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What is some proof that humans evolved from animals? - Emily 

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What is some proof that humans evolved from animals? - Emily 

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Is it possible that eventually we will evolve back?

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Is it possible that eventually we will evolve back?

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Is everyone with blue eyes related or is it a mutation? When was the first blue eye encounter?

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Is everyone with blue eyes related or is it a mutation? When was the first blue eye encounter?

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New research shows that blues eyed people are all believed to have a single, common ancestor.It is believed that originally we all had brown eyes,  A team at the University Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of all blue eyed alive humans.
Jessica
(pt.2 extended version)

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Why did people evolve into different races?

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Why did people evolve into different races?

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Humans divided into different races due to location. For example it was beneficial to have dark skin near the equator to resist harsh sunlight while in a colder northern climate light skin was more well suited since it could absorb more sunlight to receive important vitamins.

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=1138

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How does natural selection lead to forming a new species?-Rojina

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How does natural selection lead to forming a new species?-Rojina

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Through natural process, existing species are put under pressure, resulting in significant changes to populations. When spices reproduce and it exceeds environmental resources, this starts to allow species to slowly mature till the next generations reproduce. More species are being born than they can live. Thus, this can lead to species with genetic disadvantages to die before reaching reproductive maturity. Overpopulated species with genetic advantages can live long enough to reach reproductive maturity, passing on genetic hereditary traits to the next generations.

Advantages also leads to the formation of new species such as adaptations in the climate, the food supply, same spices competition, niche competition, other species competition, effective reproducing, quickly maturing, as well as inherited genetic strength of passing beneficial adaptations leading the species to blossom.

Similarly, geological changes can pressure populations, resulting in a natural selection of genetic and species variation. For example, volcanic eruptions can force species to make different adaptations to their environment, leave their environment, or become extinct.

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Full disclosure: I ran the four-part (newly renamed!) natural selection misconception diagnostic because my idea well had run dry. I was hoping that by retreading some old misconception tropes, I would get inspired. Imagine my delight, then, when Larry Moran gave me an idea for this post in the comments. In a back-and-forth about how I explained the right answer to a particular question about arctic worms getting transplanted into tropical waters, Larry thought I was reinforcing a misconception: that in the absence of environmental change all species are perfectly adapted and evolution comes to a halt. Thank you, Larry! An idea for a new post had arrived.
Misconception: Evolution can stop. Correction: No stop signs for evolution.
I think that the idea that populations can "stop" evolving reflects the fundamental misconception that evolution only occurs by natural selection, driven by the rarer misconception that natural selection is only triggered by a dramatic change to the external environment. If you are laboring under both of these misconceptions, then it would be reasonable to infer that if the environment stays generally stable, there won't be any evolution.

But not so fast!

First, of course, evolution does not happen only by natural selection. Drift, gene flow, and mutation can't be ignored. And moreover, not all selection is set in motion by external (meaning: outside of the evolving population in question) changes to the environment. Imagine, for example, that in a population of organisms, a heritable mutation arises randomly that enables those that have the mutation to have twice as many healthy offspring as those that do not have the mutation. That is quite a strong, initially positive selection that has nothing to do with a change to something like temperature, precipitation, predator population, food availability, etc.

The next problem is that there really is no such thing as complete environmental stability. The environment includes abiotic (non-living) and biotic (living) components that are constantly shifting in interconnected and dynamic ways. Complete stasis is simply impossible as long as Earth keeps turning, animals keep breathing, organisms keep dying, water keeps cycling, oceans keep churning, big wheels keep on turning, proud Mary keeps on doing her thing ... you get the idea.

In short: evolution is always happening. Even humans, the masters of technology, are evolving- quite rapidly, in fact. Yes, we can now treat and even cure many diseases that once posed very strong negative selection factors. Yes, humans use technology that extends our inherent, natural capabilities. (These are factors that are occasionally claimed, even by scientists who should know better, to mean that humans are no longer evolving.) But evidence for contemporary human evolution is plentiful.

In the classroom, there are a few approaches to take that would prevent the misconception that evolution can stop. Fundamentally, it's important to stress that variation in, and changes to a population are not always visible. This is an especially important point to make with the youngest learners, who tend to be very literal. When we give examples of variation in early lessons on evolution, for example, they tend to emphasize visible, physical differences such as coat color, long or short ears, spots or no spots. We then show evolution occurring by illustrating shifts in the frequencies of these very visible traits. Using these kinds of examples is important-they provide concrete, real-world relevance to children. The downside, however, is that some students may conclude that if a visible shift in traits isn't occurring, neither is evolution. So I'd recommend at least hinting that some differences aren't always obvious-such as how well animals can see, smell, and hear, or how easily organisms get or fight off diseases.

In middle and high school, it'll become important to push back on the idea that all evolution occurs via natural selection, but it'll also be important to work the ecology angle. Make sure your students understand the dynamic nature of the environment that is all around them. When you teach natural selection, emphasize that environmental changes can be as sweeping as the introduction of a nonnative species or a change in global temperature, but also as subtle as a shift in the wind pattern or a bumper crop of acorns. And use examples such as the mutation that results in suddenly fecund individuals to illustrate that sometimes, selection is set off by a change to the very population you're interested in.

I'd also highly recommend talking about humans! I have heard more than one very smart person say something like, "Humans aren't evolving. If we were, we wouldn't have eyebrows anymore." And when I ask them to explain, I get an answer like, "We don't need eyebrows, so if we were evolving, they'd disappear!" Another example, "Humans aren't evolving. If we were, wouldn't we have x-ray vision by now? X-ray vision would be so helpful!" Such moments provide marvelous opportunities to discuss how evolution works, and a great excuse to talk about the reproductive chances of hypothetical eyebrow-less individuals.

Have an idea for a future Misconception Monday or other post? See some good or bad examples of science communication lately? Drop me an email or shoot me a tweet <at>keeps3.

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Misconception Monday: Can Evolution Stop?

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Full disclosure: I ran the four-part (newly renamed!) natural selection misconception diagnostic because my idea well had run dry. I was hoping that by retreading some old misconception tropes, I would get inspired. Imagine my delight, then, when Larry Moran gave me an idea for this post in the comments.

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Why aren’t apes evolving into humans? - Karla 

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Why aren’t apes evolving into humans? - Karla 

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According to Dear Science research, "They're doing their chimp stuff, their orangutan stuff, their gorilla stuff; they don't need to be more human- like because they're surviving perfectly." Humans are “modern species” that have transcended into different paths from primates.

Through this, apes have developed a genetic mutation separate from human DNA. A mutation that does not lead apes to having human qualities.

Dear Science states, “First of all, the creatures we call apes are our cousins, not our ancestors. Which would make it very hard for them to evolve into something like us.”

In significance to this:  We did not come from these hairy mammals. We are however, closely related to them.

WHAT MAKES APES AND HUMANS SIMILAR?
Apes and Humans develop similarities such as the ability to revolutionize tools in terms of survival. Communication plays a vital role too in terms of hunting, travel and protection from possible predatory threats.

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Dear Science: Why are there no hominins left on Earth? If evolution is ongoing and species are always changing and adapting, shouldn't we see new human-like species evolving from apes, even if the old ones died out?
Here's what science has to say:

We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but you are an ape.

So were the Neanderthals, the Hobbits, Lucy the Australopithecus, the Taung child and Peking man. And while we're at it, so are orangutans, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees. All of us evolved from a common ancestor that lived about 14 million years ago, and together we make up the taxonomic family Hominidae. Also known as hominids. Also known as great apes.

And there are hominins left on Earth - us. "Hominin" is the the technical term for archaic and modern humans - that is, creatures that are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas and chimps. (We know, the terminology can be confusing. Bring it up with the paleoanthropologists.) And to explain why we are the only ones around - for now, at least - you have to think about how evolution works.

First of all, the creatures we call apes are our cousins, not our ancestors. Which would make it very hard for them to evolve into something like us.

[Dear Science: Why am I always cold indoors?]

"Asking why an archaic human isn't evolving from gorillas today is like asking why the children of your cousins don't look more like you," said Matt Tocheri, an anthropology professor at Lakehead University and a researcher in the National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program. "Those creatures have been on their own lineage for 10 million years. You can't go back up that lineage and back down again."

Even if chimpanzees could suddenly develop the traits of an Australopithecus, they probably wouldn't want to.

It's easy to think about evolution as a linear, progressive drive toward greater and greater complexity, something that started with single-celled amoebas and ended with us. But evolution doesn't have a destination, and even if it did, humans are certainly not it. In many cases, evolution tends to favor simplicity. That's why creatures that live in caves lose their eyes, and whales - which are descended from terrestrial mammals - have almost no leg bones. Not even intelligence is sacred: sea urchins, which have no central nervous system, evolved from an ancestor with a brain.

