4 ms·
It is indeed an unusual assertion, but it does bring up some interesting ideas - it seems obvious that the speed of evolutionary change in species is highest wh
by PeterisP 4y ago
It is indeed an unusual assertion, but it does bring up some interesting ideas - it seems obvious that the speed of evolutionary change in species is highest whenever the environment changes (especially after various great extinction events associated with drastic change) but in any particular place would settle up in some local optimum (or Nash equilibrium between the related species) after some time of no significant change, so in some way one might say that the evolution is "completed" at that point.
Of course, even for this definition human evolution is absolutely not "completed" at the moment, since however fit/adapted homo sapiens were to the conditions of Africa 200 000 years ago, the last few thousand years have seen enormous changes in our environment to which we definitely haven't adapted yet in the insignificantly small span of 100 or so generations; If the major changes in our social and physical environment would stop today, perhaps we might reach some evolutionary "stable spot" in a 100 000 years (or much more), but right now we haven't even fully adapted to agriculture, much less modern conditions.
- GoblinSlayer 4y agoOne known recent evolutionary event is geographic variation of lactose intolerance.
- PeterisP 4y agoYes, the relatively novel adaptation to process lactose is a great example of an adaptation to agriculture and animal husbandry that started to happen but didn't even yet have the time to properly spread out until the environment changed again so much to make it not as relevant due to wide and easy availability of all kinds of arbitrary dietary choices. We could consider our "evolutionary adaption to modern agriculture" to be completed only after probably hundreds of such and larger effects have had enough time to both occur as a mutation and either spread across all the population or stabilizing to some equilibrium state.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]