• Question: How will mankind evolve given changes in technology and climate?

    Asked by imy to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 16 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      Hi Imy,

      Brilliant question, and a controversial one! I’m not sure that mankind WILL evolve any more. Evolution is driven by having children and passing on your genes. We’ve now evolved to point where nearly everybody will pass on their genes (of course, some people don’t, by choice or by biology) and so while we may find ourselves ‘evolving out’ some diseases which are caused by our genes, I think we’ve pretty much reached a point where these is no ‘selective pressure’ at the moment to drive any major change towards a particular feature that makes one person more likely to pass on their genes than another.

    • Photo: Sara Falcone

      Sara Falcone answered on 16 Nov 2015:

      There are different forces playing a role in evolution. Natural selection is one of it, but not the only one.
      We can still evolve because of migration so that different genes are carried around in a new population.
      Or we can evolve because of something called “genetic drift”, a random process that decides which variant of gene (same gene slightly different message) is passed by.
      Finally we can evolve for random mutations can occur at any time in our DNA and that can impact the look or the some physiological aspects of an organism.
      So, as you can see we cannot stop evolution. Even if we have less natural selection and less migration we are still have components that can make us step forward. How we will actually change…that’s impossible to know.

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