Pax Christi, everybody!
I was thinking about synapsids and the platypus the other day, and how we’re all descendants of reptiles in one way or another, and that got me wondering about what other drastic changes might occur in the future. Through some mutation, is it possible that reptilian characteristics could arise in any mammal, including people, and if so, to what degree and in what ways?
The future evolution of mankind will not be primarily biological. I see technology as an extension of the same process of life development. It happened before with the development of multicellular organisms. It wasn’t just about the competition between individual cells any more, but the cooperative communities of cells and all the specialization, communication, transportation, sensory, and chemical technology they developed. Now human beings have also formed communities and the same sort of technologies on a greater scale to surpass the methods of individual evolution that went before with a new and superior method of information storage and transmission in human language and media. It is no longer about evolving the perfect Daniel Boone surviving in the wilderness.
Languages are a good analogy here. If we took 10 different English speaking populations of humans and isolated them on different planets we wouldn’t expect them naturally evolve English in a way that exactly mimics Old English. Instead, we would expect the language to evolve differently on each planet and in a way that produces a version of English that has never existed before. In the same way, we wouldn’t expect isolated populations of French, Spanish, or Italian speakers to naturally start speaking Latin, the root language of the Romance languages.
So we would expect future populations to evolve something new, not evolve in a way that tries to repeat what has already happened.
So, with technology being the new environmental factor we have to adapt to, it is interesting to speculate how that might manifest itself. Perhaps we are already seeing teamwork oriented thinkers succeed better than individualistic ones, going along with the “no…Daniel Boone” idea. The fly in the ointment with humans today is whether reproductive success and individual success are linked, since with reproductive medicine, material success may be associated with fewer offspring.
Some human populations have already adapted to some aspects of agricultural technology, such as the mutations that confer lactase persistence. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other adaptations to cereal grains.
That is an interesting point. Having lots of kids is very useful in an agrarian society because kids are free labor. Having grown up on a ranch and being the descendant of farm families on both sides, I can attest to that. However, in a modernized society kids are an expense and can impair career development.
It is also a question of how much of our psychology is the product of nature v. nurture.
If Evolution is true, what is more likely is for other species to eventually catch up with humanity (assuming we do not kill them off first). The superhuman is more science fiction/fantasy than probable fact.
Richard
Yes superhero xmen is a total fantasy. I think the real xmen are to be found among our “handicapped” as they find new and different ways to survive in the human community of the future. Again I draw parallels with the evolution of multicellular organisms. The removal of the need to be Daniel Boones becomes a new source of variation to fill specialized roles in our technological community.
Other species evolving biologically to catch up with humanity is not likely. Just as our evolution is now all about adapting to the human community and technology. That has become the biggest force of evolution among other animals as well, either to adapt to scavenging or to domestication… finding their place in the human community which now dominates the planet.
Though… as we master biology and understanding our differences we may well uplift portions of other species to some degree of sentience.
Not that it matters in the grand scheme but I was under the impression mammals came out of Synapsids. We and Amniotes ( which is where reptiles came from I believe ). I think both came out of Amniota but I don’t think they were classified as reptiles. I don’t think Reptiliomorpha actually means reptile. But who knows I guess. They change it often and I think it was the platypus had some kind of reptilian genes though.
There are plenty of adaptions other than intelligence that species could evolve. The most successful species on Earth are actually the single celled ones.
I wonder if you will ever see a single-celled organism group turn into a cohesive and multicelled creature? The nearest has always been the Hydra or Coral, but, even then we have never seen the transformation happen.
Richard
It has happened.
Essentially, “reptile” is a grade encompassing sauropsidans minus birds, non-mammal synapsids, and stem-amniotes.
Thanks. I definitely need to brush up on my fauna clade terminology. I find it interesting, but I’m the type that when they start talking about fauna and the clades, I start thinking I wonder what plants they ate and where most of them were found and end up jumping ofer and looking up the plants. It’s also harder to envision clades that no longer exist. I guess hence the “ lizard shape “ clade lol. It is interesting though.
