Althouse: "How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years."

June 7, 2013

"How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years."

Key word: "might."

35 comments:

chickelit said...: I'm disappointed that there was no mention of breast evolution. I predict they'll get smaller as artificially enhanced women dupe more mates, and naturally endowed ones fend off reproduction with hormones.; 6/7/13, 6:08 PM
Chip S. said...: So the future is meth-anime?; 6/7/13, 6:10 PM
edutcher said...: Saw that in an old "Twilight Zone" comic.; 6/7/13, 6:19 PM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: ...and Kwan expects the human head to trend larger to accommodate a larger brain.

I'm guessing Dr. Kwan never had to squeeze one of those heads out his uterus.; 6/7/13, 6:27 PM
chickelit said...: I'm guessing Dr. Kwan never had to squeeze one of those heads out his uterus.

In the future, most births will be caesarian.; 6/7/13, 6:33 PM
Palladian said...: So we're going to evolve into Keane paintings?; 6/7/13, 6:38 PM
Revenant said...: Given the speed with which we are mastering genetics, the correct answer to the question "what will the human face look like in 100,000 years" is "whatever we want it to look like".

Assuming we're still around in 100,000 years, of course. I wouldn't bet on it.; 6/7/13, 6:47 PM
Unknown said...: Palladian
I was going to say that, but less knowledgeably. I just call them big eye pictures.; 6/7/13, 6:51 PM
MadisonMan said...: In 100000 years, my own face will look kinda dusty.; 6/7/13, 6:56 PM
Tim said...: O grate.

Can I haz kartunes?; 6/7/13, 7:04 PM
Tim said...: Ignorance is Bliss said...

"...and Kwan expects the human head to trend larger to accommodate a larger brain."

Seems Kwan hasn't been paying attention to the national, every-two years intelligence tests, with the finals every four years: elections.

On that basis, my Welsh Terrier, asleep, is smarter than the average American voter.

And he has a small brain, compared to adult humans.; 6/7/13, 7:06 PM
Curious George said...: So there will be no "people of color"?; 6/7/13, 7:07 PM
Darury said...: Revenant said...
Given the speed with which we are mastering genetics, the correct answer to the question "what will the human face look like in 100,000 years" is "whatever we want it to look like".

I'm not seeing the gills. I've been assured with continued AGW that Kevin Costner was prescient in his future documentary Waterworld.

But overall, I'd say Revenant is much closer to reality. There's actually a John Ringo series that sort of touches on that idea (Council Wars); 6/7/13, 7:09 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: I look like one of those future people people. Big eyes, giant forehead. No wonder I have such a hard time making myself understood to you vergangen mensch.; 6/7/13, 7:21 PM
shirley elizabeth said...: This guy has obviously never been to Japan.; 6/7/13, 7:22 PM
Unknown said...: So this chick is ahead of her time? Who knew?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210364/Anastasiya-Shpagina-Teenage-girl-living-cartoon-character.html; 6/7/13, 7:48 PM
Methadras said...: So we might look like Anime in 100k years? Damn, evolution sucks and is stupid.; 6/7/13, 7:49 PM
Methadras said...: shirley elizabeth said...

This guy has obviously never been to Japan.

I think he did. Hence...; 6/7/13, 7:49 PM
Petunia said...: Am I the only one who noticed that in the very first line she talks about our "homo sapien ancestors" existing 200,000-800,000 year ago?

There WERE no Homo sapiens between 200,000 and 800,000 years ago.; 6/7/13, 8:09 PM
Sorun said...: Keyword: Wild-ass guess.; 6/7/13, 8:09 PM
Chip S. said...: I'd say more like animeth.; 6/7/13, 8:26 PM
Indigo Red said...: Way too white European, not enough browning.; 6/7/13, 8:34 PM
Synova said...: I'm a bit confused as to how a large forehead and eyes makes Google Glass a reproductive element worth consideration.; 6/7/13, 8:39 PM
Ambrose said...: So eyes will evolve to be twice as big but hair styles will change less in 100,000 years than they have since the 70s.; 6/7/13, 8:39 PM
Anonymous said...: Look like these little guys especially the one on the left upper corner, don't they?

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=New+World+monkey&id=29EEFD4D20167D62262FF7F37779E9B943FB01AA&FORM=IQFRBA; 6/7/13, 8:50 PM
Sorun said...: Way too white European, not enough browning.

