What a terrible article. There’s no real logical structure to it, so it’s difficult to work out where exactly the change described in the headline is supposed to take place. As near as I can figure:
Over the next two millennia: humanity as a whole gets taller, more attractive, and more uniform.
Over the next 7000 years after that, humanity peaks, and begins to overspecialize, with peoples’ jawlines receding due to a dependence on a heavily-preprocessed diet, weaker immune systems due to a reliance on external technology, probably less physical capability, and overall less ability to interact socially.
This section does smack of Lamarckism, but for example if weaker jawlines become the standard for attractiveness, it could become a self-fulfilling inheritable characteristic i.e. it’s not an adaptation, but those who have *more* receded jaws naturally become more desirable, and thus the characteristic spreads. Even if food were to suddenly become more raw again, and jaws were developed to their genetic potentials, the average would still be smaller than the prior period of heavy jaws.
The immune system claim is harder to explain, but perhaps would not be genetic, but rather a pervasive situation where no one ever develops a robust immune system simply because no one is ever given the chance. Presumably this would recover if germ pressure were increased again, since a few thousand years is hardly enough to render something so fundamental to the body’s operation as vestigial.
Over the following 80,000 years (now ~90,000 years in), humanity starts to bifurcate as the right half of the bell curve (in all respects) self-segregates and continues to breed for attractiveness, intelligence, and health, while the left half is left to itself, and is pushed further left on the curve as a result of limited breeding choices.
The end result in 100,000 years’ time is two distinct forms of humanity, one which is sickly, unintelligent, and brutish, though probably more physically capable due to the inability to leverage technology as well and thus have to expend more physical effort; and one which is more recognizably human, intelligent and healthy, though presumably still possessing some after-effects of the reliance on technology i.e. more slender body structure, more delicate facial features,
Well .. I hate to be a spoil sport .. but here goes. Mars will not provide anything for humans.
The only way a human gets safely off the planet earth is when Jesus returns for his church (meaning those who have chosen HIM as their Savior).
HE IS THE ONLY SAFETY .. !!!!!!
I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while. We’re already fairly far along that path. I marvel sometimes about how the extreme the divergence had become between how educated affluent people raise their children versus the poor. It’s not unusual for affluent children to enter kindergarten knowing how to read and it’s not unusual for poor children to leave high school illiterate, and those trends are accelerating. Then add to that that the affluent and highly educated are increasingly coupling only with other affluent and highly educated people, and the same with the poor. You don’t have to play those two trends out for very long before you really start to see humanity dividing into distinct species with very little intermingling occurring between them.
Sheep and goats. That’ll be the separation.
When will it happen? Only the Father knows.
I understand the concern that the upper class would make their children smarter, prettier, longer lived, etc, through genetic engineering.
The unaltered lower class isn’t “dimwitted” unless he expects the dysgenic effects of welfare encouraging the less intelligent on welfare to continue long enough and at great enough numbers to actually pull down the average human IQ. And we can solve that in one generation by saying “if you’re on welfare in any form, every female in the household 12-42 gets contraception they can’t undo until off welfare”. That Democrats don’t support this while decrying the lack of resources for the poor is proof they want votes, any votes, no matter the negative results for both the people trapped in dependency or society as a whole.
Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics
Sorry to be non PC. But it split a LONG time ago.
It already has - liberals/progressives and human beings.
humanity will be human-robot hybrids
Yea but then all the Genetic Upper Class girls will watch TV shows where the Dim-Witted are made out to be noble brave heroes and they will screw it all up again.
LOL - the elites wish this was true... it’s not. Machines will do the rough work and the meaningful work... Culture suicide might be the outcome... Ahhh wait, Eloi with no Morlocks... could be...
Without a free market and a free society that is almost inevitable. The Medieval period in Europe produced something like that. It is not irreversible.
This concern reflects--again in my opinion--an extreme form of Humanism. It reflects a facet of the Egalitarian/Humanist/Collectivist compulsion to seek uniformity, and is an implied premise in the lunacy that has been used to recruit Marxists, Bolsheviks, Nazis and American pseudo "Liberals," into pursuing different approaches to forced uniformity, in lands under their control. (For example, see Compulsion For Uniformity.)
I used to try to drive the essential point home to student "liberals," when speaking to such groups, by suggesting that if you were lost in a dessert, you would certainly prefer a Bushman from the Kalahari to a Cultural Anthropologist from Yale or Columbia, for a guide, if you wanted to survive.
It is no insult to anyone to recognize qualities that make them rare or unique. The need to pretend that we are all alike is neurotic and indefensible in reason--and is a terrible impediment to human progress.
These futurists and their vein imaginings.
Only God can create kinds. And His work of creation was rested on the seventh day.
The next creative effort will be when He creates the new heaven and new earth. But this will not happen until the end of the millennium (Christ’s thousand year reign), when He judges the dead, those who wish to be judged on basis of their works, and casts them into the lake of fire. See Revelation 20 and 21.
Apparently, Bravo TV has also evolved very differently in Britain and the US.
Sexual partners? What's that?
In the future children will be conceived in test-tubes and parents will be able to choose the characteristics their children will have. Moneyed people may have an advantage in buying "good genes" for their children, but future humans won't be dependent on who they mate with for their children's genetic make-up.
“Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge.”
We already have a term for “dim-witted underclass”. It’s called GOPe.
Silly rabbit. Don’t you know that evolutionary science rejects the very notion of human speciation? Only non-human animals speciate. Evolutionary biology preaches total equality and freed the slaves and ended jim crow by defeating once and for all the evil first eleven chapters of Genesis [/sarcasm].