• Question: If you believe in evolution, what stage of evolution are humans at and why?

    Asked by to Amelia, Izzy, Sarah on 20 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      This is a very good question, because really no one can agree on this.

      Some people think that humans have stopped evolving now and we are at the peak of our evolution. This is because we don’t have to adapt to our environments any more – if we don’t like something we change it for example move house or go to a different supermarket. We have so much technology now that we are pretty removed from the natural world. You could say it is the technology rather than us that is evolving.

      Other scientists do think we are still evolving. Evolution is a continuous process that all living things are going through. We are also a living mammal so not exempt from this process. We still get diseases so need to adapt to over come them. Brain power and thinking are really important so people could still be evolving better brains and becoming cleverer.

      I guess we will never know the answer because evolution takes thousands of years.

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      Evolution is an ongoing process – it doesn’t have a start or an end, or definite stages. Things evolve to cope with the world around them.

      Lots of people say that we have stopped evolving because we change our environments instead of evolving to match them. If we move somewhere cold, we put on a scarf and a jumper instead of evolving to cope with it.

      However, we are also causing ourselves to evolve unintentionally. For example, our eyesight is evolving to become less good. Prehistoric humans needed good eyesight to find food, and short-sighted people died and so didn’t pass on that feature to their children. Nowadays we just buy a pair of glasses – and so poor eyesight is being passed along in our DNA. The same thing is happening with allergies, and also inherited diseases that we can now treat.

      We are also slowly getting taller, and also fatter (have you seen Wall-E, where everyone has become really fat???)! So I wouldn’t say that we have stopped evolving – but maybe you might say we aren’t evolving very well any more!!

      Who knows what humans will look like in hundreds of thousands of years.

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