A Prediction of Humanity's Future
 

See the story here.

So this scientist guy is predicting the future evolutionary development of humanity, with his theory bearing a striking resemblance to 'The Time Machine'.

Man, H.G. Wells was ahead of his time.

Sounds sexy.

In all honesty, I think medicine is already weakening our immune systems.

Interestingly enough, this guy is an evolutionist, but his theory also includes a lot of anthropology and social psychology. I'm not sure how much he's extended himself outside of his expertise.

As much as it disturbs me, however, a lot of it does make sense. We all like to mate with perfection, but we don't allow natural selection to kill the unfit either, thereby leading to a genetic dichotomy within humanity.

So, thoughts, discussions, predictions?

I think that he read the time machine, then said, Hey!
I've got a list of absolutely arbitrary statistics for 10000 years in the future.

Men will have bigger peni!
Women will have shapely bosoms.

The goblin people will reign over the underground.

Sounds like THX-1138

No.

My thoughts on this are simple. IN 1965, it was widely accepted that by this time, there would be a peaceful worldwide utopia with flying cars and rocket rides to the moon for sandwiches and tea.

Didn't happen.

And there is no genetic evidence that ugly people mating would nessecarily produce ugly people.
And if the society was divided, then the have-not's would eventually take over the haves, because un-selective breeding gives you population advantage.

My vision of the future is more like the movie "idiocracy"
Which sucked but had a good point.

1- everything on the last 200 years of lifestyle is weakening our immunity system

2- According to this guy nobody here will be around to see if je is wrong or right

3- It sounds realy silly... because as time passes by our personal view of "beauty" changes... what is pretty for some is ugly to other... there is no "commonplace beauty"

I think that the part about technology weakening our immune systems is already happening. We keep ourselves boxed up away from anything that could give us diseases. Everyone is such a super-neat-freak what with washing hands 20 times a day and stuff. We have no contact with weak bacteria to strengthen our immune system.Of course we have problems with disease and bird flu, and now that stuff about staff infections. It's like playing a video game, where instead of leveling, you just jump right in and attack the boss: you are going to die.

Sweet...elite and intelligent. Sounds fun to me. :P

I wouldn't say that. Maybe mainstream habits and medicinal practices have done that, but not everything is weakening us. For instance, due to several nearly unrelated events, qigong has begun to spread to have more widespread acceptance. Even if people aren't practicing the level that used to be practiced, a few years should be enough to bring their immune systems back up above what was natural in the past.

As it currently stands in our society, the have-nots and the haves tend to cycle every couple generations anyway, so there wouldn't be a chance to have two separate races occur. I mean, maybe if we went back to feudal era type arrangement and stayed that way for a while it might occur, but in today's free society, the beautiful don't exclusively mate with the beautiful, the intelligent don't stick with the intelligent, and the ugly, well, if they've got the right personality, they can get whoever they want.

I'm just gonna come out and say it. The whole two breeds of human thing is bullshit.

I mean, what is he basing this prediction on? His own gut feeling? The Time Machine? This is more fiction than science. In order for our species to split in two there would need to be two groups with no/extremely rare interbreeding between them for thousands of years. That would never happen unless the two groups are somehow completely cut off from eachother.

Plus, this theory says that these two groups are the pretty people and the ugly poeple. While it's true that we would all like to mate with an attractive person, that obviously doesn't always happen. Also, not everyone can be defined as beautiful or ugly, you could fall somewhere in between, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder anyways. What's attractive to one person might not be to another, ever heard of a fetish?

And as mentioned by others, what defines beauty changes over time. Thin women might be considered hot now, but who's to say that won't change in the future? Before, heavier women were once considered to be attracive.


A weaker immune system is most certainly correct, though. I think it's safe to say that's happening right now.

I am disinclined to believe this.

100,000 years from now, I think humanity will either be able to pretty much look however the hell we like or be dead.

Then again, I think given the exponential increase in technological development, we'll be hitting the Technological Singularity some time this century.

Admittedly, I don't think we'll be getting Strong AI any time soon but technology is going to reach a point where we can't easily see what lies next.

We're already studying genetics and prosthetics. A computer complex enough to create an unoptimised simulation of an entire human brain down to every last neuron is estimated to only require about five times the capacity of a modern supercomputer. According to Moore's Law, computing power doubles every 18 months. And, of course, to understand that sort of thing, we wouldn't start with something that complex. We'd start with insect brains. There might even be work underway already.

Eventually, it will be possible for humanity to radically modify our own biology. I think sexual selection is going to slowly become phased out. We can genetically excise many disorders, so why wouldn't we perform screening of infants? Probalems arise in who gets to decide what other traits we might modify in an embryo, but I believe some degree of genetic engineering is inevitable.

Not to be the freakishly picky biologist that I am, but its 'STAPH' infection. As in Staphylococcus... everybody I talk to thinks its 'staff' and somehow related to work... it bugs me.

And while I agree that most of this is bull, its interesting to note that the guy's at least a decently respected scientist. Its not like he's some quack that nobody ever takes seriously...

The only thing is, evolution models aren't useful for predicting the future. We can't possibly determine what selection pressures are going to be placed on our species over the next 10 millenia, nor can we predict what genetic mutations will find its way into our gene pool as it is completely random.

All in all, I've never heard an evolutionist claim that he has a prediction for the future before and I thought it was interesting that one did.

I was going to ask what in the hell kind of evolutionary theorist comes from the school of economics, but then I realized this is pretty much exactly the kind of evolutionary theorizing I would expect from someone who comes from a school of economics.