Hey, if the women end up looking like Jeanne Tripplehorn:
Then I'm all for it!
Posted on 01/12/2016 7:13:53 PM PST by Up Yours Marxists
Humans may evolve bizarre features such as webbed feet and eyes like cats in response to changing environments, a scientist claims today.
Experts calculated how our physical appearance could change under a number of scenarios, including a 'water world' if melting ice caps cause rising sea levels.
They also considered what would happen in a second ice age which could be triggered by an asteroid strike, and if humans colonised other planets.
Dr Matthew Skinner, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kent, examined the three scenarios and worked with artist Quentin Devine to help visualise how humans could look in the future.
Dr Skinner said some changes - such as webbed feet and hands becoming widespread - could take place very quickly as some humans already have a genetic mutation that produces webbing.
Other changes to allow humans to live in extreme conditions might only take place over hundreds of generations of natural selection, or require genetic engineering.
He said: 'We could genetically engineer ourselves if important enough to survive. Some of these things we might try to develop as a necessity rather than occurring over time naturally. Others could occur over tens of thousands of years.'
To adapt to a 'water world', Dr Skinner expects humans would develop webbed hands and eyes like those of cats to help us see in the poor lighting conditions underwater.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Hey, if the women end up looking like Jeanne Tripplehorn:
Then I'm all for it!
I suppose we could evolve webbed feet and gills, or......we might move a few hundred feet inland, too.
This is what you get when you legalize pot and it gets into the brownies! Why don’t people double over in laughter at these buffoons?
Too late — it has already happened — just look at all the RAT-NAG-HAG womyn.
And warts too... did the fear monger forget to mention warts?
I will now give two or three instances of diversified and of changed habits in the individuals of the same species. When either case occurs, it would be easy for natural selection to fit the animal, by some modification of its structure, for its changed habits, or exclusively for one of its several different habits. But it is difficult to tell, and immaterial for us, whether habits generally change first and structure afterwards; or whether slight modifications of structure lead to changed habits; both probably often change almost simultaneously. Of cases of changed habits it will suffice merely to allude to that of the many British insects which now feed on exotic plants, or exclusively on artificial substances. Of diversified habits innumerable instances could be given: I have often watched a tyrant flycatcher (Saurophagus sulphuratus) in South America, hovering over one spot and then proceeding to another, like a kestrel, and at other times standing stationary on the margin of water, and then dashing like a kingfisher at a fish. In our own country the larger titmouse (Parus major) may be seen climbing branches, almost like a creeper; it often, like a shrike, kills small birds by blows on the head; and I have many times seen and heard it hammering the seeds of the yew on a branch, and thus breaking them like a nuthatch. In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.Later topic:
Actually, we’d have to retro-evolve back to webbed feet and gills like the mermen/mermaids shown on the Animal Planet series.
Or a vacuum cleaner...
That was one of the all-time great spoofs, right up there with Orson W's radio version of "War of the Worlds", during the hour or so of which Martians are supposed to have landed, fought the army, killed some soldiers, and during a return to a program of dance music (lasted a few minutes) one of the dead soldiers' body was driven some miles away and autopsied and the report was ready. :')
Same process led to the same result on a Dyson sphere somewhere. /rimshot!
It sure makes you wonder...you start off with an innocent plant that eats insects and end up with a little monster that could grow to gobble up the Universe...
WaterWorld! I did enjoy that movie, even with the cheesy bad guys (the “smokers”).
I remember a similar article in Playboy back in the 70’s. BTW, those of us that read the articles did gain some worthwhile knowledge.
The concept is extrapolation of some trend of environmental change to the extreme. The Playboy piece extrapolated human features subject to the Los Angeles perpetual air pollution.
The features I remember were enlarged noses with filters and increased lung capacity to absorb oxygen
The conceptualizing is not prediction so much as extending a hypothesis to the extreme.
Dennis Hopper may have been the only redeeming feature of that movie. He was also good in the original “True Grit”.
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