Will humans evolve further or have we reached our final form?

Question

what sort of changes are likely in the future?

Answer 1

We need a few more hundred millenia to get rid of our tail bones, the last remnants of our primitive reptillian past, along with other assorted useless body parts.

Answer 2

Interesting question!

First of all, evolution never stops. If the environment changes, if evolutionary pressures mount, humans will adapt or become extinct.

But the environment is already infested with humans in many niches, and it's a highly adaptive species : it can make rational choices about changing the environment. If humans are *very* lucky, they will bring down the environmental pressures, and the pressure to evolve will be less.

On the other hand, for evolution to speed up and to evolve into a new species, a human population must become isolated and interbreed. So we could imagine a scenario that because of pollution, rising sea levels, an asteroid impact, nuclear or biological war or a pandemic, the human population will crash and break up, and that in some human groups a new species will evolve.

But there are indications that humans' potential for evolution is limited, because our advanced immunity system limits the size of the human genome.

So let's hope we will be able to protect our ecological niche and we don't have to evolve rapidly.

Answer 3

Somehow I doubt we'll evolve.
It's only in extreme conditions that a species really changes. As I understand, it works like this: if most of the population dies, only the ones most adapted to certain life-threatening conditions survive. Their children then get the specific genes that allowed their parents to stay alive. And after a long time, they end up being different, and fully adapted to the climate they live in. Evolution has a lot to do with natural selection: the ones more adapted to their environment survive, the weaker ones die. In the case of humans, there is no natural selection. Children that would have died at birth are saved, people that are weaker and in nature would be unable to survive get treated. In our society most people - if you have the money - can make it. Even if they wouldn't have been able to if the 'law of the strongest' had still been valid.
How can there be evolution without natural selection?
So, though of course I don't know for sure; this is pure theoratical, I suspect that the answer to your question is 'no'.

Answer 4

I do not remember who said it but, "the only thing that does not change is change"itself says alot about how evolution actually works. Does anything ever reach its final evolutionary form, or does it just fail during its evolution? If evolution means change, then we have not reached our final form, but if evolution means that we continue to improve our chances at existing due to evolutionary changes that make us better at adapting to our environment, then perhaps, considering how we use language to destroy our chances and our future, perhaps we have reached our final form. When you look towards what language calls the 'future' it seems that what we will change into in order to continue with our evolution will probably not be very human. Probably half human and half something else. Ray Kurzweil calls our merging into this evolutionary trail as the 'singularity'. Can we still call that 'human'; good question!

Answer 5

I'd say that we are going to evolve further but that it won't be significantly more useful adaptation as we no longer have to be the fittest to survive our environment, so nowadays someone who wouldn't have survived by a long shot 10000 years ago will live to reproduce lots of kids. Therefore I think that any evolution we undergo from now on will either be sideways (i.e. random but not detrimental or useful) or it'll be bad for us. I think that it's likely that future evolution will be bad for us because as I said, now the weak can survive, therefore there'll be no reason for our descendants to have such good emmune systems because of antibiotics and other medical advances, we won't have to be able to run as fast in order to reproduce, we also don't even have to be good at reproducing anymore to reproduce, IVF has meant that couples who'd have never concieved a child naturally will now be able to.

So there you go, I don't think we'll evolve further a lot, but if we do it almost certainly won't be beneficial. Anyone who thinks we're likely to get more intelligent should think about how that would make any individual more likely to reproduce, after all slugs can reproduce.

Answer 6

There's no distance involved, only meaningless change according to the environment. You can't be more or less evolved because there's no final aim to evolution.

"Look around the universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living creatures, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their on happiness. How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children."

Philo, in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, bk. XI.

Answer 7

Species evolve as a response to selection pressure. Homo sapiens have no significant selection pressure.

But then, sometimes a chance mutation - and almost all mutations disadvantage the individual - might produce an individual with an advantage that could over time spread through his/her offspring, such that in the end all humans have this characteristic, which would take many thousands of years, at least. And this is highly unlikely.

Answer 8

We are constantly evolving.

Only last year I developed the ability to use predictive text, and by only using my thumbs.

In the future I hope to be able to predict the future. Right now I'm not to sure whether that will happen but who knows.

If we have reached our final form as a species then I'd say we've done pretty well, except for the lesser beings who continue to drop litter outside my house... and anywhere else for that matter.

Answer 9

Depends what you mean. The average human is constantly changing due to breeding, but whether this is of any benefit is arguable. Survival of the fittest isn't realy working any more because relatively rubbish people can breed as much if not more than others. Unusually sucessful people tend to accumulate wealth, and reproduce with eachother, and so may be evolving as a subset of people.

Answer 10

notice that the human being is still evolving... we are much taller then we were just a hundred or so years ago (insignificant number to the evolution). the brainpower is evolving too, human are more and more able to design and create ever new things. the relations between people also evolve. there is no final form. the entire universe and all of its creatures are still evolving, just look carefully around you.

Answer 11

It can speculated that further developments will be in form of development of human mind out of the ranges of physical handicaps. It could be possible that human mind would exist in more ethereal forms. What is it for example that causes assimilation of elemental matter to formulate human life, one may ask. If, for example, there was nothing intelligent right from the start then how did it all start? A flower buds out of an apparently unintelligent looking bare branch of a tree, but we know that in that branch there is a complete flower-producing mechanism hidden.

It seems to me that some intelligence that was in existence right from the beginning wanted to express itself into this world and the course it assumed was through what we know as material form of abstract notions. Now I can only ask a question that if this is true then where did that intelligent come form in the beginning to travel into this universe in form of ‘intelligent’ life we have? And most importantly where does it want to lead up to, as there is an ongoing and seemingly endless process of evolutionary change in life visible, as we are evolving, at least intellectually. And this second question seeks to explore what could be at least next in human evolution.

If we can realise abstract ideas into their material forms even today than we can assume that at one stage our abstract ideal form was materialised into what we are today, or that the process of realisation is not complete yet. Then again the question is what is next? It is possible for human reality to exist as intelligence beyond the need of thought and reason that we use to interface with this physical world?