"Evolution is about survival under particular conditions, and random mutations," says Nina Jablonski, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State. "There's a big element of chance and certainly no element of direction. ... Living things are just trying to adapt to the contingencies of life in their environment."

[Dear Science: What does sunscreen SPF mean, and what happens if you mix them?]

The diversity of hominins during the earliest stages of human evolution showed how several species tried to do that. For example, it's thought that Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species) evolved human-like hips that let them walk on two feet because it let them carry things - a useful skill for collecting food on the savanna. Paranthropus robustus had a powerful jaw for chewing the tough, fibrous foods available in their dry environment. Homo habilis had a relatively huge brain that helped them make early stone tools. Australopithecus boisei's massive molars let him dine on mostly nuts and seeds.

But as hominins' tool use got more sophisticated, their ecological niches expanded. Species didn't have to choose between having big molars for chewing seeds and sharp canines for ripping meat - with tools, they could partially break the food before eating it and consume both.

"As the technological complexity of humans increases ... one species with tools is able to do more than two or three species could in the past," Jablonski said. Homo species with larger brains and smaller teeth were more ecologically successful, so evolution favored those groups. The development of language added to our ancestors' evolutionary toolkit, helping them hunt, travel, anticipate and avoid threats. By the time Homo sapiens arose roughly 200,000 years ago, they were able to survive in almost any environment, under any circumstances.

"They're able to adapt to dramatically changing climates all over the world and disperse much more widely because they can make a bunch of different stuff," Jablonski said. "So when we see the final extinction of the Neanderthals or the funny little Hobbit guys in Indonesia" - two Homo species that lived at the same time as modern humans - "as a result of dramatic climatic changes, modern humans with this incredible toolkit and ability to duck and dive around the problems of the world, they're able to survive."

In other words, modern humans were able to outlive other hominins because we were equipped to exploit multiple ecological niches under the particular circumstances in which we lived. Had the climate not changed 30,000 years ago, or if it had changed differently, the Neanderthals might have survived instead of Homo sapiens.

That's important to remember when we ask why our ape cousins aren't evolving the traits that characterize humans.

Modern great apes live in heavily forested environments where the ability to climb trees is a big bonus - so they have no need for human bipedalism. Creatures like chimpanzees and bonobos are capable of building nests, using rudimentary tools, appreciating beauty, and perhaps even mourning their dead - without our energy-guzzling big brains.

"When we look at our ape relatives today, they're just fine being ape-y," Jablonski said. "They're doing their chimp stuff, their orangutan stuff, their gorilla stuff; they don't need to be more human-like because they're surviving perfectly."

"Of course," she added, "that's predicated on the hope that modern humans don't chop down their forest completely and entirely deprive them of their natural habitat. But that's a different issue."

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Dear Science: Why aren't apes evolving into humans?

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Dear Science: Why are there no hominins left on Earth? If evolution is ongoing and species are always changing and adapting, shouldn't we see new human-like species evolving from apes, even if the old ones died out? Here's what science has to say: We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but you are an ape.

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What kind of changes in our evolution can we predict based on global warming issues-- Annie~~

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What kind of changes in our evolution can we predict based on global warming issues-- Annie~~

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Global warming has caused our environment to change dramatically. The increasing amount of heat produced by greenhouse effect is melting glaciers and sea ice, shifting precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, etc. Extreme weathers are more likely to happen, such as droughts, floods, hurricanes and other strong storms. Species including plants, animals and even bacterias will need to change themselves in order to adapt to the rapidly changing environment. Generally, these changes of living environment or habitat are mediated by 3 kinds of responses.
The first way is via plastic reactions (a kind of behavioural responses). The second way is by shifting geographically to track optimal conditions, for example, the migration of species towards the cooler poles because of global warming. The third way is the genetic adaptation, or evolution, which is what we are focusing on in this unit.
Paleoecological studies ( normally from fossils) suggest that species actually had the resilience to the past climatic warming(which were relatively more graduate and slower than modern climate changes). A part of them processed adaptive variation and mutation, altered their fitness traits, and made an evolutionary response. On the other hand, the parts that weren't able to quickly adapt to the environment actually experienced local extinction or total extinction.
There are lots of uncertainties and possibility in the predictions of the future changes of our evolution. However, it is indicated that the prediction related to the future ecosystem is definitely not positive because of the effects caused by humans have made the global temperature increase much faster and more rapid than before. The species won't be able to get a long period of time to go through the evolution process (like what they have done in the past, it usually took millions of years and numerous generations to happen) A large scale of extinction among species may be happening shortly.
At the same time, the survivors may need to evolve special skin (greenhouse gases, ultraviolet light, and even radiations), lung (air pollution and increasing amount of Co2), sweat gland (increased temperature), etc. They may become smaller in size in order to consume less energy, escape from frequently occurring extreme weathers and adapt to their reduced and destroyed habitats.

A good article to check out~~
The Future of Species Under Climate Change: Resilience or Decline?

Craig Moritz and Rosa AgudoScience 341, 504 (2013);
DOI: 10.1126/science.1237190

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a729/f370bd0fe80846d0ed4127d972cb67737a4d.pdf?_ga=2.123058571.1014277948.1543549656-1367404972.1539265878

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Can apes keep evolving into humans in the present day? Sabrina 

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Can apes keep evolving into humans in the present day? Sabrina 

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Evolution is not a timed process and it has no end destination. Lets say there were an end destination it would not end with humans. Due to the environmental changes between present day and millions of years ago apes do not evolve into humans anymore. Millions of years ago apes living conditions were not substantial and this is what forced them to start the evolution process. They began to gain more human traits so that they were able to maintain life. Now a days the ape habitats are more fitting for the apes and they are now able to live comfortably.  There is no longer a need for the apes to take on human features because there habitats allow for them to live a normal life.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/06/27/dear-science-why-arent-apes-evolving-into-humans/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c6594b5f04ea

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Would extinction happen without humans?- Deanna Romano

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Would extinction happen without humans?- Deanna Romano

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Yes, Extinction has occured many many years ago without the use of humans, as we were not yet introduced to the planet. Because of different environmental factors, some animals are unable to adapt to the environmental changes, therefore causing their own extinction. Although humans have contributed to the extinction of animals by Pollution,  Overhunting and Habitat destruction, animals as themselves have species that have gone extinct a long time before we came around, such as dinosaurs. Species go extinct on their own once in a while, but it's usually a result of rapidly changing ecosystem conditions over an entire species range. According to an article on extinction, it states that Extinction is a natural process. Scientists estimate that up to 98% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. Most of these became extinct before the arrival of humans over a period of hundreds of millions of years.

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The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ranks a species as extinct when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died. This might sound like a simple definition, but it isn't always easy to pinpoint exactly when a species has become extinct.

Occasionally, a species that has been presumed extinct reappears, for example, in New Zealand, the takahē was presumed extinct in the 1930s but was rediscovered in a remote valley in 1948. Despite a few examples like this, when a species becomes extinct, it is almost always gone forever.

The IUCN also has a separate rank 'extinct in the wild' when the species is only known to survive in captivity. Species are also sometimes referred to as 'functionally extinct' when only a very small number of individuals survive and factors such as poor health or age mean that they can not successfully reproduce.

Scientists have documented a large number of extinctions in New Zealand. These include at least 3 native frogs and a number of skinks and geckos. It is thought that there may have also been another species of tuatara that is now extinct, but this is difficult to prove without further DNA analysis of fossilised remains.

History of extinctions

Extinction is a natural process. Scientists estimate that up to 98% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. Most of these became extinct before the arrival of humans over a period of hundreds of millions of years.

Evidence from the fossil record suggests that there have been at least 5 mass extinctions during the Earth's history. Mass extinctions are where a large number of species disappear within a relatively short period of time. The most well known example is the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction. This resulted in the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

So if extinction is a natural event, why should we be concerned about modern extinctions?

There are 2 main arguments:

The extinction rate today is estimated to be significantly higher than the expected natural rate. This increased rate does not allow for ecosystems to recover or other species to occupy vacant niches.

The primary cause of modern extinctions is human impact as opposed to natural phenomena.

Causes of extinction

There is no single factor responsible for extinction. Some species may gradually reduce in number over thousands of years as they are out-competed by another species. Others may become extinct very suddenly due to an unprecedented event, such as a large-scale fire.

Internationally, habitat loss and degradation is considered the most significant factor. In New Zealand, the biggest threat is introduced species. Other factors include over-exploitation, pollution, disease and climate change. Some species may be affected by a combination of factors. Species that have a very limited habitat or small population size are particularly vulnerable to extinction.

