Question: Whats your opinion about how animals and humans evoving?

Asked by humpie to Bev, Posty, Edward, Kate, Nathan on 22 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by bruce.

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  1. Photo: Kate PattersonKate Patterson
    answered on 21 Jun 2011:

    Hi humpie and bruce.

    Do you mean how did animals and humans evolve, or are we still evolving? well, let me try to answer both of those questions:

    Firstly, Charles darwin was the scientist that thought of the theory of evolution and he described the ‘survival of the fittest’ where over time, animals adapt to their environments. By chance animals are born with slight variations and some of these variations will make them better suited to their environment, and more likely to survive to make more babies etc.

    Now… humans are so dominant on earth and we have such well established lives with comforts, with medicines etc that we have probably stopped evolving. I think we are probably getting more racial mixing now because of multicultural societies and the ease of travel, and I think our brain structure is still developing… but these are my opinions. I am not sure who is looking at this in scientific detail…

    although I am sure someone is… somewhere!

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  2. Photo: Edward ShinEdward Shin
    answered on 22 Jun 2011:

    Hi humpie and bruce,

    If you’ll excuse a massive simplification, there are basically two things that are needed for ‘evolution’ as we currently know it.

    1. From one generation of plants/animals to the next, each species of plants/animals changes genetically (in its DNA) because of random mistakes in copying DNA.
    This in itself can be enough for species to “evolve” in the sense that they will change over time.

    What Darwin brought to the party is

    2. “Natural selection” (or “survival of the fittest”) which Kate has already explained. Natural selection will affect HOW the species evolves.

    Human beings are definitely still “evolving” in that they are changing. Whether this changing is still according to “survival of the fittest” is probably a controversial issue in social science. And a lot depends on how you define ‘fittest’ in the modern human world.

    As for other animals, yes they are definitely still evolving, and we human beings are influencing that evolution! That’s because
    1. ‘fittest’ for animals now includes how well they cope with human beings living and changing the whole planet (here’s a great story about how birds in cities sing differently to birds in the country, and how one species may split into a ‘city species’ and a ‘country species’: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/03/great-tit-city-bird-song);
    2. for thousands of years, since farming began, people have been “designing the evolution” of plants and animals that are farmed, through “selective breeding”. Pet dogs, for example, would not survive in the wild.

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