Where is Evolution Going?

[CriticalSock]

Evolution doesn't have a plan or a goal, but can you speculate as to what it's going to be like in the future?

Is intelligence a long term survival trait? Or has it meant that humans, for example, have altered their environment to the extent that we'll no longer evolve?

Are mammals a dead end? I mean invertebrates are in pretty much all the ecological niches.

How many humans dying today will end up fossilised and what will the insectile archaeologists who dig them up make of them?

 

[Floyt]

Is intelligence a long term survival trait? Or has it meant that humans, for example, have altered their environment to the extent that we'll no longer evolve?

I remember an SF short (Swarm, by Bruce Sterling) that has fun wih the idea of intelligence as a trait of purely facultative value - in this case, specialist individuals of a hive organism are born with intelligence when the environment demands it, do their thing, then the hive as a whole goes back to happy non-sentience again.
If things fall out accordingly, humanity's successors may well lose intelligence again. The gonads don't care.
As to what's going on right now - hard to say. We've only been taking notes for the blink of an eye.

Are mammals a dead end? I mean invertebrates are in pretty much all the ecological niches.

The average mammal species sticks around for only ~5 mya, if I'm not mistaken. But mammals as a whole are doing quite well. Be some time yet until we catch up to dinosaur longevity, but there's no reason why not. Vertebrates, then amniotes, then mammals have opened up many niches that the invertebrates had failed to monopolize, and they've had ample opportunity to do so.

How many humans dying today will end up fossilised and what will the insectile archaeologists who dig them up make of them?

We are ace at producing both mass graves and sequestering corpses at hard-to-access locations (intentional and by accident) - I think we'll leave a bounty of fossils. The insects will then make kaiju movies about us.

 

[DC]

nowhere, it's here to stay

 

[Bikewer]

I listened to an evolutionary biologist on NPR's Science Friday some months back... He doubted that humanity would evolve much at all.
Reason being that we control all the pressures that normally drive evolution. We don't need to compete for food, hide from predators... We control our environment to a large degree.
Also, modern humans are highly mobile and intermingle (and interbreed) freely... No isolated populations over long periods of time.

I speculated in a thread about possible alien characteristics.... How smart do you need to be? At some point, we are intelligent enough to do all the things described above.. Then there's no further evolutionary advantage to getting lots smarter.

 

[Aridas]

Evolution doesn't have a plan or a goal, but can you speculate as to what it's going to be like in the future?

Certainly. How accurate the speculations would be is another matter entirely.

Is intelligence a long term survival trait? Or has it meant that humans, for example, have altered their environment to the extent that we'll no longer evolve?

Define "Long term survival trait" and "intelligence," first. Regardless, humans are still evolving and, given how evolution actually works, it's highly unlikely to cease working.

Are mammals a dead end? I mean invertebrates are in pretty much all the ecological niches.

Are birds a dead end? Reptiles? Bacteria? That said... mammals are doing rather well, at the moment, it seems.

How many humans dying today will end up fossilised and what will the insectile archaeologists who dig them up make of them?

With a species as prevalent as humans and the variety of situations in which we die... very possibly many.

 

[CriticalSock]

We are ace at producing both mass graves and sequestering corpses at hard-to-access locations (intentional and by accident) - I think we'll leave a bounty of fossils. The insects will then make kaiju movies about us.

I imagine them not piecing the skeleton together as one creature but postulating a symbiotic relationship between the “Skull-crab” and the “Ribcage-Lobster” . They’re often found in close proximity of each other with the remains of Vertebrae snails scattered close by... 

I listened to an evolutionary biologist on NPR's Science Friday some months back... He doubted that humanity would evolve much at all.
Reason being that we control all the pressures that normally drive evolution. We don't need to compete for food, hide from predators... We control our environment to a large degree.
Also, modern humans are highly mobile and intermingle (and interbreed) freely... No isolated populations over long periods of time.

I speculated in a thread about possible alien characteristics.... How smart do you need to be? At some point, we are intelligent enough to do all the things described above.. Then there's no further evolutionary advantage to getting lots smarter.

