The past of human evolution is more and more coming to light as scientists uncover a trove of fossils and genetic knowledge. But where might the future of human evolution go?
There are plenty of signs that humans are still evolving. However, whether humans develop along the lines portrayed by hackneyed science fiction is doubtful.
An old cliché has the highly evolved humans of the future sporting large heads to hold their advanced enlarged brains, “but that’s nonsense, whole nonsense,” said paleontologist Peter Ward at the University of Washington at Seattle, author of “Future Evolution.”
“If you’ve ever gone through a childbirth or witnessed one,” Ward says, “we’re already anatomically right on the edge of how big our heads can go — our big brains have already caused extreme problems in childbirth, and if we had bigger and bigger brains, that’d cause more mothers to die in childbirth, so evolution would select against that.”
LiveScience (thanks, KirstyJ)
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Don’t agree with the argument regarding head size. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that that’s necessarily the direction in which we’ll evolve or ANYTHING even remotely like that. But hypothetically, in a world where having a larger head/brain endowed an advantage, but having a larger head increased the risk of mothers dying in childbirth (and thus passing on big-head genes less frequently), I don’t think this would be a problem. In the natural world, maybe. But we don’t live in the natural world. We live in a world where having a head too big to birth isn’t necessarily fatal. We have caesarian sections. And carefully monitored births where injuries can be minimalised and dealt with.
Also I’m very very tired and this might be incoherent and rambly. So sorry if that’s the case, dudes.
Semi-logical; wouldn’t evolution simply select those whose brains/skulls grew more throughout life if bigger brains were required? But they’re not, we just need to use what we have more effectively. It’s more likely we’ll evolve new parts of the brain that take place of redundant areas.
Only time will tell for certain.
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That is, of course, if we don’t manage to completely destroy ourselves, all (or most) other life and the planet way before any further significant evolution can occur.
(Yes, I’m in one of those happy-happy joy-joy moods atm
Pax, amor et concordia.
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Phew, thank god 4that !! Childbirth looks painful enough .. Bugger where we’re goin .. Where we at atm? .. So many q’s ….. Great blog tho
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fascinating… what do you think about 2012 will it happen hope not ill only be 17 lol
Xx
I’m surprised that we are still evolving at all. Natural selection is surely being circumvented by our control of the environment and advances in medicine. Plus, any ‘new’ development in a gene that may be considered an advantageous mutation does not have a small, closed population to spread through. Interesting …
Of course, when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, all depictions of future humans had no toes, no appendix, telepathic powers and a head like the Mekon. We ate food in tablet form, lived on the Moon and wore shiny Bacofoil one-piece suits. I’m rather pleased that none of it came true. Though I do begrudge not yet owning a hover-car.
““If you’ve ever gone through a childbirth or witnessed one,” Ward says, “we’re already anatomically right on the edge of how big our heads can go — our big brains have already caused extreme problems in childbirth, and if we had bigger and bigger brains, that’d cause more mothers to die in childbirth, so evolution would select against that.””
Of course cesareans being at around 20% of births (in the UK) may alter that a bit.
“There are plenty of signs that humans are still evolving” — whoever wrote this sentence needs to learn what the hell evolution is. Of course humans are still evolving, all biological organisms are constantly evolving through random mutations.
On a less scientific note: You know the pictures about outer space aliens? Maybe that is what human beings will look like one day. This could be possible for the following reasons:
We will have big eyes: More and more people develop bad eye-sight already. The internet and mobile phones will be our main means of contact to other people. (When you think, your eyes widens “stare”. With exercise it will become big)
We will have small mouths: We won’t eat decent food anymore, only pop concentrated, synthetic nutritional pills. Already, the food we eat have much less nutritional value than years ago because of polluted soil, water and air. Another thing is that our mouths would probably not be used so much anymore for speaking etc. Muscles that are not used, degenerate.
We will have small noses: There won’t be much to use our smelling senses for with the little foodstuffs and natural scents gone. Also, we will not move around so much, because we’ll be sitting in one place doing everything over the internet. (one place/one scent)
We will have small ears: Very little real live conversation will take place. All we will need is earphones or desktop speakers.
We will have thin bodies, arms and legs: Robots will be doing most of the physical work and as said before, we won’t be getting much exercise. We will get thinner and thinner as we replace real food with pills.
We will have long, flexible fingers with big fingertips: No need to explain why.
