• Question: what do you predict humans will look like in the future?

    Asked by 10ashtonr to Laura, Nicola, Norman, Sandra, Thanasis on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Nicola Wardrop

      Nicola Wardrop answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Well – as we evolved, we were hunter-gatherers, so we had to go out and find our own food. We didn’t have any technological advances to help us, just very basic tools that we made for ourselves, so we the way we evolved suited that lifestyle. Nowadays though, we have a lot more help – we don’t need to go out hunting and gathering, we live in houses which are warm in winter and cool in summer, we wear clothes, we buy food at the supermarket and for a large proportion of the population we get a lot less exercise than we used to!

      So…if our lifestyle continues like this, then it might influence our evolution! Perhaps we will develop more flexible hands to improve our use of gadgets! For some reason we have been getting taller and generally larger over the past generations…that may be partly due to nutrition, but I think the average height, weight and other measurements might change over time.

      In the very far future – who knows! I think we’ll look roughly the same, but I think our proportions might change a bit. Imagine – if we could jump into the future in a time machine, we would probably think everyone looked a little bit out of proportion!

    • Photo: Laura Soul

      Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I think that we will probably look quite similar to how we do now. At least for quite a long time anyway. I think that humans from different parts of the world will probably look more similar to each other than they do now. I also think that like Nicola said there will be small changes like maybe people will be taller, or have different body proportions.

      The interesting thing about humans is that we are the first species on Earth that has been able to control the environment to make ourselves more comfortable. Before, if a species went to a place that was colder than where it used to live, or if it just got colder everywhere, over a really long time it would slowly evolve to be better adapted to a cold environment, maybe it would have evolved thicker hair. When humans go to cold places though we just put more clothes on, or use fire to keep ourselves warm, so if the planet got colder we could probably still do this. So some people think that because we can do things like that we wont evolve much any more because we won’t need to, unless there is some big change in the planet that means we can’t use technology to help everyone survive. This is why humans will probably look similar to now in the future.

    • Photo: Norman Lazarus

      Norman Lazarus answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I see Lamarkism is alive and well. You ask how will people look. Well evolution is blind. There is no great plan.Random changes take place in DNA and from these changes animals get new properties. These properties may not be immediately seen. Let us suppose that some of us as a result of evolution have a gene that allows us to live in the cold. We live in heated houses etc so we may never see the effects of that gene. But say the wheather changes as a result of climate change and it gets very cold. Now we have an environment that brings out the effects of that gene. It may mean that humans with that gene change will survive and those that do not have it will die. So if the cold gene caused hair to grow, or altered circulation to hands and feet then we will have hairy humans with maybe smaller hands and feet wandering around. Lets say it gets hot instead of cold then those people who have the cold gene will be at a disadvantage and then in these hot conditions they would be the ones to die. Please remember our environment does not cause evolutionary change what the environment does is select for those properties which are already in the genome. So if a fox develops a bit more hair than the other foxes around and it gets colder that fox has a better chance of survival. So foxes without more fur will die out. Then there may be a change and a fox somewhere gets a little more hair, then this group of foxes will survive even better and move to environmental conditions where there will be less competition from foxes with little fur.. So there is a gradual change takes place in foxes that allows them to survive in cold conditions. Now if the weather suddenly gets warmer there is no way these foxes will be able to adapt to the warmth and they will die. Out of all these thick furred foxes there may be a few in which the fur gene is not as well expressed as in other foxes. Now these foxes have a better chance of survival. And if another fox loses the fur gene that fox will survive even better. The world has gone through changes at least three times in which the changes have resulted in the elimination of many species. No species can survive a catastrophe by quickly adapting because evolutionary change takes many many years. So for example the dinasaurs are wiped out by a terrible change in the environment, but hiding in the bushes were animals who had the necessary genes in order to survive this unexpected event That is, they already had genes, which they never used before, but which flourished in this new environment. There little animals were the mammals and look where these previously hidden genes took this group of animals over the next 100 million years.

    • Photo: Sandra Phinbow

      Sandra Phinbow answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      Bright orange, bright red lips, big round black lining on our eyes. We will talk badly and spell even worse! We’ll have no shame or decency. And will be a bit on the stupid side.

      If TOWIE has anything to do with it ;P

Comments