Nature of science

The impacts of extinction

The impact of isolated extinctions can be very difficult to predict and measure. In some ecosystems, the loss of one species may have an obvious negative effect, but the loss of another may have little or no immediate effect.

If the species that becomes extinct is a keystone species, the results can be dramatic. The removal of a keystone species characteristically results in a major change, in the same way that removing a keystone from an arch or bridge could cause the structure to collapse. A good example of this in New Zealand is the kererū. Kererū are the only birds that are able to swallow the largest fruits - and disperse the seeds - of many of our native trees, so the extinction of the kererū could result in the loss of many of our native tree species. This would have significant flow-on effects for the whole ecosystem.

From a human-centred perspective, many scientists are concerned about the impact of extinctions on our food supply, control of insect populations and potential medical treatments.

What are scientists doing to prevent extinction?

A large number of scientists around the world are involved in research to try and prevent extinction. An important aspect of this work is the collaboration between scientists, zoos and government bodies as well as the general public.

In New Zealand, conservation is an important research field. Key conservation tools include habitat restoration, pest eradication, captive breeding, translocation and treatment of disease. Have a look at the New Zealand Research articles in this context to find out more about how scientists at the University of Otago are working together to save our native reptiles and amphibians.

Useful links

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The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ranks a species as extinct when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died. This might sound like a simple definition, but it isn't always easy to pinpoint exactly when a species has become extinct.

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What will humans look like in the future. 

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What will humans look like in the future. 

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Humans have come a very long way through evolution. In the past 10,000 years humans have become lactose intolerant, in the past 150 years

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Yes, extinction had occurred millions of years before humans were on the planet, and because of environmental factors, some animals are unable to adapt to environmental changes, therefore causing their own extinction.

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Is it possible to reverse evolution? Can history go backwards? - Joy

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Is it possible to reverse evolution? Can history go backwards? - Joy

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According to an article by Carl Zimmer entitled "Can Evolution Run In Reverse? A Study Says It's a One-Way Street in the New York Times, the answer is no. After examining the evolution of one protein, they came to the conclusion that new mutations make it practically impossible for evolution to reverse direction. Our environment is constantly changing, and as it changes so do we.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/science/29evol.html

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What will humans evolve into after millions of years?

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What will humans evolve into after millions of years?

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Scientists predict that humans may become a hybrid robot species in a million years. It is believed that physical strength of humans will not be demanded as there is the possibility of humans merging technology with the human body. (https://brightside.me/wonder-curiosities/how-people-will-look-in-a-few-million-years-293010/). (https://www.livescience.com/59115-year-million-series-explores-future-of-humanity.html).

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What Will Humans Look Like In A Million Years? | Earth Lab

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The nice thing about bacteria is that they multiply really fast. This is inconvenient if they happen to infect, but useful if you want to see how evolution works. Put antibiotics on a Petri dish with enough bacteria, and a few days later you'll find that a lone bacterium-one that happened to be resistant to the drug's effects -is now recolonizing the plate. It's natural selection in action.

The reality is that every single living thing on Earth is constantly evolving, at least to some extent. But in species that don't live and die as rapidly as bacteria, it's hard to see the process in action.

A massive genetic study in PLOS Biology highlighted that earlier this week. Researchers looked at DNA from 215,000 people, tracking 8 million mutations to see which genetic changes were changing in frequency. They found that a number of genes-one of the gene variants that predisposes you to Alzheimer's disease, for example-are becoming uncommon in older people, even though the genes don't seem to directly affect childbearing. If a mutation keeps you from successfully reproducing, it follows that such a genetic change would have difficulty gaining a foothold in the larger population. Since Alzheimer's patients generally don't start having symptoms until after their reproductive years, the mutation shouldn't be selected against. Similarly, groups of genes that predispose you to asthma, high cholesterol, high body mass index, and coronary artery disease seem to be becoming less common.

The authors think this might be because those predispositions somehow affect your likelihood of having children earlier-in very subtle ways. You'd need a huge sample of people to detect such a small effect, so even this large study can't answer that question. It's also possible that something called the grandmother hypothesis, which says that living long enough to help take care of your grandchildren makes them more likely to survive, and therefore makes your own genes more likely to be passed on, is involved. If the grandmother hypothesis is influencing our species' evolution, it makes sense that genes causing disease late in life would become less common over time.

This is all crucial evidence that we're continuing to evolve as a species, and it's easy to see why we don't notice it happening. Evolution doesn't look like a generation of humans suddenly including a few X-Men. It looks like the ever so slight reduction in mutations that lead to Alzheimer's disease. The progress is slow.

We should all be lactose intolerant

To really see evolution's effects, you have to find traits that are already common in humans and look back at how they came to be that way. The ability to drink milk is a classic case.

Humans mostly shouldn't be able to drink milk past infancy- the majority of adults today can't really digest it. When we're babies, the gene that encodes an enzyme called lactase is turned on, so lactase is around to digest lactose (one of the principal components in milk). As we get older, the lactase gene is supposed to turn off. But several thousand years ago, being able to drink milk without getting sick became an advantage in some parts of the world. We're not exactly sure why, though it probably has something to do with its nutritional value and wide availability on farms. Some evidence suggests that Europeans made cheese for some 4,000 years before any of them developed the ability to properly digest lactose. A few lucky individuals happened to acquire a mutation in the lactase gene that allowed it to stay turned on, even after infancy, and therefore allowed them to rely more heavily on dairy later in life. Those people tended to do a better job of living and having a bunch of children, and so did the offspring who got the same mutation, and so the genetic change spread.

The Netherlands is vertically gifted

A more modern example: Dutch men are very tall. So is most of Scandinavia, really, but the Dutch in particular. The average Dutchman is 6 feet tall, which is 7.9 inches higher than the typical height 200 years ago. Virtually every country has increased their average height because we have much better nutrition, but the Dutch have rocketed skyward at a much faster rate. Americans, for example, have only grown by 2.4 inches during that span. Why? Because that's what Dutch women prefer.

Tall men in the Netherlands have more children than their short buddies, so they tend to produce more tall men, who go on to have generally tall babies. Dutch women of medium height are more likely to have a partner than their long-legged counterparts, and so (on average) have the most children. Being a lady of middling height means that plenty of men are taller than you, which Dutch women find desirable in a partner (again, on average-no offense to the women of the Netherlands who've got a thing for short men, or tall women, or, you know, whoever). If you're a tall woman, it's harder to find a man who can tower over you. But those tall women who do partner up actually end up having the most children of all, so the country's reproductive habits are basically geared to produce increasingly giant babies.

These examples are obvious now, because they're traits we can see evidence of with our own eyes (or noses, in the case of lactose intolerance). Someday, we might be able to look back with the same clarity on the genes that are only just starting to shift today. The only constant in nature is change. Genes will always mutate, and some of those mutations will be advantageous. Over time, almost everything changes a little. We just have to pay attention.

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Yes, humans are still evolving. Here's how you can tell.

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The nice thing about bacteria is that they multiply really fast. This is inconvenient if they happen to infect, but useful if you want to see how evolution works. Put antibiotics on a Petri dish with enough bacteria, and a few days later you'll find that a lone bacterium-one that happened to be resistant to the drug's effects -is now recolonizing the plate.

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How did humans figure out how to reproduce? - Amanda

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How did humans figure out how to reproduce? - Amanda

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There is a natural instinct in humans to have sex. Without this instinct, organisms wouldn't be able to reproduce and would go extinct fairly quickly. They also noticed patterns - if a woman didn't have sex, she wouldn't get pregnant and have a child.

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When the Explainer asked you to vote on a favorite unanswered question of 2012, the majority opted for a rather lascivious query regarding why rich ladies sunbathe topless, and the Explainer has duly delivered your pound of flesh. But in perusing the runners-up, another question so intrigued the Explainer that he could not resist answering it as well: When and how did humankind figure out that sex is what causes babies? It's not exactly the most obvious correlation: Sex doesn't always lead to babies, and there's a long lead time between the act and the consequences-weeks before there are even symptoms, usually. So roughly where do we think we were as a species when it clicked?

Basically, since the beginning. While anthropologists and evolutionary biologists can't be precise, all available evidence suggests that humans have understood that there is some relationship between copulation and childbirth since Homo sapiens first exhibited greater cognitive development, sometime between the emergence of our species 200,000 years ago and the elaboration of human culture probably about 50,000 years ago. Material evidence for this knowledge is thin, but one plaque from the Çatalhöyük archaeological site seems to demonstrate a Neolithic understanding, with two figures embracing on one side and a mother and child depicted on the other. A firmer conclusion can be drawn from the fact that, though explanations for conception vary wildly across contemporary cultural groups, everyone acknowledges at least a partial link between sex and babies.

