- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
The age of the urban ape
New research shows that humans haven't stopped evolving – could a city habitat be the end of us, asks the distinguished anthropologist.
By Desmond Morris
9:08PM BST 04 May 2012
The scientific discovery, announced this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that humans are still evolving, is about as surprising as saying that scientists have proved that water is wet.
Of course we are still evolving. Humans, as I am on record as stating, are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are animals – extraordinary animals, but animals none the less. We breed, therefore we evolve.
The whole point about sexual reproduction – something (unlike pandas) we are rather good at – is that it keeps a species flexible. Each generation is the result of the breeding successes of the last generation. And the last generation is bred under the influences of the environment as it was during their brief spell on earth. If that environment changes, then breeding successes will change with it. ...
So, to understand how humans are evolving today, all we need to do is to look at the ways in which our environment has been changing. If it is static, we will pause in our evolution. If it is undergoing some sort of upheaval, then our evolution will speed up. Of course, for us, being large animals, the evolutionary process is very slow. We have only undergone one major environmental change in the past 12,000 years, so one mustn’t expect a huge alteration. The big change we have seen, as a primate species, is urbanisation. Up until the point when we discovered agriculture, we had always lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes. But once we had planted crops and domesticated animals, we had given ourselves the chance to build up a food surplus. This let our villages become towns, and our towns become cities full of specialists, who made exciting new discoveries and set us on a path towards technological brilliance.
So the primeval naked ape that had evolved to live in small tribes suddenly found itself surrounded by strangers in huge urban populations – a process that continues at a pace today. This is the only major environmental pressure on us as a species. Anyone unable to adapt to this crowded new world, full of bustle, novelty, social stress and noise, would find it hard to settle down and breed. Evolution would wave goodbye to them and the species would move on. There are several ways in which evolution could wave goodbye – by making them suicidal, by giving them mental breakdowns, by giving them stress diseases, or by directly interfering with their attitude towards the act of mating.
If certain kinds of people became non-breeders in this new urban world, then this would gradually change our species. Even if they only became “reduced breeders”, it would still have an impact, allowing our species to become more efficient as a new kind of Urban Ape. ...
... As we become ever more crowded, those individuals who cannot cope with the situation will breed less and our species will continue to adapt to life in mega-cities. In our early evolution, one trait we developed was to survive through co-operation. That quality is built into our genes and can be strengthened genetically as time passes.
But, in becoming so populous, we do face a great danger that stems from our hidden enemy and our greatest threat – the fast-breeding viruses and bacteria. Hostile microbes are forever improving their abilities, and one feature they adore is “host proximity”. In other words, the closer we are packed together in our mega-cities, the greater opportunity there is for our enemy microbes to strike at epidemic levels. If, for example, a deadly virus could evolve from being contagious to being infectious, so that you could catch it from the person sitting next to you, then a new Black Death could be upon us. Our 7,000 million population could shrink to a million in a few years. But that million – the resistant ones – would eventually start to breed again and in a few thousand years we would be back on top once more.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9245 ... n-ape.html
New research shows that humans haven't stopped evolving – could a city habitat be the end of us, asks the distinguished anthropologist.
By Desmond Morris
9:08PM BST 04 May 2012
The scientific discovery, announced this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that humans are still evolving, is about as surprising as saying that scientists have proved that water is wet.
Of course we are still evolving. Humans, as I am on record as stating, are risen apes, not fallen angels. We are animals – extraordinary animals, but animals none the less. We breed, therefore we evolve.The whole point about sexual reproduction – something (unlike pandas) we are rather good at – is that it keeps a species flexible. Each generation is the result of the breeding successes of the last generation. And the last generation is bred under the influences of the environment as it was during their brief spell on earth. If that environment changes, then breeding successes will change with it. ...
So, to understand how humans are evolving today, all we need to do is to look at the ways in which our environment has been changing. If it is static, we will pause in our evolution. If it is undergoing some sort of upheaval, then our evolution will speed up. Of course, for us, being large animals, the evolutionary process is very slow. We have only undergone one major environmental change in the past 12,000 years, so one mustn’t expect a huge alteration. The big change we have seen, as a primate species, is urbanisation. Up until the point when we discovered agriculture, we had always lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes. But once we had planted crops and domesticated animals, we had given ourselves the chance to build up a food surplus. This let our villages become towns, and our towns become cities full of specialists, who made exciting new discoveries and set us on a path towards technological brilliance.
So the primeval naked ape that had evolved to live in small tribes suddenly found itself surrounded by strangers in huge urban populations – a process that continues at a pace today. This is the only major environmental pressure on us as a species. Anyone unable to adapt to this crowded new world, full of bustle, novelty, social stress and noise, would find it hard to settle down and breed. Evolution would wave goodbye to them and the species would move on. There are several ways in which evolution could wave goodbye – by making them suicidal, by giving them mental breakdowns, by giving them stress diseases, or by directly interfering with their attitude towards the act of mating.
If certain kinds of people became non-breeders in this new urban world, then this would gradually change our species. Even if they only became “reduced breeders”, it would still have an impact, allowing our species to become more efficient as a new kind of Urban Ape. ...
... As we become ever more crowded, those individuals who cannot cope with the situation will breed less and our species will continue to adapt to life in mega-cities. In our early evolution, one trait we developed was to survive through co-operation. That quality is built into our genes and can be strengthened genetically as time passes.
But, in becoming so populous, we do face a great danger that stems from our hidden enemy and our greatest threat – the fast-breeding viruses and bacteria. Hostile microbes are forever improving their abilities, and one feature they adore is “host proximity”. In other words, the closer we are packed together in our mega-cities, the greater opportunity there is for our enemy microbes to strike at epidemic levels. If, for example, a deadly virus could evolve from being contagious to being infectious, so that you could catch it from the person sitting next to you, then a new Black Death could be upon us. Our 7,000 million population could shrink to a million in a few years. But that million – the resistant ones – would eventually start to breed again and in a few thousand years we would be back on top once more.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9245 ... n-ape.html
Last edited by a moderator:
