Question: How will mankind evolve given changes in technology and climate?

Kevin Arbuckle answered on 18 Mar 2014:

Very good question! There is actually a lot of debate over how much we have managed to stop (or rather, slow) our evolution with technology/medicines and things. Some people even argue that we have stopped evolving because of these things. On the other hand, I think that’s a very naive view, because evolution happens when some things make more babies than other things – in other words, when some individuals survive and reproduce better than others.

In the developing world (such as many tropical places, e.g. African countries) there is still a lot of death from disease and failure to get enough food etc., and so plenty of scope for evolution to keep happening. Even in places like the UK, where we have medicines and less dangerous lives, we still get ill and die, and we still differ in how many kids we have. Some people are immune to certain diseases, others aren’t. Some people are very attractive and might have lots of kids, others aren’t (or stop themselves having kids).

So we might have changed how we will evolve, but we will continue to evolve anyway. Exactly how is difficult to say. Evolution often happens most strongly after large-scale disasters (such as the black death a few hundred years ago), so rare events can really effect how we evolve, making it difficult to predict. But we have certainly changed how we evolve nowadays.