CMV: human evolution is forcing us to evolve mentally and physically every 10 years

Many people are saying you are wrong because Evolution takes millions of years. I don't think that's quite the whole picture.

Most populations loving in relative stasis, I. E. In a situation where the basic mechanics of life work as normal most of the time, yes, small changes take a long time to shift the entire populations generic profile. Humans have so much generic variation, that really changing it, getting every individual to have some new change, is very hard.

However, cataclysmic events change the genetics if an entire populations in very short order. That's due to two effects:. 1) every individual has some mutations and some generic differences from the herd. And 2) catastrophe kills the ones without the genes needed to deal with the catastrophe.

So in one sense, we are all changing all the time, and the underlying generic drift is proceeding as normal. This is happening every time someone is born.

We don't have many cataclysms though. Hardly anything in the last century has even killed a sizeable percentage of humans (in a grand scheme sense). Those areas that have seen massive devastation usually have populations that move, or other humans move in, it the conditions really aren't requiring a new genetic profile to survive in. Although it would be interesting to see if war-torn regions who have that experience large-scale destruction end up with people who are genetically more predisposed to peace. However it would be unlikely to see a marked genetic change from that sort of event.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it requires a tremendous amount of genetic drift for two populations that started as the same species to become unable to interbreed. That's what would Define a new species. Generally it takes Millenia of separation, with its slow drift and occasional cataclysmic change to create a new species. As long as populations can interbreed, the average remains roughly the same. We have had human populations that have been very separate for a long time, because modern transportation is very recent. But nowadays we are reintegrating those populations because they can travel from the distances quickly. I'm sure this is doing something interesting to our genetics, and it could be classified as evolution, but I don't think you could say that it is creating a subspecies of human.

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