The Future Of Human Evolution Essay Research

The Future Of Human Evolution Essay, Research Paper

The Future of Human Evolution

Alexander R.

Prof. Kohn

Darwinism and Evolution

12-6-96

Evolution, the science of how populations of living organisms change over

time in response to their environment, is the central unifying theme in biology

today. Evolution was first explored in its semi-modern form in Charles Darwin ’s

1859 book, Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection. In this book, Darwin

laid out a strong argument for evolution. He postulated that all species have a

common ancestor from which they are descended. As populations of species moved

into new habitats and new parts of the world, they faced different environmental

conditions. Over time, these populations accumulated modifications, or

adaptations, that allowed them and their offspring to survive better in their

new environments. These modifications were the key to the evolution of new

species, and Darwin proposed natural selection or “survival of the fittest” as

the vehicle by which that change occurs. Under Natural Selection, some

individuals in a population have adaptations that allow them to survive and

reproduce

more than other individuals. These adaptations become more common in the

population because of this higher reproductive success. Over time, the

characteristics of the population as a whole can change, sometimes even

resulting in the formation of a new species. Humans have survived for thousands

of years and will most like survive thousands of more. Throughout the history

of the Huminoid species man has evolved from Homo Erectus to what we today call

Homo Sapiens, or what we know today as modern man.. The topic of this paper is

what does the future have in store for the evolution of Homo Sapiens. Of course,

human beings will continue to change culturally; therefore cultural evolution

will always continue; but what of physiological evolution. The cultural

evolution of man will continue as long as man can think; after all it’s the

ideas we think up that makes up our cultures. In a thousand years man might

complete a 180 degree turn culturally (not to mention physiologically) and as

seen by our fellow inhabitants of earth we would in essence be different beings.

One can say that this new culture has chosen its ideas based on Natural

Selection. One can see this in the spread of ideas in the past history of homo

sapiens, the ideas which cause man to succeed are chosen such as science and

democracy (the present growth of Islam is also worthy of mention, but would be a

paper in itself). Lamarck’s fourth law, that is, ideas acquired by one

generation are passed on to the next, describes this transfer of ideas from one

generation to another.

The question is can humans evolve (physically), that is through changes

of some sort to the general human gene pool, enough to be considered a different

species sometime in the future. The answer to this is tricky. The answer is

“yes” if there is no human intervention and “not likely” (or atleast controlled)

if there is human intervention. The more interesting answer is the latter. The

first answer deserves some mention. Through the subtraction or addition (that

is through chance changes of some sort) of alleles (different forms of a

characteristic gene) from the overall gene pool until homo sapiens are no longer

is feasible. One might ask how and were this is occurring. The answer is human

genes are changing all the time through radiation and spontaneous mutations (the

latter more rapidly no than ever since the human population is now larger than

ever) and one can see these changes to the overall gene pool in the

disappearance of certain human tribes within parts of Africa and South America..

These tribes unfortunately take exclusive alleles with them. What about Natural

Selection in present human culture. Some peoples are growing faster than others,

for example-Chinese faster than any other in the present world, thus the large

Chinese population. Therefore some group traits ae more common than others. Yet

the loss of these alleles and the gain of these mutations offer marginal

contributions to our species and thus have little or no effect.

The first step in understand evolution in present terms is to mention

genetic engineering (including genetic drift). The first step to understanding

genetic engineering, and embracing its possibilities for society, is to obtain a

rough knowledge base of its history and method. The basis for altering the

evolutionary process is dependant on the understanding of how individuals pass

on characteristics to their offspring. Genetics achieved its first foothold on

the secrets of nature’s evolutionary process when an Austrian monk named Gregor

Mendel developed the first “laws of heredity.” Using these laws, scientists

studied the characteristics of organisms for most of the next one hundred years