but the thing is... we human lost our evolution skills... what we do is we craete something for us to adapt instead of changing ourself to adapt

Au contraire, the reason why we have not evolved as much as our predecessors is because there is no need to at this moment. Also, we homo sapiens have only been around for a relatively short 200,000 years, as compared to our predecessors. And yes, we do force our environment to evolve instead of ourselves. But still, we humans are a biological spesies and when the need comes for it, believe me we will evolve and adapt to our new environment.

That in itself is evolution.

The very act of evolving itself has evolved.

Initially evolution was about us adapting to the surroundings, now evolution is more in the mind. We're evolving now faster than ever, but our evolution now is judged by how much knowledge we can gather and how fast we can apply it.

Biological evolution may have slowed down, but our minds are racing.

Eventually, I believe that we will use technology to evolve biologically. Even as we speak, there's many different researches being done to improve our biological systems. One of the most attractive ones to me is the research being done to prevent cellular damage that will result in perfect restoration of our bodily cells. Meaning we can live much much longer. Another interesting thing is transhumanism. Where eventually we'll supplant our biological form with electronics.

i don think we are better off 100,000 years ago biologically.. what we see the difference now is that there is a set of education system and documented knowledge passed down from generation....

if you put a 22th century baby on ice age and age age baby in 22th century and let them grow.. i bet the out come is the same

This post has been edited by Awakened_Angel: Oct 30 2009, 11:22 PM

Education and knowledge does not play a big part in evolution. Sure, we can use science to accelerate evolution, but evolution depends on the surroundings.
Also, unlike some animals, human evolution isn't something that is significant in 1 or 2 generations. Put a baby there and it's great-great-greatgrandchild may be different from it.
I read an article recently about humans today and homonids hundreds of thousands of years ago. Those homonids could easily run at 37kph, which would mean that they had a more muscular frame. And they needed it, be it to hunt or run away from predators.
And then there's us homo sapiens, with much less muscle mass simply because we do not need so much, but with much bigger brains than our predecessors. =)
We do evolve.

You cannot 'lose' your evolution, it is not a skill. By creating those things space travel would not be possible in the first place, you cannot expect evolution to suddenly make us fly to space, nor will it ever be possible.

yes.... our body and mind never stop evolving.. or genral mean.. change to adapt.... even our social behaviour evolve... langauge evolve...

but physically we dont evolve much.. thansk to technology that provide us comfort

No, what I meant by that was that we're evolving more in terms of how much we learn and stuff. Perhaps I shouldn't call it evolution... it's a bit misleading.

From what I know about evolution, the process doesn't work to suit our environment specifically. It's random.

Let's take a fictional scenario. Imagine we had lots of monkeys a long time ago living in Siberia and none of them had eyes. Then due to some accidental mutation in their genes, one of the monkeys was born with an eye. In modern terms, we would call this "cacat", but it's actually evolution.

Now because this monkey has an eye, it is able to hunt better, avoid predators better and become much stronger than the other monkeys. So obviously this monkey becomes the big boss in the group and gets to mate with all the lovely female monkeys.

And it's offspring will also carry the same genetic mutation that he had, so all of it's children will also have an eye.

Then lets say after many thousands of years (now all monkeys has an eye), another random/accidental mutation occurs. This time, the newly born monkey is born with fur-free skin. But unfortunately for this monkey, the environment that it lives in (Siberia) requires that monkeys have thick furs to live. So eventually this monkey dies and that puts an end to that particular evolutionary chain.

Then again, we fast forward another million years and now yet another random/accidental mutation occurs, this time the new monkey born has 2 eyes instead of one. This allows better depth perception for this monkey and hence this monkey is even better at hunting and staying alive. Eventually as this one mates with other monkeys, all it's offspring will also have the advantage of 2 eyes and so on the story goes...

So the way evolution works is that random things keep happening, and only those random things that suit the environment and gives an advantage in the environment actually gets to stay on.

The reason this doesn't work as easily with humans is: imagine that monkey born without furs, if it was human, it's parents would have given him animal skin to wear as an alternative. And it will also have fire to keep it warm. So instead of dying and just ending an entire evolutionary chain, the hairless monkey instead continues to live.

yes.. i once asked my wife who studied pure bio in uni.. ask her to differentiate mutation, adaptation and evolution....

can you explain it here??