As for how humans attained what biological anthropologist Holly Dunsworth calls "reproductive consciousness," that part is murkier. Most likely, we got the gist from observing animal reproduction cycles and generally noting that women who do not sleep with men do not get pregnant. But that doesn't mean that early peoples-or for that matter, modern people-thought or think of the process in the utilitarian, sperm-meets-egg way that the scientifically literate do now.

Around the turn of the 20 th century, anthropologists working in places such as Australia and New Guinea reported that their subjects did not recognize a connection between sex and children. However, subsequent research has shown these biased reports to be only half-true at best. For example, Bronislaw Malinowski claimed in 1927 that, for Trobriand Islanders, the father played no role in producing a child. But later anthropologists studying the same group learned that semen was believed to be necessary for the "coagulation" of menstrual blood, the stoppage of which was thought to eventually form the fetus.

Even though the Trobriand Islanders' traditional explanations of conception seem quaint or strange, they do on some level recognize the tie between sex and childbirth. And of course, before we Westerners get to feeling all superior, it must be said that our notions of conception are not wholly consistent or rational either. (The number of unplanned pregnancies in the United States reveals as much.) As women's studies scholar Cynthia Eller points out, while "other events may also be necessary-such as the entrance of a spirit child through the top of the head (in the case of the Triobriand Islanders), or the entrance of a soul into a fertilized egg (in the case of Roman Catholics) ... it is simply not believed that women bear children without any male participation whatsoever."

If we humans have essentially always kind of understood that the deed leads to the delivery room, did that knowledge have any consequences on our evolution as a society? Holly Dunsworth argues that, of the entire animal world, "reproductive consciousness" is unique to humans. That special knowledge may help explain both the evolution of our taboos around sex and our ability to bend nature's procreative capacities to our favor in everything from dog-breeding to family planning.

Explainer thanks Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island, Cynthia Eller of Montclair State University, Helen Fisher of Rutgers University, and Wenda Trevathan of New Mexico State University.

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When Did Humans Realize That Sex Leads to Pregnancy?

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When the Explainer asked you to vote on a favorite unanswered question of 2012, the majority opted for a rather lascivious query regarding why rich ladies sunbathe topless, and the Explainer has duly delivered your pound of flesh.

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How did blue eyes in humans develop? When was it developed?-Jessica

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How did blue eyes in humans develop? When was it developed?-Jessica

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One single, common ancestor. Genetic mutation from about 6-10,000 years ago.

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Why aren't apes evolving into humans?- Karla 

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Why aren't apes evolving into humans?- Karla 

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"They're doing their chimp stuff, their orangutan stuff, their gorilla stuff; they don't need to be more human- like because they're surviving perfectly.

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What is some proof that humans evolved from animals?

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What is some proof that humans evolved from animals?

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Because of the arctic ice melting polar bears are moving south and mating with grizzly bears. Is their offspring a form of evolution? -Matthew 

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Because of the arctic ice melting polar bears are moving south and mating with grizzly bears. Is their offspring a form of evolution? -Matthew 

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What they are doing is called Flexible mate choice where the bears mate with the best possible partners as supposed not mating at all and they mate together because they share relatively close territories and the same branches of the same evolutionary tree. So they are expanding there evolution tree by mating with one another. (they are evolving by expanding, so they don't become extinct)

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BARROW, Alaska - Most Alaskans and Canadians have a bear story - tales of fearsome grizzlies, even polar bears. But a mix of the two?

They're known as pizzlies or grolars, and they're a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins. It's a blend that's been turning up more and more in parts of Alaska and Western Canada.

Last week, a strange-looking bear was shot by a hunter in Nunavut, a remote territory that curves around Canada's Hudson Bay. Its head was large, like a grizzly's, but its fur was white. The bear's genetics were not tested, but Arctic researchers seem unified in their analysis: It's a polar-grizzly mix. A hybrid.

Textbooks say these two species aren't supposed to inhabit the same environments. Polar bears are marine mammals; grizzlies are terrestrial. But as the Arctic warms, sea ice is shrinking and the tundra is expanding. And the bears' disparate populations are meeting, mating and creating a new breed that's capable of reproducing.

[Death at Yellowstone: Feds probe shooting of 'Scarface,' the park's most famed grizzly]

Bears sharing both species' DNA have been recorded several times over the past decade. So why are these two species linking up?

It's called flexible mate choice: The bears are mating with the best possible partners as opposed to not mating at all, and they're mating because they share relatively close territories and the same branches of the same evolutionary tree.

Intraspecies mixing between the two happened thousands of years ago, thanks to the advance and retreat of glaciers, and of late, it has been boosted by climate change. Scientists say it's also probably been assisted by policies that protect both bears from culling and hunting, affording further opportunities for mingling.

The crossbreeds found in Alaska and Canada are not genetic anomalies. Scientists have found the mix in the islands off Southeast Alaska, where bears resemble grizzlies but contain polar bear DNA. That indicates decades of sporadic interbreeding, said Steven Amstrup, chief scientist at Polar Bears International.

The polar-grizzly cocktail is also far from the only recent animal hybrid. The coywolf - a coyote-dog-wolf amalgamation - and a lynx-bobcat mix have been popping up along the northern Atlantic coast. The more scientists analyze species' genomes, the more they realize that animals we label as "pure breeds" actually share DNA - and that includes us.

Many humans carry traces of DNA from Neanderthals, which means we're all hybrids. It also means there's no such thing as genetic purity. The concept is a romantic construct, an anthropomorphized take on nature. And what may be most surprising about this, researchers say, is the role interbreeding plays in the futures of endangered species - or, as the case may be with polar bears, accelerating their end.

[Humans and Neanderthals may have interbred 50,000 years earlier than previously thought]

Amstrup has studied bears in the Arctic since the 1970s and was instrumental in helping list the polar bear as a threatened species in 2008. He, like other experts, characterizes this "new" bear relationship as more beneficial to grizzlies than polar bears. That's because there are more grizzlies than polar bears and because grizzly territory is expanding while polar bear territory is contracting. What that adds up to is a good chance grizzlies could essentially dilute the polar bear population until it doesn't exist at all, they say.

Polar bears are getting the short end of the stick in this relationship, not "gaining any genetic diversity," said Geoff York, who led research on polar bears at the World Wildlife Fund for almost a decade before joining Amstrup at PBI.

Andrew Derocher, a professor of biological studies at the University of Alberta, has spent three decades studying bears throughout the Arctic. He, too, has a sobering view about where the hybridization is heading.

"I hate to say it, but from a genetic perspective, it's quite likely grizzly bears will eat polar bears up, genetically," he told me. And he says the changes are already at play.

All hybrids that have been analyzed had grizzly fathers, because grizzly males roam to establish territory and come in contact with receptive female polar bears. Female grizzlies tend not to stray far from their home ranges, and male polar bears don't usually creep into grizzly habitats.

Polar bears need the ice - that's where the seals and walruses they eat live. They don't hibernate, and they don't travel south of the tundra. Grizzlies, historically, rarely ventured north of the treeline. Permafrost is too cold for their liking, and they sink into the snow easily. (Polar bears have padded paws that act as snowshoes). Hunting is more challenging in the north, where prey is scarce. They're not really swimmers.

But shifts are afoot.

"What we're starting to see in the Canadian Arctic is three-fourth grizzlies," Derocher said, referring to the offspring of 50-50 hybrids that then mated with grizzlies. "How do they act? Probably more like grizzly bears, living on land. As climate change continues, terrestrial habitat is going to increase, and the likelihood is the habitat for grizzlies, a terrestrial bear, is going to get better. That means a longer warming period and greater food potential."

Derocher said it will not be long before we start seeing female grizzlies bump into male polar bears, further straining the polar bear's genetic variation. "I suspect at the same time that that's occurring, we'll start to see polar bears on their way out."

When will that be? Impossible to say, but some experts think that as the Arctic continues warming, it may be only a few decades, perhaps a century. There are about 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the Circumpolar Arctic, and "an order of magnitude higher for grizzlies in that area" and other brown bears, Derocher said. "It shouldn't be a big surprise that grizzlies are moving north - everything is."

Right now, polar bears are also threatened by polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, and other toxic pollution - primarily from eating seals and other animals affected by these carcinogens - that has been linked to brain damage, even causing some bears' baculums, or penis bones, to break off.

And those outcomes could affect polar-grizzly hybrids as badly as pure breeds. No matter what bear ends up as the Arctic's future apex predator, scientists say, if the issues up north aren't solved, it won't matter what bears are there.

