• Question: Can we engineer our own evolution?

    Asked by 387furk22 to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 13 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      I think we will be able to in the future, genetic engineering of DNA is becoming an increasing area of research, and in hundreds of years could be a huge part of civilization.

    • Photo: Kathryn Schoenrock

      Kathryn Schoenrock answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      Yep- some people think that we have because we are so used to a sedentary lifestyle, medicine, and more. we don’t use a lot of our senses like we used to when we were hunter-gatherers and some say that is the root cause for people getting bad depression and anxiety- their natural instincts are being suppressed.

      We have also rerouted evolution of other animals in what we call artificial selection with dogs, chickens, pigs and more. In terms of directly changing our DNA rather than waiting for natural selection of good human traits, there is a lot of research using something called CRISPR which edits DNA. It’s very controversial thought when we talk about using it on humans. http://www.sciencemag.org/topic/crispr

    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 13 Nov 2017:

      We’ve probably been doing it for the last 5,000 years in particular. Since the Bronze Age we’ve evolved into a very different species. I don’t think we could survive if we went back 5,000 years. There are odd projections for our evolution in the next 1000 years! Some ideas are to enhance our lung capacity to live in thinner atmospheres!

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