This is after white privilege has caused the extinction of all non-whites, even in China.; 6/7/13, 9:03 PM
Quaestor said...: Petunia wrote:
There WERE no Homo sapiens between 200,000 and 800,000 years ago.

The fossil and genetic evidence is WAY too spare to make that assertion stick. Current DNA studies of living modern humans compared with recovered DNA from Neanderthal teeth reinforce the notion that Neanderthals are members of a subspecies of Homo sapiens, specifically Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. The conventional temporal range for H. s. neanderthalensis is Middle to Late Pleistocene, or between 0.6 to 0.03 million years ago, well within the 0.2 to 0.8Ma window given by the writer of the article.; 6/7/13, 10:17 PM
bagoh20 said...: I'm expecting a forehead with screen implanted that constantly updates and displays taxes due. Form follows function.; 6/7/13, 10:22 PM
Big Mike said...: Aren't large eyes associated with night vision? Is he assuming that we won't have light bulbs anymore.

I do agree that we'll tend to be lighter-colored as we spend more and more time indoors.; 6/7/13, 10:31 PM
Anonymous said...: Alan Watts has a nice discussion of how fish think they are people, and naturally find people to be grotesquely unhuman, what with our non-human appendages and non-human way of extracting oxygen from water. I wonder if Alan Watts would say that, in 100,000 years, people will look exactly like they do now. That, at least, makes the most sense to me.; 6/7/13, 10:33 PM
William said...: Mankind will achieve extinction or immortality within 10,000 years, and all this messy evolution crap will not be needed.....Embrace the matrix. More than likely we're all just icons in some advanced civilization's Donkey Kong game for its preschoolers.; 6/7/13, 11:20 PM
Quaestor said...: It seems to me that Kwan has put his limited understanding of evolutionary biology on display here. I hope it is not a career-killer has such speculations have been in the past.

I'm thinking of a specific case from 1982 when Dale Russell, then curator of Ottawa's Natural History Museum of Canada, proposed an anthropomorphic "dinosauroid" as a hypothetical descendant of Troondon formosus assuming the K-T extinction event never happened. His speculation was popular with the press and the general public, but was round criticized by scientists, so much so that Russell had to offer a humorous mea culpa before presenting a paper or giving a lecture thereafter. It really damaged his credibility.

Evolution is nature's problem solver, but it doesn't work logically because natural selection is often the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. Sometimes species draw on their so-called "junk" DNA for solutions, sometimes not. For example the furcula (wishbone) is a definitive character in birds that first appeared in the ornithodirans in the early Triassic, but was not evident in their dinosaurian descendants, at least not in the specimens described by Cope and Marsh. This was pointed to by Feducia of UNC (and others) as strong evidence against a bird/dinosaur connection. Then fossils turned up with furculae, mostly in smaller predatory dinos. Evo-Devo theory explains the loss and re-occurrence of wishbones by asserting that though expressed characters may disappear their genetic blueprints remain, which can be called on again when competitive pressures arise.

Evo-Devo and Darwinian evolution do have predictive power, but it's almost entirely a matter of looking backward at the fossil record and predicting the timeframe and characters of a hypothetical "missing link"; Evo-Devo just doesn't explain every case. Sometimes evolution just goes off on a totally accidental tangent that influences subsequent development in manner that defies predictability.

For example, nature has evolved flight in vertebrates three times -- twice in closely related archosaurs, the theropod dinosaurs (which includes the birds) and the pterosaurs, but each solution was unique, practically evolved from scratch with much that's merely accidental. In pterosaurs nature built the wing on one finger of a hand with four outwardly evident fingers (the thumb became the "pteroid bone"). In contrast theropods wings are based on two fingers of a three-fingered hand (the other two are mere splints on the carpal matrix). The ancestors of flying theropods evolved their three-fingered hands as tools for predation. The flyers just built on the current plan and didn't recall a five-fingered hand from their junk file. Moreover pterosaurs originally had long bony tails and later evolved totally tailless aerodynamics. Theropod flyers started with long bony tails, then evolved a very short bony structure, the pygostyle, which is a "compressed" tail, to support an array of feathers to fill the aerodynamic role.; 6/7/13, 11:58 PM
stlcdr said...: File under ''making sh!t up'.; 6/8/13, 5:12 AM
Clyde said...: Wow, we "might" turn into lorises!; 6/8/13, 6:35 AM
n.n said...: Evolution is a chaotic process. Any predictions about its progress over extended periods is purely speculative.; 6/8/13, 10:00 AM