Hybrids are "a normal part of the evolutionary process," Derocher said. But if the ice disappears, "we won't have grizzlies or polar bears in this area. If you roll the clock ahead another number of decades or a century, quite clearly it's going to be no bears eventually."
Adam Popescu is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer. Find him on Twitter at @adampopescu. Read more: Here's what seeing bears at National Parks looked like 90 years ago Seriously, people, stay away from the bison People love watching nature on nest cams - until it gets grisly

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Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating

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BARROW, Alaska - Most Alaskans and Canadians have a bear story - tales of fearsome grizzlies, even polar bears. But a mix of the two? They're known as pizzlies or grolars, and they're a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins.

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Are giraffes still developing longer necks than the length they already have?

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Are giraffes still developing longer necks than the length they already have?

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Within every generation the neck of the giraffe grew every so slightly longer than the original parents, which took millions of years for the neck to evolve to the way it is now. Therefore the neck of giraffes are still slightly growing through time as evolution is a never ending process of change.
-Silvana

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For giraffes, necking isn't a sign of affection

(Image: Tony Heald/Nature Picture Library/Rex Features)

Species&colon; Giraffa camelopardalis

Habitat&colon; grasslands and open woodlands of sub-Saharan Africa

Around 15 million years ago, antelope-like animals were roaming the dry grasslands of Africa. There was nothing very special about them, but some of their necks were a bit long.

Within a mere 6 million years, they had evolved into animals that looked like modern giraffes, though the modern species only turned up around 1 million years ago. The tallest living land animal, a giraffe stands between 4.5 and 5 metres tall - and almost half that height is neck.

Most people assume that giraffes' long necks evolved to help them feed. If you have a long neck, runs the argument, you can eat leaves on tall trees that your rivals can't reach. But there is another possibility. The prodigious necks may have little to do with food, and everything to do with sex.

The evidence supporting the high-feeding theory is surprisingly weak. Giraffes in South Africa do spend a lot of time browsing for food high up in trees, but elsewhere in Africa they don't seem to bother, even when food is scarce.

Girls like them long

Giraffes' necks are long, but there have been longer ones. Sauropod dinosaurs trump them easily&colon; the dinosaur Mamenchisaurus, for instance, had a neck over 9 metres long, four times the longest of giraffe necks.

Long necks come at a cost. Because a giraffe's brain is around 2 metres above its heart, the heart has to be big and powerful. In fact, for the blood to reach the brain it has to be pumped at the highest pressure of any animal. So there must be a big payback to keep giraffes' necks so long.

The latest theory - and it's a surprise this hasn't come up before, given biologists' fixation with it - is that the long necks are the result of sexual selection&colon; that is, they evolved in males as a way of competing for females.

Male giraffes fight for females by "necking". They stand side by side and swing the backs of their heads into each others' ribs and legs. To help with this, their skulls are unusually thick and they have horn-like growths called ossicones on the tops of their heads. Their heads, in short, are battering rams, and are quite capable of breaking their opponents' bones.

Having a long and powerful neck would be an advantage in these duels, and it's been found that males with long necks tend to win, and also that females prefer them.

The "necks for sex" idea also helps explain why giraffes have extended their necks so much more than their legs. If giraffes evolved to reach higher branches, we might expect their legs to have lengthened as fast as their necks, but they haven't.

Neck and neck

The problem for the sex idea is that it implies that female giraffes shouldn't have long necks, and they plainly do. Sexual selection often drives males to develop spectacular attributes - think peacocks' tails or the feathers of birds of paradise - to impress females, but the females remain relatively dowdy.

A study last year by Graham Mitchell of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and colleagues apparently delivered a knock-down blow to the "necks for sex" theory. Mitchell's team showed that, in Zimbabwe at least, males and females had necks that were almost exactly the same length, and that if anything the females' necks were longer. This led many people to write off the whole sex idea.

However, Rob Simmons and Res Altwegg of the University of Cape Town, also in South Africa, have taken a second look at Mitchell's results and are not convinced. They say the figures do show that males have proportionally longer necks, and that "Mitchell et al. appear to have misinterpreted this result".

They point to a study in Namibia which found that males consistently had heavier necks than females with the same body mass, and that only the males' necks kept growing throughout their lives. Males' heads were also heavier than females', which is what you would expect if they were being selected for their ability to fight.

Simmons and Altwegg suggest that giraffes' necks may have begun growing as a way of eating hard-to-reach food, but that they were then "hijacked" for mating purposes. Once the necks had reached a certain length, males could use them for necking and clubbing - and at that point sexual selection took over, driving the necks to their current extreme lengths.

Peacocks and birds of paradise aside, there are many birds of which the male seems to have developed colourful plumage as a result of sexual selection, but the females are also brightly coloured. Perhaps the sexual selection explanation for long necks in giraffes isn't dead after all.

Journal reference&colon; Journal of Zoology, DOI&colon; 10.1111/j.1469-7998.2010.00711.x

Read previous Zoologger columns&colon; The toughest fish on Earth... and in space, Vultures use twigs to gather wool for nests, The biggest living thing with teeth, Globetrotters of the animal kingdom, Judge Dredd worm traps prey with riot foam, Flashmobbing locusts have redesigned brains, Smart camo lets glow-in-the-dark shark hide, Attack of the self-sacrificing child clones, The most kick-ass fish in the sea, The most bizarre life story on Earth?, Keep freeloaders happy with rotting corpses.

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Zoologger: How did the giraffe get its long neck?

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The tallest land animal alive, giraffes grew their necks to feed off high trees, didn't they? Maybe not - it could all be down to sex

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Who are we and where do we come from? - Giulia C

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Who are we and where do we come from? - Giulia C

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Technically, we are homosapiens. This means we are the modern humans who are seen as the most developed and advanced. However, we were not always homospaiens. It has been theorized that we come from a long evolutionary line. The oldest believed relatives are the Australopitecos anamensis who is about 4.1 million years old.

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When did apes stop turning into humans? - Jermaine 

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When did apes stop turning into humans? - Jermaine 

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Technically, apes did not stop turning into humans. This is simply because we are the  evolved version of a common ancestor.

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Dear Science: Why are there no hominins left on Earth? If evolution is ongoing and species are always changing and adapting, shouldn't we see new human-like species evolving from apes, even if the old ones died out?
Here's what science has to say:

We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but you are an ape.

So were the Neanderthals, the Hobbits, Lucy the Australopithecus, the Taung child and Peking man. And while we're at it, so are orangutans, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees. All of us evolved from a common ancestor that lived about 14 million years ago, and together we make up the taxonomic family Hominidae. Also known as hominids. Also known as great apes.

And there are hominins left on Earth - us. "Hominin" is the the technical term for archaic and modern humans - that is, creatures that are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas and chimps. (We know, the terminology can be confusing. Bring it up with the paleoanthropologists.) And to explain why we are the only ones around - for now, at least - you have to think about how evolution works.

First of all, the creatures we call apes are our cousins, not our ancestors. Which would make it very hard for them to evolve into something like us.

[Dear Science: Why am I always cold indoors?]

"Asking why an archaic human isn't evolving from gorillas today is like asking why the children of your cousins don't look more like you," said Matt Tocheri, an anthropology professor at Lakehead University and a researcher in the National Museum of Natural History's Human Origins Program. "Those creatures have been on their own lineage for 10 million years. You can't go back up that lineage and back down again."

Even if chimpanzees could suddenly develop the traits of an Australopithecus, they probably wouldn't want to.

It's easy to think about evolution as a linear, progressive drive toward greater and greater complexity, something that started with single-celled amoebas and ended with us. But evolution doesn't have a destination, and even if it did, humans are certainly not it. In many cases, evolution tends to favor simplicity. That's why creatures that live in caves lose their eyes, and whales - which are descended from terrestrial mammals - have almost no leg bones. Not even intelligence is sacred: sea urchins, which have no central nervous system, evolved from an ancestor with a brain.

"Evolution is about survival under particular conditions, and random mutations," says Nina Jablonski, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State. "There's a big element of chance and certainly no element of direction. ... Living things are just trying to adapt to the contingencies of life in their environment."

[Dear Science: What does sunscreen SPF mean, and what happens if you mix them?]

The diversity of hominins during the earliest stages of human evolution showed how several species tried to do that. For example, it's thought that Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species) evolved human-like hips that let them walk on two feet because it let them carry things - a useful skill for collecting food on the savanna. Paranthropus robustus had a powerful jaw for chewing the tough, fibrous foods available in their dry environment. Homo habilis had a relatively huge brain that helped them make early stone tools. Australopithecus boisei's massive molars let him dine on mostly nuts and seeds.

But as hominins' tool use got more sophisticated, their ecological niches expanded. Species didn't have to choose between having big molars for chewing seeds and sharp canines for ripping meat - with tools, they could partially break the food before eating it and consume both.

