• Question: Have humans evolved to their limit? I only say this because I don't see anything different in humans for a long time. Or are we just evolving slowly?

    Asked by Lily to Adam, Adele, Deborah, Matt, Samantha on 16 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Matthew Lee

      Matthew Lee answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      Evolution takes thousands of years! And there are different aspects to evolution, for example we havent changed that much in terms of our genes from people who lived in th eyear 1200, but we have all become taller and we live longer. This is a combination of sexual selection (people that live longer have more opportunity to pass on their genes so they have more children who live longer and have more children) and advances in medicine. But are genes are quite similar to how they were hundreds of years ago, the expression of those genes (this means the genes are turned on or off more or less) is probably quite different to our ancestors because we have different enviornments that we need to adapt to now. A good example is people that live at really high altitude they produce a lot more red blood cells than people taht live at sea level and this has been a change in their DNA that has happened over many many generations of people.

    • Photo: Samantha Ahern

      Samantha Ahern answered on 22 Jun 2017:

      Matt has answered this really well, no additional comments

Comments

  • Photo: Matt

    Matt commented on :

    I think humans can continue to evolve (change and adapt) over the next thousands of years because we will have lots of new things we need to live with. For example it might be better for everyone to develop darker skin to protect us against the suns rays if our Ozone layer disappears in the future.