Human evolution: predicting evolution to +1000 years
While a thought-provoking piece, this article from The Sun is total bullshit.
Dr Curry continues: “People of the year 3000 will have reached the peak of human enhancement, leading the longest, healthiest and most accomplished lives in the entire history of the human race.
“Improved nutrition and understanding of the human body will see people grow taller, with men reaching an average height of between six and seven feet, while lifespans will also be far greater, with humans living for up to 120 years.”
Dr Curry also claims men and women will also become better-looking by the next Millennium in order to attract a mate.
The coffee-colored thing is pretty obvious and probably true, but the expectation that we'll all be more attractive? Evolution cares only about relative differences in reproductive success, therefore humanity becoming "more attractive" or "sportin' bigger junk" is only possible if people with those traits squeeze out kids more often than those lacking said traits. From my perspective, it's not obvious that the attractive or the well-endowed are having more children...
As a result men are expected to exhibit symmetrical facial features, athleticism and the classic signs of testosterone such as a square jaw, deeper voice and larger manhood...
“Skills such as communicating and interacting with others will be degraded, leaving humans less able to care for others."
Horse shiat. Current pressures still select for the people who are sociable and outgoing. Ever try living the life of a sociophobe? It's impossible for a man to send forth his homunculi into the fertile land-o-plenty without a little social skill. What reproductive mechanism (short of mass-conception-by-donor-sperm) allows humanity to shed its need for social skills?
If we really want to breed "better" humans, humanity will have to develop a mechanism of encouraging the successful to have more children than the unsuccessful (whatever "success" means). Technology may have allowed us to decouple successful behavior from reproductive success, in which case our selection would also be inverted. If true, then natural selection ain't directly headed towards a future full of symmetrical, intelligent, coffee-colored athletes. For the purposes of our species, social pressures and access to technology are probably much more powerful predictors of reproductive success than most innate tendencies.