"As the technological complexity of humans increases ... one species with tools is able to do more than two or three species could in the past," Jablonski said. Homo species with larger brains and smaller teeth were more ecologically successful, so evolution favored those groups. The development of language added to our ancestors' evolutionary toolkit, helping them hunt, travel, anticipate and avoid threats. By the time Homo sapiens arose roughly 200,000 years ago, they were able to survive in almost any environment, under any circumstances.

"They're able to adapt to dramatically changing climates all over the world and disperse much more widely because they can make a bunch of different stuff," Jablonski said. "So when we see the final extinction of the Neanderthals or the funny little Hobbit guys in Indonesia" - two Homo species that lived at the same time as modern humans - "as a result of dramatic climatic changes, modern humans with this incredible toolkit and ability to duck and dive around the problems of the world, they're able to survive."

In other words, modern humans were able to outlive other hominins because we were equipped to exploit multiple ecological niches under the particular circumstances in which we lived. Had the climate not changed 30,000 years ago, or if it had changed differently, the Neanderthals might have survived instead of Homo sapiens.

That's important to remember when we ask why our ape cousins aren't evolving the traits that characterize humans.

Modern great apes live in heavily forested environments where the ability to climb trees is a big bonus - so they have no need for human bipedalism. Creatures like chimpanzees and bonobos are capable of building nests, using rudimentary tools, appreciating beauty, and perhaps even mourning their dead - without our energy-guzzling big brains.

"When we look at our ape relatives today, they're just fine being ape-y," Jablonski said. "They're doing their chimp stuff, their orangutan stuff, their gorilla stuff; they don't need to be more human-like because they're surviving perfectly."

"Of course," she added, "that's predicated on the hope that modern humans don't chop down their forest completely and entirely deprive them of their natural habitat. But that's a different issue."

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Dear Science: Why aren't apes evolving into humans?

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Dear Science: Why are there no hominins left on Earth? If evolution is ongoing and species are always changing and adapting, shouldn't we see new human-like species evolving from apes, even if the old ones died out? Here's what science has to say: We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but you are an ape.

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Can apes keep evolving into humans in the present day? Sabrina

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Can apes keep evolving into humans in the present day? Sabrina

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Evolution is not a timed process and it has no end destination. Lets say there were an end destination it would not end with humans. Due to the environmental changes between present day and millions of years ago apes do not evolve into humans anymore. Millions of years ago apes living conditions were not substantial and this is what forced them to start the evolution process. They began to gain more human traits so that they were able to maintain life. Now a days the ape habitats

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Can the opposite happen and overtime we go back to apes?-Nicole

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Can the opposite happen and overtime we go back to apes?-Nicole

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The changes from apes to humans have occurred over the years due to environmental changes, however humans did not evolve from chimps. Evolution does not go backwards or forward, it is about the adaptation of a species to it's environment. The environment a million years ago is different from the environment now a days, meaning that due to these factors humans will not change back into apes.

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Early Primate Evolution: The First Primates

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prosimian ancestors evolved. While the earth is about 4.54 billion years old and the first life dates to at least 3.5 billion years ago, the first primates did not appear until around 50-55 million years ago. That was10-15 million years after the dinosaurs had become extinct.

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Will humans still evolve over the years? -Michelle

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Will humans still evolve over the years? -Michelle

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Yes, because every living thing on Earth is constantly changing. Overtime humans may become more or less exposed to mutations, which creates changes in our genes and can lead us either towards or away from different diseases. The constant change of the environment also influences our evolution because it pressures us to adapt to a new environment and we change as we learn how to adapt.

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In this Spotlight, we ask whether modern humans are still evolving or whether we have stepped out of the path of natural selection.

Does Charles Darwin's theory of evolution still apply to modern humans?

Charles Darwin published his totemic work on evolution - On the Origin of Species - in 1859.

Based on the concept of natural selection, Darwin's book provided scientists with a new toolkit for understanding the place that humans and animals occupy in the natural world.

The tome also gave clues as to where their earthly origins may lie.

According to Darwin's thesis, evolution is slow and incremental with tiny genetic changes spread tens of thousands of years apart gently pushing forward changes in species.

In 2000, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould famously declared that "there's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years," suggesting that evolution in humans is imperceptibly slow or has perhaps stopped altogether.

The British naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough concurred, even arguing that birth control and abortion have contributed to a halt in physical evolution among humans.

"We stopped natural selection as soon as we started being able to rear 90-95 percent of our babies that are born. We are the only species to have put a halt to natural selection, of its own free will, as it were," he told the British magazine The Radio Times in 2013, adding that our species has instead ensured our continued survival through accelerating cultural evolution:
"Stopping natural selection is not as important, or depressing, as it might sound - because our evolution is now cultural [...] We can inherit a knowledge of computers or television, electronics, airplanes, and so on."
Natural selection requires variation

Both positions have been hotly contested. For instance, Dr. Ian Rickard - from Durham University in the United Kingdom - responded to Attenborough's claims by pointing out that while abortion and birth control may mean that some people are having children while others are not, natural selection does not end here.

Rather, it places a renewed focus on the genetic material that is being passed along by those who are having children. Writing in The Guardian, Dr. Rickard explains, "Natural selection requires variation. It needs some individuals to thrive more than others."

"So the improved survival prospects around the world over recent decades and centuries drastically decreases the potential for natural selection to work in those populations. But that is not the end of the argument. Even if everyone survives to the same age, there is still variation for natural selection to work with. Natural selection doesn't really care about survival."

And, a 2010 paper by Alan R. Templeton preemptively discarded Attenborough's theory that physical evolution has been replaced by cultural evolution, arguing instead that "all organisms adapt to their environment, and humans are no exception. Culture defines much of the human environment, so cultural evolution has actually led to adaptive evolution in humans."
Templeton gives the example of how technological advances in transportation have facilitated a rapid mixing of the human gene pool across the globe, resulting in the waning of differences between different populations with overall beneficial effects to human health.
Human evolution is now '100 times faster'

In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending calculate that - rather than there having been no biological change in humans over the past 50,000 years - human evolution has accelerated in the past 10,000 years.
Rather than slowing or stopping, the authors argue that evolution is now happening approximately "100 times faster than its long-term average over the 6 million years of our existence."
Modern technology also presents us with opportunities to observe changes in humans at a molecular level. Scott Solomon, a biologist from the University of Texas in Austin, highlights in his book Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution that since 2000 - when Gould declared human evolution to have slowed or stopped - it has been possible to sequence the human genome.

In the 18 years since then, it has become much faster and cheaper to do so, providing scientists with an unprecedented insight into our recent evolutionary past.

From these data, Solomon explains, researchers have found evidence of natural selection altering genes responsible for our:

tolerance of dietary changes

protection from infectious changes

ability to withstand ultraviolet radiation from sunlight

ability to thrive in mountainous regions with decreased oxygen

The milk revolution

One easy-to-understand example of how humans have evolved over recent centuries is how, on some continents, our bodies have adapted to tolerate the most abundant food sources common to that region.

Evolution drove humanity's tolerance of milk.

Around 11,000 years ago, for instance, adult humans were unable to digest lactose - the sugar in milk.

As humans in some regions began to rely on dairy farming as a source of nourishment, our bodies adjusted over time to be more able to digest this food, which, previously, was only tolerated by infants and toddlers.

We can see evidence of this evolution today because humans in areas with a long tradition of dairy farming - such as Europe - are much more tolerant of lactose in their diet than people in regions that do not have a heritage of dairy farming - such as Asia. Around 5 percent of people descended from Northern Europeans are lactose intolerant, compared with more than 90 percent of people of East Asian descent.

The Framingham Heart Study

Another source of evidence for recent human evolution cited by biologists is the Framingham Heart Study - the longest-running multigenerational medical study in the world.

Framingham is a small town in Massachusetts, and in 1948, a study of the town's female population began; scientists wanted to understand what causes heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study is ongoing, and it has become an important repository for scientific data, not only relating to heart disease but also on changing trends in human health overall.

Scientists say that the Framingham data demonstrate that natural selection influenced the Framingham population - reducing height, increasing weight, lowering cholesterol levels, and lowering systolic blood pressures.

Importantly, the data do not show that average weight is increasing in Framingham because the women in the study are eating more. Instead, people with genes that affect these traits tend to have more children, meaning that these traits will become more common with subsequent generations.

"We see rapid evolution when there's rapid environmental change, and the biggest part of our environment is culture, and culture is exploding," Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, told the BBC.

"That's [...] the take-home message of the Framingham study, that we are continuing to evolve, that biology is going to change with the culture, and it's just a matter of not being able to see it because we're stuck right in the middle of the process right now."

Dr. Pardis Sabeti

Why are the Dutch so tall?

A 2015 study published in Proceedings of The Royal Society B asked the question, "Does natural selection favor taller stature among the tallest people on Earth?" The researchers behind the study tested this by looking at the tallest people on Earth: the Dutch.