Use to always joke if I was a vampire I would spend a century studying just plants and then a century studying just butterflies and moths and then a century looking at reptiles and so on.
The problem in predicting the future is that we do not know in what kind of environments the future generations will live, assuming that the return of Jesus is delayed. We can predict what might happen if everything continues as it is now. It is likely that the current conditions are just a temporary phase in the history of humanity. If there happens a catastrophe that wipes out our technological societies, the future will be very different compared to a situation where humanity expands to other planets. Restrictions to reproduction might give an advantage to different traits compared to free reproduction.
Some general rules are playing a role in the future. As before, fitness will be important. Those getting many adult grandchildren will replace those that do not get any. What is good for the career might be bad for your fitness. Idiots getting tens of grandchildren will replace the wise that do not get biological grandchildren. Those delaying reproduction because of the career or a worry about the future will be among those who might be replaced by others.
As the role of natural selection becomes smaller, the importance of sexual selection increases. In a free and rich society, those having qualities that attract the opposite sex are going to replace the ugly and unfortunate, even if the latter would be more successful in natural environments.
So at what point did the new life form reach a cohesive state with delineated functions including a surrounding membrane? Was a new life form produced? Did it reproduce in its entirety? What happened to this new creature?
Or was it just the logical reaction to environmental pressure?
Richard
Experimentally, single-celled yeasts have become colonial, so we do see some transitions. There are also natural examples such as the volvocine algae, which include single-celled forms, ones where a few cells tend to stick together but can survive individually, and ones where a small group of cells is interdependent and can’t survive and reproduce as a single cell.
The yeasts in question may have a multicellular ancestor, though, so it could be a case of reversion as speculated above. Given that extremely distant ancestors of mammals were more reptilian in certain ways than modern mammals, there is probably the genetic capacity to become more like that again if conditions favored it. But, as already noted, an exact replica of the ancestral form is rather unlikely. Of course, under current conditions, reptiles exist, so there is no point in a mammal evolving into a reptile-like form when it would be competing with species already good at being reptiles. But one could imagine a space colony where rats evolve into more lizard-like forms because there aren’t lizards already present. Mass extinctions produce a similar situation; removing existing species gives an opportunity for the survivors to diversify into niches that were previously occupied by someone else. It can be difficult to tell just what happened evolutionarily. “Lazarus” taxa are ones where we don’t have any fossil record for a while, but then they appear again because they survived the extinction somewhere that we don’t have the fossils. But there are also “Elvis” taxa, where the purported survivors are really imitators of the pre-extinction form, convergently evolved into a similar form.
Traditionally, “reptile” means “non-furry, non-feathered, ectothermic tetrapod with shelled eggs that resist drying out and generally scaly skin.” That would describe early synapsids (mammal relatives) as well as early diapsids. But currently, many biologists would restrict “reptile” to the diapsids (lizard, snake, bird, crocodile, tuatara, dinosaur, pterosaur, plesiosaur, etc.)
IOW the answer is no. We have never witnessed the birth of a multicellular creature from a single-cell source. Despite literally millions of lifecycles due to the brevity of single-celled life.
Time has yet to be proven capable of doing what pure Evolution claims or wants it to.
Richard
The answer is yes. That is exactly what they observed in that experiment.
" We observed the rapid evolution of clustering genotypes that display a novel multicellular life history characterized by reproduction via multicellular propagules, a juvenile phase, and determinate growth. The multicellular clusters are uniclonal, minimizing within-cluster genetic conflicts of interest. Simple among-cell division of labor rapidly evolved."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1115323109
Is not a cohesive life form that has structure and can reproduce itself in entirety. It is not Evolution.
Richard
Yes, it is.
" We observed the rapid evolution of clustering genotypes that display a novel multicellular life history characterized by reproduction via multicellular propagules, a juvenile phase, and determinate growth. The multicellular clusters are uniclonal, minimizing within-cluster genetic conflicts of interest. Simple among-cell division of labor rapidly evolved."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1115323109
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.