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catbrane t1_j28uydf wrote

Humans are evolving right now, and very rapidly.

As you say, we've mostly left disease and predation behind. The main drivers now are mate selection, and population size, which are far higher than they've ever been.

Until relatively recently, people almost always married within their local communities. You had to make a choice from perhaps 10 or 20 people (see Jane Austen etc.). Many people now live in large cities, and those cities are full of people from all over the world. The level of mixing of the gene pool is astonishing, and the number of partners we can pick from is almost unending (see Tinder etc.).

The combination of huge choice and very rapid global mixing means the human genome is shifting very fast indeed.

Writers, especially SF writers, have been talking about the long-term consequences of this change for a 100 years or more. The Time Machine (1895) imagines a future where (spoiler alert) mate selection splits humans along class lines into a useless but beautiful idle middle-class who are farmed for food by the evolved bestial working classes. Brave New World (1931) has a designer future where people have abandoned evolution entirely and degenerated into decadent folly.

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