Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ChainLegacy
Humans have lived for thousands of years without evolving. We aren't going to turn into lizards anytime soon (and by soon I mean 5000 generations and unlike most of you, I don't believe we're all going to kill ourselves because of technology).
|
Not true; every biological species is continually evolving with each generation, subtly responding to environmental demands. The main conditions of evolution are of course, survival and reproduction. People are still dying of natural causes like sicknesses and allergies, wiping them out of participation in the gene pool. They also die of "constructed" causes like the inability to get a job due to lack of intelligence, competence etc (but this is buffered by the nanny state system).
Anyway, this continual change in the species' biological profile over each subsequent generation is called a "micro" evolution. When the profile changes radically enough (due to environmental demands and whatnot), there will sometimes be a large enough change that is physically differentiable or biologically significant. This is the so called "macro" evolution step... but I really need to read more to be very sure of the terminology.
Regardless, we -are- continually evolving; but at a very slow rate. This is, for example, because instead of people dying off from diseases and having their genes wiped from the gene pool, we have medicine.