We will be only one gender: More and more people become gay and also, people will have sex with their minds. Physical contact won’t be needed anymore, people already have sex over the air and internet. Babies can be cloned, finish and klaar!
We will have big heads after all: Mind power will be used for everything. We’ll be able to communicate with each other with our minds using kinetic thought waves. Hitler started studies with kinetics and if you look around, you’ll see a lot of similar studies and books about the power of the mind). More seriously, we will have bigger brains. According to science, the frontal lobe of the human brain enlarges with each generation.
Transhumanism?
I appreciate that Peter Ward is a paleontologist, and that he knows a lot about his subject. I wonder then, how does he explain my cousin, his head is huge. His cranium is reminiscent of a gorillas.
All of these theories that have been banded around for a while are pure conjecture and best guesses.
“Ward says, “we’re already anatomically right on the edge of how big our heads can go”
Well, he’s obviously never heard of a c-section. Evolution is shaped by our environment, our environment HAS CHANGED! Or doesthis idiot think we’re still living in the Stone Age? Besides, with genetic engineering we can now by-pass natural selection. I don’t think there’s any way we can possibly tell what our descendants will look like.
Surely bigger brains would be possible if the ladies woo woo increased as well? I think this will definitely happen.
I’ve always wondered what would happen if we colonised other planets; how long it’d take to adapt to each one (assuming we don’t continue to travel back and forth between the same planets). Cold planet = going back to being hairy (maybe), hotter planet = bigger ears/nose and probably no hair at all. I think the most interesting branches would be those on planets almost identical to Earth, because there’s no way of even guessing what would happen.
People evolve only to their surroundings, you may have picked up from some of my other posts I believe we will be exposed to solar winds. I don’t believe this is as harmful as we may think, and as people have read, 2012 shows positive perspective. And to say how we’d physically evolve is a big guess – mine would be we’d slowly start loosing our hair all over our body, our skin would become tighter, slightly change colour, and yes, our heads expand.
I think physical human change isn’t too close to us, I’d say about 200 years until the changes become apparent, and a gradual change lasting around 100-200 years. Of course no one would want to accept this change as reality, who would? And further more it’s only an idea, but it’s a possibility – I don’t know how many people here believe in aliens or even do research of them, but it seems so.
I have read somewhere that our brains are actually getting bigger since the Paleolithic era, particularly in the pre-frontal cortex area concerned with reasoning, risk taking, judgement and ethics.
Peter Ward has, I think, has got the wrong end of the evolutionary stick and is confusing Cause and Effect..
Evolution would naturally decide whether to produce a group of surviving women with a bigger pelvic area that could deliver a baby with a larger skull, or to birth the baby earlier.
You guys talking about caesarians might want to keep in mind that on a global, species-wide scale, caesarians are not that common. Humans with access to good, regular medical care and surgical procedures like that are not in the majority, unfortunately.
Ake: not everyone is aware that human beings are still evolving, which is quite probably why the writer is pointing it out. There are people who think that anything man-made such as medicine actually halts natural selection, and therefore that we are no longer evolving as a species. There’s also this popular impression that we evolved from animals into humans – yes, I know, humans are animals – and that’s the peak of evolution, so we’re done with all that now and can sit around congratulating ourselves about it.
We’ll all be grown in bell jars anyway and done away with if we’re not perfect and harvested for body parts and stuff, being plebs and all that. So no worries about having a butt like the back end of a bus, ladies. That’s if, as @Mr Woolf says, we can hang onto the planet long enough. Which I very much doubt. Trahlahlahlah!
well, aldous huxley said we would grow babies in jars…
We are in any case the Missing Link, a sort of unstable thing between more stable species. Has anyone noticed that when we try to draw a human face, without training we essentially draw to the proportions of Homo Erectus, which was in existence ten times as long as we have been.
Whether we get to the next stable state, and under what circumstances, is another matter. There’s a lot of people down my street who are making no use at all of the heritage of Homo Sapiens.
surely a person with a bigger brain would be selected for, and because of this, women with wider hips/wombs etc would also then be selected for. this creating a race of humans with increasingly large heads, and increasing wide bodies.
I’m trying hard to resist typing something about Jordan allowing the future evolution of size.
we seem to be evolving into creatures with longer lifespans, food allergies and social anxieties. soon we’ll all be old, sick and scared. sorry to be a bummer.
