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Siderophore 
LSU Fan
Member since Nov 2010
3334 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 10:07 am to JabarkusRussell)
Someone doesn't understand how evolution works....
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McLemore
Member since Dec 2003
9638 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 11:40 am to Siderophore)
I wouldn't hold my breath... (this is in response to OP)
This post was edited on 2/9 at 11:40 am
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touchdownjeebus
LSU Fan
Member since Sep 2010
1818 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 11:58 am to JabarkusRussell)
The evolutionary change most likely to happen will not be physical in appearance as much as it will be how we process information, and how we interact globally.
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Carson123987
LSU Fan
Middle Court at The Rec
Member since Jul 2011
23187 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 11:59 am to markasaurus)
quote:
This. For a man with the great Hitch as his avatar, I'd expect nothing less.
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BayouBandit24 
New Orleans Saints Fan
Member since Aug 2010
7590 posts
 Online
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 12:23 pm to Carson123987)
quote:
now that our weak can survive
Hinders us.
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BayouBandit24
New Orleans Saints Fan
Member since Aug 2010
7590 posts
Online
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 12:24 pm to touchdownjeebus)
quote:
how we interact globally.
I dont think you can count stuff like this as evolution.
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JabarkusRussell
Member since Jul 2009
5559 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 1:56 pm to recruitnik)
What about de-evolution? I think we're on that path now. 
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sportsaddit68
LSU Fan
Hammond
Member since Sep 2008
665 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:00 pm to BayouBandit24)
People commonly say we have slowed down, or we no longer need to play in the survival of the fittest. What people do not realize is, we still play this game. Every period of evolution slows down and becomes complacent where only "minor" changes occur over time. So what triggers that big push in evolution? An event that we can no longer survive as is. Ice Age, Big Astroid, climate change due to eroison and plate tectonics, etc. We still have these threats today. Over time, Plagues have wiped out large percentages of people. Over population will cause even your richest nations to starve. This may force us to colonize antartica and slowly evolve to thicker fur again, or a lower body temp. There are many ways to effect evolution. I can give a more detailed answer when I get to a computer if everyone wants. This phone is a dumb phone.
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JabarkusRussell
Member since Jul 2009
5559 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:04 pm to sportsaddit68)
quote:
I would like to see our conscious be uploaded into a form of robotics or digital "being".
Tell me more.
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HarryBalzack
Member since Oct 2012
6283 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:05 pm to JabarkusRussell)
quote:
What is the next step and how long until we evolve?
You really need to study evolutionary genetics a little more closely. Coursera offers a course on evolutionary genetics. quote:
Introduction to Genetics and Evolution
Dr. Mohamed Noor is the Earl D. McLean Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University. His expertise is in molecular evolution, and a large part of his research has been devoted to trying to understand the genetic changes that ultimately lead to the formation of new species. More recently, his research team has used fruit fly species to understand the causes and evolutionary consequences of variation in rates of genetic recombination/ exchange.
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sbr2
Member since Apr 2011
8401 posts
Online
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:06 pm to JabarkusRussell)
I think we're in the projected singularity timeline, I'd imagine the line between human and machine would blur beyond that point. Id see some sort of human augmentation as evolution as well.
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ItNeverRains
LSU Fan
Franklin, TN
Member since Oct 2007
4607 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:11 pm to JabarkusRussell)
Singularity will be pretty fricking epic and a possibility in the next 50 years
Edit: see post above 
This post was edited on 2/9 at 2:13 pm
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HarryBalzack
Member since Oct 2012
6283 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:43 pm to Carson123987)
quote:
In terms of major evolutionary changes, I think we're done. There are no evolutionary pressures anymore now that our weak can survive and I don't think we will have a major evolution as long as our tech keeps improving
That's true in the inter species, macro sense, assuming all the current variables remain constant.
There is, however, a major evolutionary shift that has been ongoing since the early 18th century and, it's one that really dominates this board, though few probably realize it: intellectual stratification. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994) explored the topic, but the got serious blow-back from the touchy-feely PC crowd over some of their conclusions. Essentially, intelligent people marry people with equal or superior intelligence. The standard deviation for offspring IQ is +/- 10 pts. In pre-industrial, rural, agricultural societies, people didn't move around a lot and tended to intermarry with their neighbors and those within the community. Consequently, the intellectual development of the people remained generally consistent. That kind of regression to the mean doesn't happen in modern, industrialized economies where the ease of mobility puts upward pressure on the intellectual mean.
