I am no Anthropologist.

But here is what I know about you.

How are you?  If you stretched out all the DNA in your body and put them end to end, it would be about six times the distance that Pluto is from the Sun.

You are capable of abstract reasoning, language, introspection, and emotion. You are notable for your desire to understand and influence the world around you, seeking to explain and manipulate natural phenomena through science, philosophy, mythology and religion.

Your brain weights about 2% of our body mass but consumes 20% of our oxygen at resting state.

The changes in your DNA are completely random.

But not all evolutionary changes make inherent sense.

Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men.

You decide who to have as a mate or how best to rear your children.

You have develop in a cultural sense; inheriting knowledge from previous generations and building upon it.

Your intellectual and emotional abilities are genetically surprisingly fragile.

Although you are now surrounded by the technological and medical benefits of a scientific revolution, these have masked an underlying decline in your brain power which is set to continue into the future leading to the ultimate dumbing-down of the human species.

You cannot step away from evolution.

In fact no matter how unique you think you are: you are living and dying like me on this planet called Earth.

“Uniquely in the living world, what makes humans what we are is in our minds, in our society, and not in our evolution.”

So what type of Modern Human are you.?

This is who you are.

Many people conceptualize evolution to be a gradual process, with natural selection blindly tinkering away at genetic and phenotypic diversity across generations. As long as people are tempted to confuse evolution with improvement dramatic changes in a species, under certain circumstances, can accelerate rapidly.

You don’t have to be right to be doing something useful.

Modern day human evolution is a contentious topic.

Is the human species doomed to intellectual decline?

Will our intelligence ebb away in centuries to come leaving our descendants incapable of using the technology their ancestors invented?

In short: Will Homo be left without his sapiens?

Our intelligence is designed to allow us to build houses and throw spears straighter at pigs in the bush, but that is not the real driver of brain size… In reality, what has driven human and primate brain evolution is the complexity of our social world, [and] that complex world is not going to go away.

Will the fruits of science and technology enabled humans to rise above the constraints of nature and cushioned our fragile intellect from genetic mutations. I don’t think so.

Humans of the future may have less hair.

Humans of the future may be more resistant to diabetes and heart disease.

Humans of the future may be physically weaker and more susceptible to pathogens.

Humans of the future may lack wisdom teeth.

Race differences may disappear.

But natural forces of evolution will still continue to shape humanity despite the power we have to profoundly alter the world around us.

This time does seem to mark a watershed where modern humans are pushing the boundaries further and further.

In my last post (The beady eye look’s at history’s greatest frauds) I argued that humanity’s collective intelligence has gone downhill ever since we started living on farms.

Its continuing with the iPad man. 

The cost of greater intelligence is marginally more expensive.

Human beings have stopped evolving after becoming the only species to “put halt to natural selection of its own free will”. Says David Attenborough

Humanity is fragile.

Are we genetically different from our Homo sapiens ancestors who lived 10-20,000 years ago?

When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today.

But not only are we still evolving, we’re doing so even faster than before.

In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations.

In recent years, enormous advances in techniques for the recovery and analysis of ancient DNA have unlocked new secrets about our human evolutionary family tree. These advances indicate that modern humans did not completely replace other human species, as had once been suggested. Instead there was some interbreeding. This model has become known as replacement-hybridisation, ‘leaky replacement’, or ‘mostly out of Africa’.

All people today are classified as Homo sapiens.

Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years.

The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. It is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity.

Finally, can we say what direction human evolution will take in the future?

This is a fascinating question to consider but impossible to answer because of innumerable unknown factors. Though, it is certain that we will continue to evolve until we reach the point of extinction.

Is Technology making modern-day MUMMIES: The world suffers global recession, enormous inequity, hunger, deforestation, pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc.

Are we going to stand back and spectate while the ugly foundations of a modern-day. More people have a mobile phone than a toilet.

It’s obvious to anybody that looks around at the behavior of Homo sapiens that we’re not really perfected in any way.

The violence and vandalism unleashed by the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in the Middle East in recent years is seen from Yerevan as a logical continuation of the world’s failure to properly recognize and condemn the past genocides, including the Ottoman-era massacres of 1.5 million Armenians.

To those who say we’re are really making progress, there are more slaves than at any time in human history — 27 million. On average, in the past half-hour, one more person will have been trafficked to the United States into slavery. Never mind the rest of the word.

But there are also other forms, where people voluntarily agree to take what’s presented to them as a job. It’s usually an opportunity for a better life and much-needed income. They go willingly.

There’s a lot of illegal money being made buying, selling, and exploiting humans — about $32 billion a year.

Until human rights are elevated to a serious consideration for all decision-making, the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration will remain an unattained goal. We are all human beings therefore we all have a stake in our history.

What if Darwin Got Wrong? Has our culture and our technology stopped or changed our evolutionary trajectory?

The Judeo-Christians believed that nature was placed here on Earth to be dominated by humans.

What is the present day relationship between nature and society?

Men are presented as being more powerful in society than women. As a species, we have naively disconnected ourselves from the ecology of life and have never fully credited our interdependence with nature. We are acting in ignorance to this whole and we are only beginning to feel the repercussions. The results of any evolution right now won’t really be visible until thousands of years in the future.

This is what we did look like:

 

 

 

 

This is what we might look like 100,000: years in the future.

So where does this leave us, evolutionarily speaking?

Don’t take received wisdom as the truth. All scientific knowledge is provisional. Question everything.

We differ from each other not only in our outward appearance, but also in the inner workings of our bodies. If humans had access to more than the 10% of the mental capacity that they now use, we would be able to control our body’s involuntary functions.

Evolution Has Never Been Observed.

But we are on the path to liberal eugenics?

Liberal eugenics is the idea of using genetic technologies to enhance human abilities and characteristics. Imagine the possibility of giving birth to your child without the possibility of any genetic mutations or ‘undesirable’ traits being passed along.

What would happen if we could change our physical appearance by the power of our own minds.

I believe that one day, we will be left with only two human races: those privileged enough to go through the process of designing their offspring’s own genome and those who will continue to roll the evolutionary die.

Is this the way we simply must go?

Society is the sum of the inventions, institutions, and relationships created and reproduced by human beings across particular places and times.

<a style=”color: #111; font-family: helvetica;” target=”_blank” href=”https://www.khanacademy.org/video/human-evolution-overview?utm_campaign=embed”&gt;

<b>Human evolution overview</b>: From the extinction of the dinosaurs to humanity
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https://www.khanacademy.org/embed_video?v=frE1rjhH77Y