Why are men from the Netherlands so tall?

But the Dutch were not always the tallest people on Earth. The researchers observe that in the mid-18th century, the average height of Dutch soldiers was 165 centimeters, which was well below the average of soldiers from other European countries and tiny compared with American soldiers, who were 5-8 centimeters taller than the average Dutch soldier.

But Dutch men have experienced a relatively sudden growth spurt, adding an extra 20 centimeters to their average height over the past 150 years.

During the same period, American men have only added 6 centimeters to their average height, and men from other European countries have struggled to keep pace with their neighbors from the Netherlands.
But why? The authors took into account disparities between the Netherlands and the United States in diet, social inequality, and the availability and quality of healthcare, but they concluded that it was natural selection that was driving up the height of the Dutch.
Put simply, Dutch women were more likely to find tall men attractive and were therefore more likely to have children with them. Tall Dutch men, the study confirmed, have more children than shorter Dutch men.

And, although the study found that tall Dutch women were less likely to have children than middling-height Dutch women, the tall women who did have children had more children than their shorter countryfolk.

In combination, these preferences exert a powerful natural selection effect on the average height of people in the Netherlands.

While this might not exactly be Marvel Cinematic Universe levels of genetic mutation - we are sad to report that we did not find any studies suggesting that the human race is about to acquire a telepathy gene - these examples illustrate how evolution works in terms of modern humans.

Evolution is persistent, everywhere, pushing our species forward in tiny increments. It might even be occurring with an accelerated regularity.

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Is there any evidence that humans are still evolving?

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In this Spotlight, we ask whether modern humans are still evolving or whether we have stepped out of the path of natural selection. Does Charles Darwin's theory of evolution still apply to modern humans? Charles Darwin published his totemic work on evolution - On the Origin of Species - in 1859.

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Evolution is the change in the traits that you inherited from passed ancestors or generations. These traits are passed down during reproduction but when mutations occur, the genes can be changed. Overtime, we begin to be able to see the small changes that have occurred through the generations. Different species and organism may change overtime due to their adaptation to the environment.
Ie) the giraffes overtime their necks became longer and longer because their was a greater survival rate, so over a large amount of time, their necks were long.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/evolution.htm

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How do things evolve?                         - Tiffany

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How do things evolve?                         - Tiffany

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individuals don't evolve, the population does. separate organisms may evolve a different way than others in the same species. they may adapt and survive differently to environmental conditions.

species change over time. this process of change is due to natural selection.

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Things start out very small in our universe, and life is no exception. Today's Earth is home to a vast and varied population of living things, yet all life traces back more than 3 billion years to a lone, single- celled species. We call this organism the last universal common ancestor ( LUCA).

Some biologists believe LUCA evolved from simpler strands of nucleic acids. While the organism's exact nature is unknown, its genetic code exists in all of us. This code is essentially the universal language for DNA. The genetic manufacture of insulin for diabetics provides an excellent example of DNA's uniformity across life. Scientists can place a human insulin gene inside a bacterium, and that bacterium will produce insulin.

The genetic code plays a crucial role in reproduction, an act that all walks of life share. But an organism doesn't merely make a copy of itself. If this were the case, there would have never been any variation in LUCA's offspring, and life's enormous biological family tree would have never branched out into the diversity that surrounds us today.

Offspring exhibit slight variations of form and function so that the DNA of subsequent generations are all marginally different from prior groups. Even siblings differ slightly from one another through a combination of nature and nurture. On the nature end, this process occurs through mutation. The new organisms face environmental challenges, and only those suited to survive these obstacles pass on their mutated genes. We call this natural selection, the process by which life forms evolve and develop into new species.

To examine a more detailed account of this process, we return once more to bacteria. These single-cell organisms are ideal for such studies, not only for their simplicity, but also for their brief life spans. In 1988, a Michigan State University biologist used a single E. coli bacterium to start 12 laboratory populations. In 20 year's time, these populations went through 44,000 generations. Researchers observed the bacteria as they grew larger and faster in response to their lab diets. Then, the 31,500th generation suddenly developed the ability to consume citrate, a nutrient they'd been surrounded by the whole time, but were unable to metabolize. The population of mutated, citrate-consuming bacteria skyrocketed [source: Holmes].

Outside the world of bacteria, evolutionary changes take longer to fully realize. Australian skinks, for instance, lost their legs to become more snakelike over the course of 3.6 million years -- and even this was a rather fast change [source: Roach].

That, in a nutshell, is how life evolves. It's the path LUCA took in becoming everything from amoebas to zebras, and the path human beings continue to take today as they respond to environmental stimuli and steadily change into something more suitable for the world around us.

Explore the links below to learn more about evolution.

Related HowStuffWorks Articles

More Great Links

Sources

Holmes, Bob. "Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab." New Scientist. June 9, 2008. (May 6, 2010)http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab.html

"How Did Life Begin?" NOVA. July 1, 2004. (May 6, 2010)http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/how-did-life-begin.html

"How did life begin and evolve on Earth, and has it evolved elsewhere in the Solar System?" NASA. April 5, 2010. (May 6, 2010)http://science.nasa.gov/planetary-science/big-questions/how-did-life-begin-and-evolve-on-earth-and-has-it-evolved-elsewhere-in-the-solar-system/

Poole, Anthony. "What is the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)?" ActionBioscience.org. (May 6, 2010)http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/poolearticle.html

Roach, John. "Seven Signs of Evolution in Action." MSNBC. Feb. 11, 2009. (May 6, 2010)http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29040024/

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Variety is the spice of life. Absent the amazing diversity of organisms that calls Earth home, it would be a deadly boring place. How did we get to a point where Komodo dragons, giraffes and butterflies all compete for space on the same planet?

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Are we evolving and not noticing it? -Adrienne

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Is it possible to reverse evolution? Can history run backward?

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Is it possible to reverse evolution? Can history run backward?

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According to an article in the New York Times entitled "Can Evolution Run In Reverse? A Study Says It's a One-Way Street" by Carl Zimmer, the answer is no.

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if god created the first particle, what created God?- Nicholas Nesci

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if god created the first particle, what created God?- Nicholas Nesci

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The bible describes God as self-existent and self-sufficient.

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Are we going to continue evolving? Or are we done?- Aldrin Duque

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Are we going to continue evolving? Or are we done?- Aldrin Duque

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Over the past 40 000 to 50 000 years humans have not really changed biologically suggesting the the evolution of humans as of right now is slow due to our environment. In order for us to evolve there must be a significant change in order for us to adapt. Although there has not been much of a biological change we are still evolving slowly due to no significant change in the environment.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321942.php

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How are we existing with apes if we come from them?-Alejandro  

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How are we existing with apes if we come from them?-Alejandro  

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The various stages of evolution are not linear. This explains how humans evolved from apes, yet apes still exist in the world. The stages in evolution do not end once a new branch is created or the species evolves. The perception that once a species evolves, the last generation of the same species becomes extinct is incorrect. The species simply branch off and evolution continues.
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/if-humans-evolved-from-apes-why-are-there-still-apes.html
https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/if-humans-evolved-from-apes-why-are-there-still-apes.html

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What are other signs of evolution in the human body? - Elisha G. 

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What are other signs of evolution in the human body? - Elisha G. 

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WE ARE ABLE TO DRINK MILK
The ability to digest lactose shut down around the time that humans did not consume animal milk, and only consumed milk from their mothers. However, when humans began to consume animal milk, people were genetically mutated to be able to digest lactose. Tolerance for consuming lactose dates back 3000 years ago in East Africa and the genetic mutation is now carried by 95% of Norther European descendants.
WE ARE LOSING OUR WISDOM TEETH
Millions of years ago, humans used to have a wider jaw to help chew tough roots, nuts, leaves and meat, requiring more teeth (wisdom teeth). Now, humans use utensils to cut up food and cook foods to soften our food. Humans don't require our set of wisdom teeth, therefore explaining why we have smaller jaws in comparison to early humans.

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When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today? New research suggests that, despite modern technology and industrialization, humans continue to evolve. "It is a common misunderstanding that evolution took place a long time ago, and that to understand ourselves we must look back to the hunter-gatherer days of humans," says Dr. Virpi Lummaa from the University of Sheffield's department of animal and plant sciences.

But not only are we still evolving, we're doing so even faster than before. In the last 10,000 years, the pace of our evolution has sped up 100 times, creating more mutations in our genes, and more natural selections from those mutations. Here are some clues that show humans are continuing to evolve.

1. We Drink Milk

Historically, the gene that regulated a human's ability to digest lactose shut down as they were weaned off of their mother's breast milk. But when we began domesticating cows, sheep and goats, being able to drink milk became a nutritionally advantageous quality, and people with the genetic mutation that allowed them to digest lactose were better able to propagate their genes.