This post has been edited by Awakened_Angel: Nov 1 2009, 05:22 PM

I would say that they're all the same thing, only differently perceived.
Evolution absolutely depends on mutation, because that's the only way new genes are created, be it useful mutation or harmful mutation. And evolution is essentially adaptation to the surroundings.
But then again I could be wrong. Someone clarify this please?

If I'm not mistaken, the correct way to relate those words is:

Genetic mutation that helps us adapt to the environment is evolution.

Mutations are random changes in our DNA that affect how our body works. If we take DNA, there are 4 chemicals that form a DNA double helix structure, it's called:
- adenine (A)
- cytosine (C )
- guanine (G)
- thymine (T)

So lets take a very simple look at how it works. Remember, this is just a simplified example, not necessarily the actual mutations.

Say the first generation of monkeys have a sequence like this: TAATGCCGAACCG

After thousands of years, one of the new monkeys born has a mutation which changes the sequence to: TAATGCCTAACCG

Note that the underlined chemical has changed from a G to a T. This is a random mutation that happened over many thousands of generations of monkeys.

For our example, let's say that this mutation causes the monkey to have eyes. With eyes, the monkey can now hunt better, run away from predators better and look for mates better. So with eyes, the monkey is able to adapt to it's environment better. As the monkey mates, it's children will also have eyes, which also helps them hunt, escape and mate better. Eventually, monkeys with eyes will be the dominant species and in the end, all monkeys will have eyes. This whole process is called evolution.

This is also why a lot of people disagree with evolution. They believe that thing's cannot just randomly happen and those mutations must be caused by some higher power. But we can see things randomly happening all the time, lots of people who are born with disabilities are results of random mutation. Whenever you read stories about babies being born with 2 heads or 4 hands or etc, it's all due to random mutation.

So going back to TS's topic of living in space, we can't just dump babies in Mars and expect them to evolve to live in Mars, they'll die. Those babies have evolved for about 200,000 years to be perfect for life on Earth, so they're not much different from us.

For us to evolve for life on Mars, we must put millions of people on Mars and let them mate and maybe thousands of generations later, there *might* be some Mars-friendly-mutation that allows some of the babies to adapt better to life on Mars.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Nov 1 2009, 10:14 PM

thanks scientist..... so, x-man mutants are the future humans instead of freak....

One day we will. Probably in 1000 years time.

I would think that humans would need much more than 1000 years to evolve to live in outer space.
1000 years on a cosmic scale is like a microsecond.

1000/13,700,000,000 = 7 microseconds =P

well, as per topic tittle this is my oppinion.

human being liivng in space in conditions similar to Earth.

the only thing i can see is building space colonies such as in the gundams and macross series.

sunlight s via the sun only that the rotation and climate is man made.

it is theoratically possible for a human to life in outerspace. but the logistic involving to send 1 person and keeping that person alive is huge.

so imagine if we were to send 5000 people to live in a space colony. the cost would be(pardon the pun) astronomical.

but only in the early stages. once we have mastered the science of space colonization then the cost would be reduce as more and more people will want to go there either by default or on their own will.

so space colonies are ethe way to go for mankind. once space colonies are up and running, we can make the colonies go to where ever we want .

Mars, Jupiter or like in the anime series ask the colonies to search for new habitable planets. but colonization of space is the first step rather then colonizing Mars.

I don't think he means us evolving to live in space, more like us being able to create fantastic technologies that can make Earth-like environment in space easily (i.e. Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Stargate Universe).

Perhaps we would be able to achieve this pretty quickly within the next 2 - 4 centuries or maybe even faster. In 1000 years, I hope that humanity would be able to develop massive starships that has entire climates in it... stuff like huge lakes, cities and other Earth-like amenities.

Such a vessel would be cool for long distance journeys to colonise distant star systems or to travel far for research and exploration. Star Trek fans --> the kind of ship I'm describing is the one that the inter-galactic alien race, The Hive, had in Objective Bajor, but with more Federation-esque design and interior, instead of a biological ship. lol.

This post has been edited by DeniseLau: Nov 11 2009, 02:57 PM

i always wonder why the monkeys in zoo negara stopped evolving. if we were the monkeys, shouldn't the monkey be us now?

or are they the "defects" evolution stunted halfway, as it is with the rest of the animals.

humans iz king

Your point being? Monkeys make better astronauts or something?

True, doesn't make sense at all. Which is why one of the first animals in space was a monkey (the second animal actually) to find out radiation effects that could cause harm to our astronauts as they are our closest relatives (evolution wise).

nononono.. sry for the misrepresentation.

I was wondering why since we evolved from monkeys there are still monkeys that exist.