A News Item Safely Reduced to the Term “Horseshit”
Published by McBoing October 18th, 2006 in "Science", Drunkle, HUH!?, Looks like someone needs an intervention“Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge” in 100,000 years’ time.
But in the nearer future, humans will evolve in 1,000 years into giants between 6ft and 7ft tall, he predicts, while life-spans will have extended to 120 years, Dr Curry claims.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.
How does that work? Silly ideas about attractiveness and reproductive fitness aside, does he think that men only inherit their fathers’ genes, and women their mothers’?
Surely the good doctor is unaware of recessive genes and throwback babies.
So only the most stereotypically gendered are breeding for this to happen?
I think his biggest mistake is assuming people will still be around in 100,000 years’ time, never mind assuming we can extrapolate that far.
I don’t know what you people are complaining about. As someone whose decendents will no doubt be a part of tomorrows superclass, I can’t wait until finally have the genetically inferior social class to do our shitwork for us. We’ve waited too long.
In all seriousness, though, he also says that after that our crippling dependence on technology will start to work against us. I think Andrew is right, we can totally fuck ourselves with technology or just raw stupidity faster than we can speciate.
I think this guy has read “The Time Machine” too many times.
it’s clearly a crock, but the way in which it’s a crock is maybe a little trickier.
Kyso sez:
“In all seriousness, though, he also says that after that our crippling dependence on technology will start to work against us. I think Andrew is right, we can totally fuck ourselves with technology or just raw stupidity faster than we can speciate.”
yes, we CAN . . . but will we? i mean, how many millennia have we survived our self-destructive tendencies? the danger is huge, and big brains are doubtless two-edged swords, in this respect. but we haven’t out-clevered ourselves, yet, and i’m not sure there’s any good reason to think we will . . . unless we fail to worry about it and try to prevent it.
the thing that strikes me is that curry’s “analysis” smacks more of herbert spencer than of wells, although wells is the obvious background. has everyone (and i mean perhaps even mainly curry?) forgotten wells’s socialist politics?
I dunno, egil, while we are a bunch of resiliant bastards we have only had super “holy shit that one could actually kill us all” style weapons for about 70 or so years, and even then only a select group of nations could actually kill us all. The weapons are getting better faster than we are getting smarter.
And we wouldn’t all have to die to throw the Eloi and Morlock future into jeopardy. Large groups of survivors battling for what resources remain will not have the time or liesure to evolve into graceful supermodels.
kyso,
yeah, it’s true that we’ve gotten very dangerous very quickly. and it’s certainly plausible to wonder if we’ll wipe ourselves out. i just don’t know that there’s any really good reason to conclude that we will in fact do so. the evidence so far suggests we won’t. my point is just that if we don’t, it will be because we make a point of not doing so. and that takes people working on it. i’m certainly not advocating some rosy-glasses view of how nuclear war, too, will pass, if we just are patient or something.
as for curry and the eloi-morlock future, i still think it mainly reflects a discredited and slightly bizarre social darwinism (a la spencer) that is way more problematic (and offensive) than simply thinking we won’t destroy ourselves before his science-fiction future can play itself out. that’s in no way to legitimate his, um, “theory”?
i’m a little surprised too that no one has remarked on the illustration that accompanies the story, at least at the beeb version: the exemplar of the superior race is of course male, and the exemplar of the inferior, female.
I had noticed that, but the whole article is so full of shit that it didn’t seem worth getting worked up over. I rate the future this article proposes up there with those discover channel specials about “animals of the FUTURE” where some guy just makes shit up.
For example, the whole thing could be avoided if we don’t spend enough time divided into dramatic have and have-nots economically, and then spend 10,000 years giving the have nots the short shrift in health care and nutrition which, barring the acension of Big Brother, is probably more the direction we’d all like to head in.
one does wonder why it got as much play as it did. i don’t recall it showing up in my “new scientist” feed, though. if i’m right, that is interesting in itself.
i reckon we’ll all have forgotten about it in a few days . . . and then in 10000 years, he will say, “i toldja so!”
Why the hell do these idiots continue to believe anyone is interested in what they think about when they masturbate?
You really think they can get it up, at all?
So a small interbreeding group of elites is supposed to turn out a bunch of Übermensch? One would think the history of European royalty would be somewhat of a stumbling block for this theory.
Excuse me? Might I remind you of a little thing called the Cold War? Almost immediately after we got weapons that made wiping humanity off the face of the earth a feasable occurance we put ourselves in a position where the actions of a single person could do just that, and you count this as evidence that we’ll be just fine and dandy? What are you smoking? Surviving “self-destructive tendencies” is dead simple when all you have to worry about are pointy sticks. Nuclear powered ducks filled with ebola, however, are another matter…
Nuclear powered ducks filled with ebola, however, are another matter…
Thank God you’ve put that idea out into the aether. I’ll feel better about the end of the human race if the end comes in such a ridiculous manner. I like my catastrophe wrapped in irony. It’s like Mary Poppins’ spoonful of sugar.
I just found another treatment of this story.
http://www.badscience.net/?p=316
Apparently Dr. Curry isn’t exactly a doctor of biology in the sense that “Evolutionary theorist” seems to imply.