As we evolve, natural selection favours those who can best capitalise on the environment. By looking at my local environment I can conclue that future human will :
- be able to extract nutrients from fast food
- be ‘solar’ powered by tanning salon energy
- have match head size ‘text-eazy’ thumbs
brain size will diminish, as all logical higher functions will be outsourced to a major ‘viewpoint provider’, such as Murdoch-corp.
i just thought i would point this out to the author of the first comment, you do realise that you disprove yourself in your own comment. you suggest that we have invented the c-section so therefore if we only used them for child birth then we would end up with large heads, or perhaps if enough of the babies that had c-sections also had large heads and if they passed on genes then there eventually everyone would have enlarged heads and have to have c-sections. this is contradictory because you claim that we changed our environment to allow people to live regardless of head size and subsequent birth issues but you forgot that by the same means we have also made intelligence irrelevant to survival and ability to pass on genes so there would be no reason for intelligence or for that mater anything within our control to increase or decrease..
..unless we lost the ability to control our environment in the way we do. obviously there are things that we still struggle to control like disease so a african child born with immunity to aids would be a positive mutation and would be more likely to pass on genes. compassion is essential to make social links but is now causing us problems our want for better, longer lives for ourselves and more importantly the others around us will cost the entire race. this especially true of western civilization.
sorry for the ramblings.should try harder to condense my points.
You guys all know that sexual selection still applies, right?
There are no real signs of evolving humans. It’s more the exact opposite. It keeps struggling against new threats .. humans try to develop stuff to keep us on top, alive. That’s the only thing we should have seen probably. A constant struggle to live, to cope with life. And we make it only harder by our so called high tech developmental structures. That might be the thing that leads to the end of human life. It might be a new species that once will develop, but no longer attached to us, humans.
Or we are not what science likes to see in us. We might be elsewhere all the time as well .. We might be part of a larger structure, not only here on planet earth, but also elsewhere .. no longer individuals but a bit as with MPS but then as one system, not able to work it on their own .. cooperating .. using way larger systems than one human.
Strange that they do not mention the latest finding.
A tribe of people in Papua New Guinea have already evolved. After years of practicing cannibalism (until the practive was banned in the 1950s) these people have developed a mutated gene that has made them immune to a variant of CJD (mad cow disease)
The tribe, who ate family members after they have died as a mark of respect have developed a gene mutation G127V and it is only found in people of the Purosa valley region of the Eastern Highlands.
A fascinating sight into Darwin’s evolutionary theory at work and of course natural selection in action.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8364603.stm
vaginas would just get bigger too
I disagree… One day, a lady with a very large vagina will give birth to a baby with a very large brain. From there we will evolve into superhumans with telekinetic powers.. lol. Who knows? In the future we might just genetically modify ourselves to have larger brains and skulls using super-advanced technology. I have a feeling technology will play a huge role in humanity’s future and the evolution of our species.
“whoever wrote this sentence needs to learn what the hell evolution is. Of course humans are still evolving, all biological organisms are constantly evolving through random mutations.”
Mutation != evolution.
Things do not always co-evolve in ways we would like. A large-headed baby is not necessarily going to have a mother with the body structure to handle that, and difficulties in birthing (seriously guys, people all over the world do not have access to caesarians) might make that head size something to be selected against – there would be less chance of surviving birth and so the possible advantages of a larger head wouldn’t come into play.
Of course we can have bigger brains….our bodies will will just get smaller….we will be ultra ripped umpa lumpas just to carry the weight our fat cranium.
Basic wants from evolution i would like….would love the fact i could pick ha ha ha…
Wings….yes i want wings so i can fly for once.
Night vision….i wanna be able to see everything at night.
Super hearing…i wanna be able to hear everything too.
Venom…yes some kind of toxic venom so any man that did me wrong…well i could just bite him and then make him beg for the anti venom ha ha ha ha ha.
The simple fact is, evolution has already selected for larger brain size (and thus larger skull sizes) despite it being a detriment to human births. This leads to humans being born underdeveloped and needing far more care early on than other primates.
There must have been some reason it was increasing in size faster than any other brain in the animal kingdom – truly an exceptional evolution event despite the fact that it was making births more and more difficult.
I think it still counts as a bit of a mystery so far. We don’t know why the brain increased in size, since any advantage it represents now would have been undeveloped and we aren’t sure if they would have been an advantage at the time.