinary genetic change in a mere 1000 years. And still on it continues.

Alas evolution remains a blind process – and not all change is what might be interpreted as ‘good’ by most sensible men. Modern medicine, for example, is paradoxically enabling a rapid increase in genetic disease as well as a general increase in mutational load.

Modern medicine allows many people who would not have lived long or healthily enough to have children as recently as 100 years ago to live healthily and long enough to have as many children as they want. While this is great from an ethical perspective – unfortunately it means that they propagate genes for ill-health.

Thus one rapid evolutionary change we can observe throughout the modern world is that humans are becoming less and less healthier at the genetic level even as modern medicine not only masks but produces the reverse trend at the phenotypic or functional level.

 

[jan]

Depends what is the best course for the species obviously.
If dogs learning to speak the human language is beneficial then it might happen far far into the future.

 

[Glad Of War]

I'm going to take a wild guess, and say, probably in a period that spans a million years.

 

[Sagebee]

Something im curious is evolution saying every species breeds up or only on the macro level we can see us breeding up

 

[chopstickchakra]

Humans will become hairless and monkeys will take over the earth as they've started to enter the stone age, it's only a matter of time before they reach the industrial revolution.