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Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Greig Cowan answered on 16 Jun 2014:
This is a tough one to answer since no one really knows. The human species is in a privileged position that we are able to control our environment to some extent, we have doctors, we can build shelter and protect ourselves and we don’t really have any natural predators. Therefore, we probably don’t suffer from the same environmental and evolutionary pressure as other species, so there is less of a pressure to find new mutations that would give us some advantage (“make us stronger”).
All of this means is that I don’t expect anyone to suddenly grow a pair of wings. Evolution takes a long time to occur and depends on changes in the environment. Perhaps if sea levels rise then over many, many generations we will develop webbed feet to make us swim better?
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Aimee Hopper answered on 16 Jun 2014:
It depends on what you are talking about. I don’t think it’s very likely that we’ll all be turning into Wolverine any time soon, though that would be awesome!!!
Mutations happen all the time in our DNA. Eye colouring and 5 fingers will have been mutations at some point in the past, and because they were not non-favourable we continued to keep them in our DNA makeup.
Unfortunately, some mutations occur to living cells by DNA damage, and this brings on mutations causing tumours and cancers. -
Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:
I’m not really sure what you mean. But everything that we are came about as a mutation, that is how evolution works – a mutation occurs that makes a species more adept at surviving in its environment. Because it has made the species “better” it survives more easily while those that don’t have the mutation die off. There are other examples where the mutation doesn’t make much of a difference so both carry on – eye and hair colour is a good example. All the different colours of eye and hair we have are mutations from one original colour. Some might be considered prettier than others but they don’t make it easier to survive, so they all carry on and they all spread.
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Laurence Perreault Levasseur answered on 17 Jun 2014:
No one really knows. The thing with mutations is that they really are mostly random errors introduced in our genetic code either when cells duplicate themselves or from external things such as x-ray gamma rays from the sun.
Their role in evolution is that some of those mutations won’t make a difference, some will be harmful and sometimes, one of those mutations can do something useful. The very harmful mutations will be deleted because usually the animal will die, or have problems reproducing, which means it won’t pass on the mutation, but the useful ones will help the animal which will more easily reproduce and pass on the mutation to a large number of descendants.
This is ‘natural selection’. For humans it doesn’t really quite work that way, because of medicine and health care, a lot of people who would normally die in the wild get to survive (this is a really good thing, ‘survival of the fittest’ isn’t really a happy and relaxing life, and I probably would be dead by now if we lived in a world like that!!). Still, some things slowly change over the course of generations, even for humans.
For example, men’s jaws have progressively become smaller over the past 100 million years. That means that nowadays, a lot of humans have mouths that are too small for their wisdom teeth, which means they need to have them surgically removed. Interestingly, more and more people are born without wisdom teeth at all (about 35% of people never develop wisdom teeth)! So, one hypothesis would be that in the future, most people won’t have them at all!
Another sign of evolution over the past 40 000 years is that we have develop close to 2000 new genes, many of which are devoted to fighting infectious diseases. For example, researchers found about 12 genetic variants rapidly spreading in Africa that help fighting malaria. Also, people living in cities have genes that help them be more resistant to things like tuberculosis and leprosy. In the future we can think that this will continue to happen for different modern diseases.
Some scientists also think that the pinky toe, the pinky finger, and the appendix will also disappear over time, but this is very controversial because, for example, the pinky toe is actually very useful to keep balance, and the appendix, even if it’s not used to digest cellulose anymore, is now thought to be used as a reservoir of good bacterias when we get sick or take antibiotics that kill the good bacteria in the gut.
One last thing could change the game of evolution in the future, though. Nowadays, it becomes possible to artificially engineer the DNA of plants and animals so that they have characteristics we want them to have (example insect-resistant crops, or frost-resistant strawberries). Maybe in the future this will be possible also for humans, but this almost in the reign of science fiction!
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