Future of human evolution? Is there a future?

[negativ]

I realize I came to this thread somewhat late, and I apologize for only skimming the previous posts and not reading each and every word.

Am I the only person who finds it... odd that someone would look at only the past few thousand years and seemingly conclude that human evolution has stopped? I'm just some random idiot with an internet connection, but it seems to me that drastic evolution is primarily noticed over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years.

Who is to say that evolution can only manifest itself by causing a human to grow an extra head or a larger brain? In the last 100 years (a monumentally tiny fraction of a blink of an eye in the Big Scheme of Things) we have adapted so as to be able to leave the planet, to trivially cure diseases that were almost invariably fatal only a few generations before, to communicate nearly instantaneously to any point on the planet, and other things I'm far too lazy to enumerate.

We are not single-celled organisms anymore. Why should the [drastic] changes we've very recently undergone not be recognized as relatively huge leaps in evolution? We currently have the ability to somewhat change our environment to support us; we no longer have to rely entirely on random mutations to ensure our survival. How can this be seen as anything other than evolution in action?

Even if we turn out like the people in the movie, "Idiocracy", that's still evolution at work.

 

[athon]

Am I the only person who finds it... odd that someone would look at only the past few thousand years and seemingly conclude that human evolution has stopped? I'm just some random idiot with an internet connection, but it seems to me that drastic evolution is primarily noticed over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years.

No, that's pretty much the point.

Sharks and crocodiles look fairly much as they did millions of years ago. Does this mean they stopped evolving? I guess it depends on what is meant by 'evolve'. Physically, they've retained many of the physiological features. But the test would be seeing how genetically related they are to their ancestors. Bacteria can look and act identical and be genetically as different as coral is from elephants (in fact I recall some interesting fact from my microbiology days which said that the two most genetically different organisms on the planet are two bacteria).

Even if we turn out like the people in the movie, "Idiocracy", that's still evolution at work.

Haha, that's a scary movie that one.

Athon