Is there any evolutionary pressure to evolve at all? Are we like sharks, perfect for our niche, or like pandas, over specialised and doomed?

 

[Aridas]

Is there any evolutionary pressure to evolve at all?

Sexual selection comes to mind.

 

[CriticalSock]

Certainly. How accurate the speculations would be is another matter entirely.

Well, it's speculation, you know, that fun, light hearted thing you can do sometimes when you don't have facts?

Define "Long term survival trait" and "intelligence," first. Regardless, humans are still evolving and, given how evolution actually works, it's highly unlikely to cease working.

Intelligence as in what we've got at the moment. Language, problem solving, invention, abstract thought. Long term survival trait as in the survival of the species. Is intelligence helping humanity to continue to survive or has it locked us in an evolutionary box?

Are birds a dead end? Reptiles? Bacteria? That said... mammals are doing rather well, at the moment, it seems.

I don't know. Will birds and reptiles still be around in (picks arbitrary amount) 50 million years? I would think bacteria would be, those guys are fairly ubiquitous.

With a species as prevalent as humans and the variety of situations in which we die... very possibly many.

Insect Archaeologist: "The long tailed, five legged creature we call 'Armodon' often has a band of what we have determined to be gold wrapped around one of its legs."

 

[CriticalSock]

Sexual selection comes to mind.

I'm not sure intelligence helps with that...

 

[SomedayGirl]

Sexual selection comes to mind.

In some ways we have offset that as well. When it comes to choosing mates, we can make ourselves look attractive and healthy even if we aren't especially attractive or healthy. We can make ourselves seem wealthy even if we're poor as church mice. The markers other species look for when deciding on a optimal breeding partner we've learned how to fake in many cases.

Dancing...we haven't learned to fake good dancing yet.

 

[Mojo]

Evolution doesn't have a plan or a goal, but can you speculate as to what it's going to be like in the future?

Yes, you can make up whatever you like, and probably get a newspaper to publish it.

 

[IXP]

In my opinion, intelligence has become a negative trait in reproductive success. Not because the more intelligent are unable to reproduce, but because they have become unwilling to.

IXP

 

[Dessi]

There are a few fictional documentaries describing possible evolutionary traits in non-terrestrial animals (Alien Planet, Natural History of an Alien), and one specific documentary on possible evolutionary directions in the far Earth future (The Future is Wild).

These appears to be developed with an earnest interest in presenting organisms with realistic adaptation strategies based on what we know from actual evolutionary history on Earth (with a little handwaving to make the documentary accessible to a large laymen audience).

Its hard to speculate on the evolution of non-existent organisms, but I would love to hear from someone much smarter than me whether these shows are based on sound biology and present organisms in a plausible manner.

 

[Dinwar]

Peter Ward's Future Evolution explores exactly this. Essentially he argues that humans are extinction-proof, as we share numerous traits with organisms that survive extinctions well (we're weedy, we survive nearly everywhere, we reproduce relatively fast, we have a broad diet, we're generarlists, etc). In addition, our intelligence will allow us to survive even a nuclear war (as a whole; individuals will certainly fail to survive). Just about the only thing that can wipe us out is the death fo the Sun, and that's only until we explore other planets (or at least get generation ships up and running).

He has some interesting arguments about the nature of organisms in the Anthropocene. We're seeing the initial stages of the recovery phase already; at least in the near-term it's possible to make relatively solid predictions about large-scale evolutionary trends. Anything humans use will be fine, if altered (via genetic engineering, adaptation, and selective breeding), as will anything that survives alongside us (cockroaches, rats, mice, and oddly enough snakes).

 

[I Ratant]

nowhere, it's here to stay

.
Yer pure evolution is being interfered with by human intervention into the natural culling processes that prune the unfit from the breeding stock.
All those medical advances that keep most of us alive...
When my eyes went bad, as a hunter-gatherer I'd have been gathered by another hunter that I couldn't see in time, for instance.
What humanity evolves into... who can say?

