Science: Mankind to evolve into a race of Michael Jordans with large schwanzes

In the near term. The good news:

Dr Curry believes humans will reach physical peak around the year 3,000, with improved nutrition and understanding of the human body. Men will reach average heights of between 6ft and 7ft. Physical features will evolve to emphasise features valued in the opposite sex by men and women looking for potential mates.

Men will therefore have more symmetrical facial features, squarer jaws, and deeper voices. Women will have lighter skin, large clear eyes, firmer breasts, glossy hair, more symmetrical features and smooth, hairless skin. Variations in skin colouring are expected to be smoothed out, with most humans moving towards a brown tone.

Behold women’s genetic destiny:

The year 3000: a good time to be alive.

After that, though? Not so much.

By around the year 12,000, he believes communication skills and emotional abilities such as love, sympathy, trust and respect will have diminished, eroding the abilities of humans to perform in teams. The increased eating of processed foods will mean humans do less chewing, leading to less developed jaws.

Immune systems will deteriorate due to hygiene and reliance on medicines.

Infants will be larger at birth, forcing mothers be rely [sic] on caesarian sections. Humans will be able to replace faulty stretches of DNA thanks to advances in genetic engineering — potentially leading to more genetic uniformity and vulnerability to disease.

Dr Curry predicts that 100,000 years from now mankind will be divided into two distinct sub-species with a genetic elite moving in ever more exclusive circles.

The genetic upper class will be increasingly tall, thin, clean, healthy and creative, while the genetic underclass will be short, stocky, asymmetrical, grubby, unhealthy and less intelligent.

It’ll be like 19th-century Europe, in other words. Still, it’s good to know that men will eventually split into distinct groups of alpha and beta males. That’ll be much different from how things are now.

Seriously, doesn’t this study presume some rather large technological blind spots? Like, for instance, won’t we have a firm enough grasp of the genome by the year 12,000 that correcting for inbreeding won’t be much of a hardship? Once you’ve mastered genetic engineering — which, if you believe Ray Kurzweil, is possible this century — you’ve mastered evolution. So why on earth would our jaws devolve 10,000 years from now in response to processed foods? Environment won’t be dictating genetic adaptations at that point; politicians will.

The jaw thing does worry me, though. If Curry’s right, then we won’t end up looking like Jordan. We’ll end up looking like this:

Update: Since we’re on the subject, advances in medicine are the one thing Mark Steyn never fully accounts for in his prophecies about the demographic decline of Europe. Actually, he does touch on it briefly in “America Alone” vis-a-vis Japan and how they’re likely to deal with their population crisis by developing robot companions, introducing cyborg tech, etc. In theory it could help replenish Europe’s numbers by extending women’s fertility an extra decade or so. The question is, would reproductive tech outpace luxury tech or, as is expected, would the opposite be true? If the latter, then life might get so comfortable that couples never get around to having kids — which would make Steyn’s predictions come true faster than even he expected.

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