Remember Bill Nye from the Skulls of Ham on Nye?
He offers some thoughts at Popular Science on whether the human species is still evolving: On the one hand:
Is there a Homo superius just around the next corner, waiting to take our place? Let’s think about what it would take: If we were to give rise to a new species, something would have to happen to us to create a bottleneck or isolated place for a founder-person and her or his mate to show up and get separated from you and me and our offspring. In the modern world, that is very unlikely. We have airplanes and ships and the Internet.
On the other hand:
There are a lot of other ways that evolutionary change will march on, no matter what. Those that survive may have a higher tolerance for drinking milk. Babies in industrialized societies have access to milk like no one before us. Maybe a genetic tolerance for milk will slowly help more of those babies survive until they have kids of their own. There is evidence that people with both especially high and especially low blood sugar levels have fewer offspring. So subtle changes at least will make their way into the human population’s gene pool. It’s going on right now.
Sure, but milk could go the way of tobacco (once considered a health benefit), in which case …
Conclusion: You’d have to be a seer to know the answer.
By the way, does Nye realize how obstructive the mobile graphic of him apparently trying to punch someone’s lights out is for a person who is just trying to read what he has written? I had to copy paste the stuff around it just to do so.
I guess no one can tell him directly because Popular Science is the mag that shut off reader comments.
Also: Why is he trying to punch someone’s lights out? Whose?
Note: He has a new book out: Undeniable: Evolution And The Science Of Creation –
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (human evolution), for why the field is in disarray.
Follow UD News at Twitter!