A 2006 study suggests this tolerance for lactose was still developing as early as 3,000 years ago in East Africa. That genetic mutation for digesting milk is now carried by more than 95 percent of Northern European descendants.

2. We're Losing Our Wisdom Teeth

Our ancestors had much bigger jaws than we do, which helped them chew a tough diet of roots, nuts and leaves. And what meat they ate they tore apart with their teeth, all of which led to worn down chompers that needed replacing. Enter the wisdom teeth: A third set of molars is believed to be the evolutionary answer to accomodate our ancestors' eating habits.

Today, we have utensils to cut our food. Our meals are softer and easier to chew, and our jaws are much smaller as a result, which is why wisdom teeth are often impacted when they come in - there just isn't room for them. Like the appendix, wisdom teeth have become vestigial organs. One estimate says 35 percent of the population is born without wisdom teeth, and some say they will disappear altogether.

3. We're Resisting Diseases

In 2007, a group of researchers looking for signs of recent evolution uncovered 1,800 genes that have only become prevalent in humans in the last 40,000 years, many of which are devoted to fighting infectious diseases like malaria. More than a dozen new genetic variants for fighting malaria are spreading rapidly among Africans. Another study found that natural selection has favored city-dwellers. Living in cities has produced a genetic variant that allows us to be more resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy. "This seems to be an elegant example of evolution in action," says Dr. Ian Barnes from the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway. "It flags up the importance of a very recent aspect of our evolution as a species, the development of cities as a selective force."

4. Our Brains Are Shrinking

While we may like to believe our big brains make us smarter than the rest of the animal world, our brains have actually been shrinking over the last 30,000 years. The average volume of the human brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimeters to 1,350 cubic centimeters, which is equivalent to a chunk the size of a tennis ball.

There are several different conclusions as to why this is: One group of researchers suspects our shrinking brains mean we are in fact getting dumber. Historically, brain size decreased as societies became larger and more complex, suggesting that the safety net of modern society negated the correlation between intelligence and survival. But another, more encouraging theory says our brains are shrinking not because we're getting dumber, but because smaller brains are more efficient. This theory suggests that, as they shrink, our brains are being rewired to work faster but take up less room. There's also a theory that smaller brains are an evolutionary advantage because they make us less aggressive beings, allowing us to work together to solve problems, rather than tear each other to shreds.

5. We Have Blue Eyes

Originally, we all had brown eyes. But about 10,000 years ago, someone who lived near the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that turned brown eyes blue. While the reason blue eyes have persisted remains a bit of a mystery, one theory is that they act as a sort of paternity test. "There is strong evolutionary pressure for a man not to invest his paternal resources in another man's child," says the lead author of a study on the development of our baby blues. Because it is virtually impossible for two blue-eyed mates to create a brown-eyed baby, our blue-eyed male ancestors may have sought out blue-eyed mates as a way of ensuring fidelity. This would partially explain why, in a recent study, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed women as more attractive compared to brown-eyed women, whereas females and brown-eyed men expressed no preference.
All images via iStock

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When we think of human evolution, our minds wander back to the thousands of years it took natural selection to produce the modern-day man. But are we still changing as a species, even today? New research suggests that, despite modern technology and industrialization, humans continue to evolve.

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Will there be a time when all living things stop evolving? ~Catrina

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Will there be a time when all living things stop evolving? ~Catrina

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Animals and humans are constantly evolving. They change in different aspects to adapt more favorable physical features for the environment they are in. For this reason alone, organisms will continue to evolve over time to adapt to the ever changing environment.  The only case in which organisms will stop evolving, is if the environment stops changing. If the organisms are in the most favorable form when the environment stops changing, they will stop evolving.

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What came first, the chicken or the egg? - Kevin P

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What came first, the chicken or the egg? - Kevin P

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The answer is the egg. Millions of years ago before chickens existed there were two different bird like animals. When these birds breeded they created a egg and when this egg hatched it was a genetic mutation (mix of both parents). That genetic mutation millions of years ago is what we know today as chickens. Therefore, the egg came first from  a genetic mutation of two different birds millions of years ago.

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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken, no, the egg, no, the chicken, no, the egg. It's enough to make your head spin right off your neck. We've all been through the logic; most of us end up at the same place. As Luna Lovegood, the dreamy yet dotty witch from Harry Potter put it when asked the riddle, "A circle has no beginning." And indeed, attempting to identify the first case of a circular cause and consequence is an exercise in utter futility. For those who don't have a pat story involving a divine being who spits out perfectly formed species, it's a no-win situation.

But that doesn't stop us from asking. Luckily for people kept awake at night by such quandaries, NPR's Robert Krulwich recently got to the bottom of the dilemma when he, thankfully, stumbled across the video below.

Basically, many, many moons ago there was a chicken-like bird. It was genetically close to a chicken but wasn't a full-blown chicken yet. The video calls it a proto-chicken. So proto-hen laid an egg, and proto-rooster fertilized it. But when the genes from ma and pa almost-chicken fused, they combined in a new way, creating a mutation that accidentally made the baby different from its parents. Although it would take millennia for the difference to be noticed, that egg was different enough to become the official progenitor of a new species, now known as... the chicken! So in a nutshell (or an eggshell, if you like), two birds that weren't really chickens created a chicken egg, and hence, we have an answer: The egg came first, and then it hatched a chicken.

Maybe the question we should be asking is: Which came first, the proto-chicken or the proto-chicken egg?

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Finally Answered! Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?

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Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken, no, the egg, no, the chicken, no, the egg. It's enough to make your head spin right off your neck. We've all been through the logic; most of us end up at the same place.

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If humans all originated from a small organism, how is genetic diversity present throughout different species/people? -Sophia

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If humans all originated from a small organism, how is genetic diversity present throughout different species/people? -Sophia

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Genetic diversity is present throughout different species/people because the traits that we have, are the expression of genes that are passed down through reproduction. The genes can be mutated, resulting in new or altered traits, which makes up for the genetic variation that we see today. And when these differences become more common or rare in a population, that is when evolution occurs

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In biology, evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population from generation to generation.

These traits are the expression of genes that are copied and passed on to offspring during reproduction.

Mutations in these genes can produce new or altered traits, resulting in heritable differences (genetic variation) between organisms.

New traits can also come from transfer of genes between populations, as in migration, or between species, in horizontal gene transfer.

Evolution occurs when these heritable differences become more common or rare in a population, either non-randomly through natural selection or randomly through genetic drift.

Natural selection is a process that causes heritable traits that are helpful for survival and reproduction to become more common, and harmful traits to become more rare.

This occurs because organisms with advantageous traits pass on more copies of these heritable traits to the next generation.

Over many generations, adaptations occur through a combination of successive, small, random changes in traits, and natural selection of those variants best-suited for their environment.

In contrast, genetic drift produces random changes in the frequency of traits in a population.

Genetic drift arises from the role chance plays in whether a given individual will survive and reproduce.

One definition of a species is a group of organisms that can reproduce with one another and produce fertile offspring.

However, when a species is separated into populations that are prevented from interbreeding, mutations, genetic drift, and the selection of novel traits cause the accumulation of differences over generations and the emergence of new species.

The similarities between organisms suggest that all known species are descended from a common ancestor (or ancestral gene pool) through this process of gradual divergence.

The theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed roughly simultaneously by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and set out in detail in Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

In the 1930s, Darwinian natural selection was combined with Mendelian inheritance to form the modern evolutionary synthesis, in which the connection between the units of evolution (genes) and the mechanism of evolution (natural selection) was made.

This powerful explanatory and predictive theory has become the central organizing principle of modern biology, providing a unifying explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

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evolutionary biology; mating and breeding; ecology; exotic species; evolution; charles darwin

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In biology, evolution is the change in the inherited traits of a population from generation to generation. These traits are the expression of genes that are copied and passed on to offspring during reproduction.

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If we are still evolving, what is the next stage of evolution for humans? - Bianca Perry

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If we are still evolving, what is the next stage of evolution for humans? - Bianca Perry

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In 2000, a palaeontologist, named Stephen Jay Gould, declared that there hasn't been any biological change in humans in the last 40-50,000 years. This discovery was concluded that evolution in humans has stopped.

Although it is thought that evolution in humans has stopped, there are two distinct theories that state human evolution is still occurring.
1. One theory states that the environment forces have stopped contributing to human evolution. Sexual  selection is now "driving" human evolution.
2.This theory states that the human body will only continue evolving through artificial selection. Robotics and genetic engineering will be what changes, and evolves humans by upgrading them through enhancement and tech implants.

Research links:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321942.php
https://futurism.com/the-next-stage-of-evolution-how-will-the-human-species-evolve