Are humans still evolving
In order to figure out if humans are still evolving scientists have to ask, "do humans have variety in their gene pool, and is there a differential fitness to these variants?" Everybody, whether or not they believe humans are still evolving, agree that we have variety. Between genetic drift and when Eyre-Walker and Keightley claimed in 1999 that humans, on average, had 4.2 amino acid altering mutations every generation since humans separated from chimpanzees it is unreasonable to claim that we don't have variety between humans. People who don't believe humans are still evolving are basing their theory on selective pressure. They believe with all the modern technology, medicine, food distribution, heating and cooling, etc, there are no longer any selective pressures in our lives to separate the fit from the unfit. They believe that the capabilities within our modern society and speed with which our culture adapts to change has completely overruled the process of natural selection and therefore stopped natural selection. However, there are several problems with these claims that could prove these people wrong. These problems are placed into 4 different classes of error including: 1. Misunderstandi
Forgetting other forms of selection, such as sexual selection,3. " to say we are no longer evolving is to say that we have such power over nature that nothing could break our control. So when we try to think of hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, and even billions of years it is beyond our comprehension and we just don't seem to grasp that amount of time. I think that humans are still evolving. I don't think we have that much control over our environment because then there wouldn't be problems with the o-zone right now or with global warming. While this may be true, our own judgement has been created by evolution and are biased towards things which were adaptive in the past. The first class comes from the assumption that selection only works on the more obvious visible traits and little else. ng the nature and power of natural selection, 2. Medicines, technology, and abundant shelter will never affect the role sexual selection plays in the evolution process. The arguments presented to show that humans are no longer evolving tend to become meaningless in light of how evolution actually works. . Whatever the case one fact remains, as long as sexual selection occurs, on any level, there will be a selective pressure present, and evolution will occur. If we were talking about the evolution of humans and we focused on the people in developing countries then all the points raised about how medicine, technology, food distribution, and general ease of life would no longer apply, and there would be no case. Humans refer to time in seconds, minutes, hours, years, and even decades, but evolution needs hundreds of thousands of years to occur.
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Acceptance Essays
