Evolutionist, if all life is about is survival...?

Question

Do you believe eventually life will evolve to not have bodies so that we can live in space and not be hindered by the need for oxygen?

Answer 1

or maybe we will eventually sprout gills and head back to the sea ...

Answer 2

I think that if humanity is to ultimately survive, it will have to.

Eventually as the worlds rotation slows, the magnetic force field that keeps us safe from the sun's radiation will weaken. When that happens, the solar storms will eliminate our atmosphere and the earth will be a completely different place.

I am hoping that, through technology, the human race will be able to come up with a solution, whether it is space travel to a habitable planet, or the ability to sustain life without an atmosphere.

Maybe we will get hit with a comet before any of this can take place though, that is why it is important to treasure the life we do have right now.

Answer 3

If it was beneficial to the species to do so, sure why not? However, it probably won't happen unless some catastrophic event causes our atmosphere to slowly leak into space. Then evolution would favor those that could work with less and less air, and get their energy primarily from the sun. This would be pretty unlikely though, considering that our technology would support us in our current state much better, and we'd have to go through some very radical biological changes which would take eons.

Answer 4

Probably not.

An organism evolves in small steps of gradual change. I can't see any small steps between having a body and not having a body.

Early living things learned to cope with oxygen (which was originally nothing more than a toxic waste product of photosynthesis) and turned it to good use so there may be a chance of evolving to live without it again (perhaps more in the field of genetic engineering than evolution).

In many respects man has moved away from aspects of evolution that are based purely on survival because we use technology as a short cut. For example if we wanted to live underwater we wouldn't find the people that could hold their breath the longest and ensure they had children and selectively breed from those children (or to use evolution, let those that couldn't hold their breath long enough drown) etc etc to produce a race of people who could dive for hours like whales - we'd simply strap on some SCUBA gear.

Human evolution is more likely to give rise to some more undesirable characteristics because we use technology to make them non-survival issues. For example:-
+ short sightedness or other visual defects would have got you eaten by predators but now we correct with lenses or laser eye surgery so the genes for poor eyesight will become more fixed in the gene pool
+ the tendency for premature birth. Again we save the lives of children born extremely early - this may become a fixed characteristic because premature children now survive and may go on to pass the characteristic to future generations
+ obesity. Any genetic tendency to being overweight could become established in the gene pool because we treat obesity with drugs or surgery so that such people survive and are able to have children who may also inherit the same tendency
+ many other hereditary conditions may become more common as we learn how to treat the disease so that the sufferers are able to have children and so pass on the characteristics

Answer 5

* There's no such thing as "evolutionist". Are you a gravitationist?

You mean "People who have at least rudimentary knowledge of science".

Which makes it a science question.

Your answer: Of course not. It boggles the mind how little one would have to know to even think that.

Do you think parents with bodies can have sex, giving birth to a baby which - through mutation - can have no body at all? Can that baby grow up and have sex, perpetuating his nonexistent DNA?

Answer 6

Oxygen respiration is important because it is metabolically efficient. What do you mean evolve to not have bodies? Everything has a body if it is alive...makes no sense.

Answer 7

You really need to take a class that teaches evolution in depth. No, not unless you throw a bunch of us into space so that we can adapt to that environment (and chances are it wouldn't work anyways cause we'd all die before that could happen--like, instantly). We can't adapt to survive in an environment we aren't even in!

Answer 8

without bodies? i don't think so. The idea that our "selves" are somehow seperate from our bodies, that our bodies are merely vessels for our consiousness, is an illusion. all our thoughts and emotions are products of electro-chemical functions of the brain, with out the brain, this is not possible. (it is this illusion, common amongst all humans, which promotes the idea of a soul)

Answer 9

Interesting question.

I don't think so. This planet has oxygen so we do not need to evolve in that way to live where we already live.

Answer 10

No, because according to Theosophy we already -were- ethereal beings. There's only 7 stages of human evolutionary life, and we're in the 5th currently.

Answer 11

Life is about procreation, not survival.

I do not believe that we will "evolve" to adapt to radical new environments in the future, but that we will engineer ourselves. Evolution is about to be rapidly outpaced by technology in the race for biological adaptation.