 

[Dinwar]

Yer pure evolution is being interfered with by human intervention into the natural culling processes that prune the unfit from the breeding stock.

It's different in specifics, but not in concept, from other evolutionary adaptations. We've shifted our fitness space, is all.

 

[Aridas]

Well, it's speculation, you know, that fun, light hearted thing you can do sometimes when you don't have facts?

Yup. We do have a fair sized history to work with, though, so we do have something to base predictions on.

Intelligence as in what we've got at the moment. Language, problem solving, invention, abstract thought. Long term survival trait as in the survival of the species. Is intelligence helping humanity to continue to survive or has it locked us in an evolutionary box?

It's likely helping us to survive and thrive then, I'd say, unless we actually kill ourselves off somehow with the fruits of that intelligence.

I don't know. Will birds and reptiles still be around in (picks arbitrary amount) 50 million years? I would think bacteria would be, those guys are fairly ubiquitous.

Maybe. Maybe not. It's quite unlikely that they'll be the same, regardless.

 

[steve s]

The average mammal species sticks around for only ~5 mya, if I'm not mistaken.

The same is true of dinosaurs. Although they were around for 160 million years, individual species were only around for 4 or 5 million. T. Rex didn't appear until just a few million years before the big snuff.

Steve S

 

[Halfcentaur]

I think, barring loss of technological progress and recorded knowledge, we're just going to be controlling our own biology more and more. Even so, I think currently the things we seem to be adapting for is something like the way the emotional regions of the brain are being more connected with our logical regions, making us more resistant to impulsive behavior and better able to act on what is rational over what makes us angry or happy. I recall a Nova which was showing we seem to be moving into this area more and more in subsequent generations, and we're losing redundant body parts, something like 30% of people are being born without wisdom teeth now. Eventually I think if technology keeps advancing we will be super adapters, altering our biology for any number of reasons whenever we please. Our niche I would argue is that of a clever tool user which searches for purpose and meaning as a byproduct of our obsession with tool oriented thinking, we see everything through the context of tool use. Hence the cognitive mistake of expecting some kind of objective purpose and meaning in things like the universe and reality itself, which is like asking what the color red's purpose is, or the smell of the color red. Abstract conceptualization leads to a lot of funny cognitive mistakes like that.

This obsession with purpose oriented context may be what's necessary to provide a frame of reference necessary to develop complex sentience. Soon we will start not only instantly altering our own biology for adaptation in variable environments, but also the animal world, and one day we will have clearly sentient cuttlefish, raccoons, and certain monkey species talking and wearing garments and decorations while they serve their human gods and play with our pseudo intelligent artificial life forms.
They will even have their own TV channels.

But you don't have to take my word for it.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Is intelligence a long term survival trait?

Depends what you mean by 'long-term'. Certainly the trend so far has been towards increasing intelligence, but will that be the best survival strategy for the next 3.5 billion years?

Or has it meant that humans, for example, have altered their environment to the extent that we'll no longer evolve?

3.5 billion years ago there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, then plants altered the environment forever. Did that stop them from evolving, or did it open up new possibilities?

How many humans dying today will end up fossilised and what will the insectile archaeologists who dig them up make of them?

There won't be any 'insectile archaeologists', because insects are taking a different evolutionary path that doesn't include practicing archaeology. That niche is already taken - by us. And we aren't about to give it up to some bug!

If we can continue to advance our knowledge and use of technology then evolution itself may come to a dead end. Once we get to the point where we can modify genes at will and/or meld our minds with machines, evolution becomes redundant. Perhaps creationists will eventually be proven right - except that we will be the intelligent designers.

OTOH, perhaps we are not as smart as we think, and all these 'advanced' technologies that we are developing will blow back on us. If this happens then it will have been our lack of intelligence that was our downfall. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

I think intelligence is almost certainly our best survival strategy provided that we use it effectively. Will we be able to continue developing advanced technologies with no limit, or will ignorance and shortsightedness prevent us from going much further? It's been working so far, but the next few hundred hundred years will be critical.