By contrast, industrialization has created pretty sweeping migration trends within the human population. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many of Europe's best and brightest moved to the United States. Those immigrants fled oppressive economic and political establishments that stifled growth and suppressed national identities. By the early 1900s, however, many of the Northwestern European nations had adopted the free-market, industrial capitalism of the US and migration from those countries slowed to a trickle. Those nations that clung to the repressive ways (Italy, Austro-Hungary, Poland, Russia, the Balkans, etc.), though, fueled another round of immigration to the New World.
Since World War II, that kind of immigration has taken place with the peoples of the former European colonies, but with a twist: the intelligentsia of these countries moves to Europe and US. The best and brightest Indian, Pakistani, Ethiopian, Egyptian, and Korean scholars, doctors, engineers, and so forth, move to the US, Canada, and Europe, creating an intellectual vacuum in those nations and fueling the intellectual evolution of the nations they immigrate to.
Within those nations, additional intellectual stratification is occurring. College educated people marry other college graduates. People with graduate degrees tend to marry other graduate degree holders. On average, those people have higher IQs and their children inherit those traits (@30% of them develop IQs up to 10 points higher than their parents, @30% develop IQs up to 10 points lower than their parents, 15% will have IQs 10+ greater than their parents). Those trends are exacerbated by the living patterns - intelligence leads to wealth and the ability to adapt to the evolving economy and these people tend to live in the same areas and go to the same schools. Think about it - there's a reason why the best schools in Alabama, for example, are in Mountain Brook and Huntsville. These parents give their kids opportunities - they send them to good schools, including private ones, they provide intellectually stimulating environments, and they afford them the economic comfort necessary for intellectual achievement.
On the other hand, the same process is working in reverse on the other end of the scale. Dropouts are spawning with other dropouts; dopers are having kids with dopers; and the rare offspring born with greater intelligence than his/her parents leaves the community as fast as they can: think of the famous rags-to-riches stories you hear about. These people tend to live in the same areas and they develop a culture that celebrates ignorance and deplores achievement . Think here the "Somebody gots to pay for my 15 kids woman," for example.
Eventually, this is all going to come to a head and it's going to get ugly.
This post was edited on 2/9 at 2:52 pm
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JabarkusRussell
Member since Jul 2009
5559 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:51 pm to HarryBalzack)
quote:
You really need to study evolutionary genetics a little more closely
For the last time, I am aware that evolution is a slow, gradual process that happens before our eyes. I am talking a new classification. Cro-magnon man slowly turned into Homosapien. I am talking the next classification.
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HarryBalzack
Member since Oct 2012
6283 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 2:58 pm to JabarkusRussell)
quote:
I am talking the next classification.
Oh. Well, you know many anthropologist believe that some of those different ancestral types lived simultaniously and that homo sapiens forced the extinction of their rivals.
Isolation is necessary for that kind of species development, though (people would kill off their competition). Hard to imagine that such isolation could occur today.
Perhaps as result of the intellectual shifts I discussed in an earlier post, the lower intellects would be eleminated. Think of how AIDS is ravaging Africa, mainly because they can't get it through their heads that unprotected sex leads to death and also because once they have the disease, the treatment regime necessary to survive is complex: doses at very specific times (many of them don't understand the concept of time), reliable distribution systems to ensure constant delivery of the drugs; a financial system to pay for the medical care, etc. Consequently, nature is weeding them out. You might say the same thing is going on here with the gang bangers, dope dealers, etc., they're mostly dead or in jail by 30.
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JabarkusRussell
Member since Jul 2009
5559 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 3:57 pm to HarryBalzack)
quote:
Oh. Well, you know many anthropologist believe that some of those different ancestral types lived simultaniously
Apes and humans now.
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islandtiger
LSU Fan
Baton Rouge
Member since Sep 2012
430 posts
| re: How Many More Centuries Until the Next Step in Human Evolution? (Posted on 2/9/13 at 5:57 pm to Siderophore)
Topics like this really do expose a general lack of science comprehension both within TD as well as the US population as a whole. Evolution, natural selection, puctuated equilibrium, etc. are all important concepts to understand before there can be a meanigful conversation about this issue. Not that this topic is really much more than interesting conjecture.
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