Submitted by Calm_Replacement8133 t3_1183sel in Futurology
A nice article about the future of humanity brought up an interesting shower thought.
How much does genetic engineering change our path of humanity? As culture wars are raging on and wizards try to find out what a woman is, the future may have hermaphrodites to ease the propagation of humanity. A space-faring nation (which is supposedly delayed, because of all that decadence) would be the epitome of adapted humans to their circumstances. Conservatives from different shades may scream as our society becomes more sexy, less muscular, tolerant and more agreeable/less violent (who need guns?).
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>We will likely live longer and become taller, as well as more lightly built. We’ll probably be less aggressive and more agreeable, but have smaller brains.
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>...our life expectancy has doubled, adaptations to prolong lifespan and child-bearing years are now advantageous.
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>As we’ve grown taller, we’ve become more gracile.
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>Humans have also reduced our muscles compared to other apes, especially in our upper bodies.
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>Our jaws and teeth also got smaller.
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>Sexual selection will further accelerate the evolution of our appearance. ... Humans might become more attractive, but more uniform in appearance.
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>This world will push us to become more outgoing, open and tolerant. Yet navigating such vast social networks may also require we become more willing to adapt ourselves to them – to be more conformist.
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Future evolution: from looks to brains and personality, how will humans change in the next 10,000 years?
What do other people think about the idea that humanity is going to be more "gender"-like (don't have a good word for this)?
Peace-Bone t1_j9fer5r wrote
This article is making a LOT of assumptions, not a lot of which are well founded. First of all, it's assuming largely that society as it is will still exist without huge changes and genetic engineering will not be major factors. Which is absurd, but a sane assumption to make for the sake of having an article that's coherent.
Beyond that, it's assumptions are too much based on a pop-culture view of 'caveman vs modern world' mentality. It assumes that 'anxiety and aggression' are selected against in a developed world, which isn't very well founded, and it assumes that anxiety and aggression are distinct, observable traits.
Furthermore, it's conflating 'societal beauty standards', 'personal sexual preference', 'person people want to breed with', and 'person people are likely to breed with' are all the same thing. Those are all separate groups. The first is a political thing more than anything divorced from the rest. And the second is a far cry from the third and forth.
And the assumption that gender differences will become more pronounced is not at all founded, really. We're in a trend of gender lines becoming more blurred. And it seems in direct opposition to it's vague concept that people will become 'more standardized' which seems to be the opposite of what's likely to happen.