MY WORK HERE IS DONE

Can It Be? The End of Evolution? (NICHOLAS WADE, August 24, 2003, NY Times)

The most improbable item in science fiction movies is not the hardware — the faster-than-light travel, the tractor beams, the levitation — but the people. Strangely, they always look and behave just like us. Yet the one safe prediction about the far future is that humans will be a lot further along in their evolution.

Last week population geneticists, rummaging in DNA's ever-fascinating attic, set dates on two important changes in the human form.

Dr. Alan R. Rogers of the University of Utah figured out that the ancestral human population had acquired black skin, as a protection against the sun, at least 1.2 million years ago, and therefore that it must have shed its fur some time before this date.

Clothing came long after we were naked. Dr. Mark Stoneking, of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, managed to address this question by calculating when the human body louse (which lives only in clothing, not hair) evolved from the human head louse. That proud event in human history dates to between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago, Dr. Stoneking reported

So where do we go from here? Have we attained perfection and ceased to evolve?

Where would anyone ever get the idea that Darwinism is deterministic?


MORE:
-ESSAY: Is human evolution finally over?: Scientists are split over the theory that natural selection has come to a standstill in the West. (Robin McKie, February 3, 2002, The Observer)
-ESSAY: As Good as It Gets (Robert E. Horseman, April 2002, CDA Journal) Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2003 6:27 AM