WASHINGTON — We’re not finished yet. Even today, scientists say that human beings are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us.
In fact, the pressures of modern life may be speeding up the pace of human evolution, some anthropologists think.
Their view contradicts the widespread 20th-century assumption that modern medical practice, antibiotics, better diet and other advances would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change.
[..]It’s even conceivable, he said, that our genes eventually will change enough to create an entirely new human species, one no longer able to breed with our own species, Homo sapiens.
“Someday in the far distant future, enough genetic changes might have occurred so that future populations could not interbreed with the current one,” Sussman said in an e-mail message.
The still-controversial concept of “ongoing evolution” was much discussed last week at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Chicago.
It’s also the topic of a new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion,” by anthropologists Henry Harpending and Gregory Cochran of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
“For most of the last century, the received wisdom in the social sciences has been that human evolution stopped a long time ago,” Harpending said. “Clearly, received wisdom is wrong, and human evolution has continued.”
What I find most ironic is Intelligent Design must be accurate whereas evolution only has to be slightly plausible. These people are nuts. The claim is that Humans have been around for 200 thousand years, yet we are still the same species, but that will not be so in the far distant future.
“…would protect people from the perils and stresses that drive evolutionary change”
Interesting that evolutionary change would be considered a “peril”, wouldn’t that be de-evolution, I thought that evolution causes better things not injury or risk.
It just goes to show the hocus-pocus that “real science” deals in.
Tags: Evolution
