• Question: Hi! My name is Batikan. My question is: Can humans still evolve if we can how?

    Asked by batikan on 13 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Duncan Wallace

      Duncan Wallace answered on 13 Nov 2020:

      Evolution usually takes a very long time (hundreds of thousands of years). Certainly evolution is still technically possible, but is complicated in recent history by the fact that humans no longer face the harsh national environment that usually helps drives evolution (food shortage and disease, while still existing, are much less common than they were thousands of years ago). Humans are still going through a population boom that will last the next hundred years or so (the world population was 1.6 billion in 1900, is 7.8 billion today, and will be 10.9 billion by 2100).

    • Photo: Marcello Valente

      Marcello Valente answered on 13 Nov 2020:

      In Nature we can observe slow and (rarely) fast process of evolution, since we are not in a natural environment we don’t have the perfect idea of what will happen but we can’t exclude that, if necessary, we can artificially evolve to adapt to a natural disaster in the future

    • Photo: Danny Hnatyshin

      Danny Hnatyshin answered on 16 Nov 2020:

      Hi Batikan
      I will take a different approach to my colleagues! I think the closes thing we will see to evolution in modern humans will be caused by us manipulating ourselves. This might be done by manipulating our own DNA to expediate evolution, for example to make us disease resistant. Or it might be done by incorporating robotics into ourselves!

    • Photo: Lara Codeca

      Lara Codeca answered on 17 Nov 2020:

      Hello Batikan,

      I’m not an expert on the subject, but being a computer scientist I have a similar take as Danny.
      If you have time, check the TED Talk from Hugh Herr on bionics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsNZJTWw0w

    • Photo: Malgorzata Dabrowska

      Malgorzata Dabrowska answered on 19 Nov 2020:

      Hi Batikan!

      This is a brilliant question! Evolution is still an ongoing process in us, but it is so extremely slow that we can’t notice it. A very big problem is actually our brain. It didn’t develop much, but the technology did, enormously. A person who was leaving around 400-300 years ago (and for evolution it is like yesterday) was getting the amount of stimulus and information over her/his life like we are getting during a week! Just imagine this gigantic jump. Everything what is going on around is actually way way way too much for our brains. The only way we are still kept going is because we are adapting very well to the new environment. But it is only adaptation and not evolution. I don’t know if our brain can still evolve, especially when it’s so dramatically overwhelmed nowadays. But I think that in the future we will start rather evolving not in the biological sense, like it was till now, but we’ll be developing technologies on how to replaced “used” parts of our bodies. So we’ll start more the “evolution” of biotechnology.

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