Thursday, July 16, 2009

Long Term Prediction

Several thousand years from now, if there are still humans around, someone will look back and describe the last few thousand years as a time of extraordinarily rapid biological evolution for humanity.

2 comments:

jte said...

Because...?

Dan Levitis said...

Don't have time to explain fully, but populations are always evolving into their environments. If the selective pressures they experience are fairly constant for extended periods, they tend to reach some sort of an equilibrium, and change fairly slowly. If a species, such as humans, experiences rapidly changing environments, with very different concern determining who has the most surviving offspring from one millennium to the next, the population is no longer selectively optimized (or even close to it) for its surroundings, and as such is expected to evolve rather rapidly.