yup
are caring atitude to the weaker members of are sosiaty is sending us in to a genetic nose dive, what we reeeealy nead is a huge globel desaster, like maby a zombie apocolips(see http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=20.0 )to cut down the "chaf" a bit . ether that or a good preditor
I'd argue that this is still theoretical for all but >5% of the world's population. You have to be rich enough, insured enough, and have access to good health care. And even then, I think it's just changing the evolutionary prerogative away from Survival to something like Beauty/Brains/Skill. If intelligence is an accident of evolution, perhaps the function of intelligence is to become the motive cause for continued evolution.
Granted, there have been theorists that the human race ends up splitting on those lines of smart/beautiful and not, and if we do I think we end up with Star Trek and Idiocracy.
This is more or less Wells' interpretation in
The Time Machine, but I have to actually read it to make sure. In that book (AIUI) there are two post-human species, descended from the soft upper class and the ugly, brutish lower class. If our society were cut off from the rest of humanity, and the two classes were prevented from interbreeding, this is a good vision of what our distant future could hold.
I think it's important to note that we are still evolving, and there are selective pressures on our gene pool. However, there are a lot of things going on that have made the process a little more interesting from a spectator's perspective. For example, we are now able to share our genes with people all over the planet. It is much harder to isolate a gene pool to any one geographical location. Even if you can't leave your village, I can visit it. This means that the rate of change will be much lower over the foreseeable future.
As others have noted, the nature of the selective pressures have changed. We can survive in an incredible range of environmental conditions because our intelligence and social ability have helped us find ways to circumvent the obvious problems. To put it differently, we are capable of taking suitable conditions into places where we ordinarily couldn't survive.
Finally, we are beginning to be able to shape the way in which we evolve. We've been able to do this to a degree for a few thousand years --- we've been able to breed desirable qualities into our animals and crops. We've also been able to do it with humans, although the lifespan of a human makes the experiment much harder. Now we are able to directly manipulate the genes of specific people and it won't be long before these changes are propagated into wider society.
I'm going to look up the Dick novels (although I have trouble getting Isaac frickin' Asimov in our town library!) and have a read.
Any other ideas?
