Humans, can we evolve any more?

[Broomstick]

Why don't our pinkies grow longer so they help the rest of our fingers instead?

Not enough evolutionary pressure to favor that trait. Our current pinkies are good enough.

[Lancer]

Why don't our pinkies grow longer so they help the rest of our fingers instead?




How sad. I thought only corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen cut corners but apparently evolution does too!! AAAAAuuugghh!!!

If it's not broken, don't fix it. If it doesn't work, force it. If it breaks, it needed fixing anyways.

[Sephirius]

Not my pinkie! I need it to press the reload key!

[RedImperator]

It is stupendously rare for a beneficial mutuation to appear in the population out of nowhere and sweep through the population. If that happened, crocodiles would still be evolving, but it's clear they haven't undergone any significant changes in tens of million years. Evolution is almost always the result of changes in the environment suddenly favoring certain preexisting variations in a population that were formerly either benign or actively harmful. The mutation already exists, but it's not until the environment changes to favor it that it becomes dominant. To go back to our crocodile example, there already exists a range of sizes for adult crocs. If a population of crocodiles became isolated in an area that only had very large, very aggressive prey like hippos or elephants, the very biggest crocs which can take those animals down would have an advantage, and natural selection would begin favoring larger and larger crocs (that very thing happened in the Mezozoic, where at least one crocodile species that I know of grew to enormous size at the exact same time the largest hadrosaurs and horned dinosaurs existed).

For humans, it's hard to make a guess because we're the only species which can consciously change its own environment. You could make up hypothetical scenarios that would cause evolutionary changes, such as a predator which ignored, say, redheads, but most of those wind up being rather silly. Most of the plausible ones I can think of make us dumber, not smarter. Say, an utter collapse of civilization, where in the aftermath big, energy-hog brains, long childhoods, and infants with heads so big they often kill their mothers in childbirth are selected against in favor of an animal like Homo habilis--still smart enough to make tools, scavenge, and occasionally hunt, but more energy efficient and not helpless for nearly so long.

[Vehrec]

I can see space living humans undergoing some extremem adaptations. Some of them might adapt to microgravity, while others thrive on extreme G forces, either through genetic enginering or good old fashioned natural selection. Either way, they will be deciedly uncomfotable walking around on earth.

[Mange]

BBC News has an article about one future possibilty for the human race: BBC: Human species 'may split in two'

[Broomstick]

That BBC article presents and over-simplistic view of evolution, not to mention time scales far too small for the effects described.

[Winston Blake]

BBC News has an article about one future possibilty for the human race: BBC: Human species 'may split in two'

That seriously looks like the academic equivalent of trolling flamebait, particularly the graphic.