What Do You Predict Next For Humans

[Geatar]

I think we will rely on cloning so i dont know if we will evolve anything else, what do you think?

Mind my spelling its been a long day and my spell check dont work. I think our toes will become more worthless than they already have. If you look at our toes to chimps its a disgrace, they have feet like hands, our toes are almost lifeless, we are evolving them out of existence. We would be better off with a kind of web foot, five ligaments attached by skin, we dont need toes anymore they were like hands once upon a time.

[Ringer]

I think we will rely on cloning so i dont know if we will evolve anything else, what do you think?

Mind my spelling its been a long day and my spell check dont work. I think our toes will become more worthless than they already have. If you look at our toes to chimps its a disgrace, they have feet like hands, our toes are almost lifeless, we are evolving them out of existence. We would be better off with a kind of web foot, five ligaments attached by skin, we dont need toes anymore they were like hands once upon a time.

 

Why would we not evolve anything, and yet evolve so to remove something?

 

Anyway there are a lot of difficulties with cloning at the moment. One is that if you clone an adult the DNA of that adult still has all the wear and tear from that persons life. This can, and usually does, cause the clone to have extremely early onset of many diseases and things associated with old age.

[jp255]

I'm not so sure that any new traits which do evolve will be able to reach fixation that easily. Survival is not much of an issue in first world countries, and I doubt reproduction differences would lead to large allele frequency changes. It would take a very long time and high number of generations, and most likely the newly evolved trait will have to be under reproductive selection in order to be overrepresented in each successive generation (in first world countries where survival is not much of an issue). Scenarios that could cause significant allele frequency changes or possible rise of new traits is from war or pathogens (like if ebola or marburg virus was able to spread out of Africa), these would probably hasten the rise of allele frequency.

It would make room for new traits and allow them to be overrepresented (assuming they survive said catastophe). However, even in this scenario, whether or not the new trait will rise in frequency depends on differential reproduction or survival of the individual (must be greater than population average).

 

 

I think elimination or reduction of genetic disease instance is most likely to occur, relatively soon. Unless ethics/law prevents it from happening. As the cost falls, the demand for it should rise as more people consider using it to prevent afflicting their child with a disease. I hope it occurs, at least for some genetic diseases. If law/ethics stops it I'd be angry. I couldn't care less about using PGD for designer babies.

 

You were only really discussing evolution regarding genetics and not so much evolutiuon of technology and civilisation, so I'll stop there.

[dmaiski]

evolution takes 1 million years

germline genetic engineering takes 4 generations to get right

cybernetics and nanotechnology takes one afternoon a big computer and some raw materials

 

if you simplify it like this you can see where humans will go for a quick fix to all their ails

 

 

[Arete]

evolution takes 1 million years

 

 

Here I was thinking that fixation of an allele in a population in HWE took 4Ne generations under drift.

 

Can you direct me to this big computer?

Given I just crashed a big node on our university's supercomputer (out of memory at 120Gb RAM) trying to do some measly comparative genomics (pairwise r²calculations), having a computer which can take me from extracted DNA to "cybernetics and nanotechnology" in an afternoon would be awesome

 

On serious note, I think cloning and human genetic engineering are a long way off for the general populous. The technology is emergent, still buggy and hideously expensive. Sure, some extremely promising developments, such as stem cell therapy for type 1 diabetes look to be coming through within my generation, but "Repo man" is still well in the realms of science fiction. In any case, with half the species still earning less than two dollars a day, wholesale evolution of the species via genetic engineering seems unlikely. Augmentation for a tiny sprinkling of the financial elite, perhaps... human speciation event in the distant future? Wildly speculatively plausible I guess...

 

Fixation of any novel allele in the current, globally connected human population is extremely unlikely. This is due to the massive effective population sizes of human populations, and the huge levels of gene flow with other populations. Hence the evolutionary trajectory of the human species as a whole is heavily governed by strong stabilizing selective forces. It would, to wildly speculate - require a significant breakdown of migration and reduction in population size to see much wholesale trait evolution in humans - small scale changes can be seen in small, religiously segregated populations - e.g. elevated rates of dwarfism in the Amish http://www.nature.co...g0300_203.html. For a selective sweep to drastically alter the human phenotype, we'd probably need to see some sort of population bottleneck first.

Edited September 18, 2012 by Arete

[akh]

 

 

On serious note, I think cloning and human genetic engineering are a long way off for the general populous. The technology is emergent, still buggy and hideously expensive. Sure, some extremely promising developments, such as stem cell therapy for type 1 diabetes look to be coming through within my generation, but "Repo man" is still well in the realms of science fiction. In any case, with half the species still earning less than two dollars a day, wholesale evolution of the species via genetic engineering seems unlikely.

 

I don't want to derail the topic too much, but the economics of this type of biotech is of great concern to me. I am one who feels that we often do not pursue technology hard enough or fast enough. But there are areas that need pause and caution. The fact is that 99.9% of the human population will not be able to afford this kind of technology. Not only will the .1% have the financial advantage, and educational advantage from first schooling through the highest degrees, but they could, in the future, have a true pedigree of definable superiority. It can be argued that the disparity in society today can be overcome by any individual (debateable, but still somewhat true). But what if someone holds a piece of paper that shows that they superior at a genetic level? It reads like a distopian cyberpunk novel but, in my opinion, that future is not too distant.

[dmaiski]

@Arete

i was talking about how long it would take for a client to get a real noticeable result with the technology

 

to make a cybernetic arm, leg, body, whatnot, takes some design software, the raw materials, and a fabricator

(amusing you have the technology to do it in the first place)

 

to make a new organism, or significantly improve a pre-existing one takes 1 generation(the wild type) as your start point a second generation(your prototype) a third generation (your finished product) and a fourth generation (item on the market)

(not to mention it would need to be custom made for every single customer(for human enhancement), or tackle the ethics board(the best way to deal with an ethics board is a heavy machine gun in my opinion(they never let you have any fun)))

 

and to evolve into a new species significantly divergent from the original takes a really long time(1 million is just a really big number to get the point across)

 

i was emphasizing the point of convenience of various pipe dreams, and their practicality to implement on a large scale

 

replacing biology with technology wins out by a lot(since it is already widely accepted and considered "safe" by the general public(ie. the angry mob))

 

also another thing, generally speaking ethics boards consider genetically engineering super humans with green hair "unethical" for some unfathomable reason, they let you do it to bugs, and mice, and monkeys, why not humans. [spits in disgust] those damn speciesists...

Edited September 19, 2012 by dmaiski

[jp255]

But what if someone holds a piece of paper that shows that they superior at a genetic level? It reads like a distopian cyberpunk novel but, in my opinion, that future is not too distant.

Don't underestimate the importance of environmental factors. It depends on what the paper contains, but I doubt it would mean much to me if I was the one judging the paper. I'm not so sure that genetics explains the population variance of certain traits that employers look at. Genetics obviously has an important function that provides the basic framework of an individual, but can it explain why some people are CEO's of banks and others work at the supermarket?

 

How much value employers would place on such a piece of paper, I couldn't say. I think it shouldn't have much value though.

[dmaiski]

actually increasing intelligence would likely have an adverse effect on the population in the short term

we just don’t have the school systems to teach intelligent children, the teachers always end up looking like morons in such cases

 

 

 

 

to increase human intelligence you need to improve education

to achieve this you need to scrap the system of public schools

which consistently churn out useless trash, every single school year

 

its not the students fault they don’t succeed its the teachers