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Asked by junjie to Alice, Bose, Christian, Emma, Steve on 9 Mar 2016.
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Steve Marsden answered on 9 Mar 2016:
I’m definitely not an expert on evolution, so it’s not worth treating my words too seriously…
For evolution to affect a species, there must be a driving force of selection. For instance, our ancestors may have to have needed to run for longer distances than our prey. Thus we evolved an efficient way of running. But this required those that ran less efficiently to starve, removing them from the gene pool.
If you want humans to evolve, you have to have a condition under which people will be killed, or at least prevented from reproducing… This is starting to sound a lot like the eugenics that started to occur in Nazi Germany during the second world war, and not something we should try to replicate.
However, we are affecting the environment to a large extent. In the more dramatically affected places we are starting to see new species emerge which are suited to these environments. For example, in the radioactive area surrounding Chernobyl, there are some plants growing there that are quite happy growing surrounded by the radiation. It’s not completely infeasible to think that if we continue to change the environment, we may slowly come to adapt to it.
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Alice Harpole answered on 9 Mar 2016:
I think humans will absolutely continue to evolve. We’re only been around a relatively short time compared to the total time that life has existed on this planet, and I see no reason why we’d stop evolving completely. Generally, species evolve in order to better adapt to their environment, so it’s possible we could end up becoming a new, better species. It’s likely that in the future things like climate change and the growing scarcity of resources will dramatically change society and ultimately cause humans to evolve in order to survive.
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