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Training_Ad_2086 t1_ivbx8j5 wrote

That's basically a billion year of trial and error before we arrived to the first spider.

All of life and evolution is basically trial and error by nature until something sticks. It happens on all sides, the predator , the prey and environment.

It's still happening right now.

A few hundred millions of years from now we'll have humans that unrecognizable from what we consider humans today

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tetrapod3d t1_ivden0b wrote

Hilarious that you think humans will survive for a few hundred million years, I wouldn’t be surprised if we went extinct in a couple thousand.

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RandomFungi t1_ivdjuum wrote

Outside of truly exceptional events, there's not much that could actually extinguish human life on that time scale. You and I might not survive a nuclear war, but it wouldn't come close to killing every human, nor would global warming or a super volcano. Assuming we spread to orbital space and other solar objects almost nothing could kill all of us.

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jml5791 t1_ivcoggp wrote

With humans, it will be artificial selection going forward rather than natural selection.

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WeirdMemoryGuy t1_ivd03i9 wrote

The distinction between artificial and natural selection is itself artificial. We just kinda decided we didn't want to consider ourself part of nature. The selection process might be based on unique factors for us, but it isn't fundamentally different from natural selection.

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Al_Rascala t1_ivdjgaj wrote

Would the difference not be based on the mechanisms by which selection is carried out? Natural being the genome mixing via sexual reproduction that is common to most multicellular animals, artificial being direct manipulation of the genome via various tools?

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Training_Ad_2086 t1_ive7p42 wrote

The human beings (us) that are doing genome manipulation are also created by evolution , hence this genome editing is something we evolved to do.

There are aquatic animals that can change their biological sex while alive, it's the evolution taking its course.

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jqbr t1_iveidr0 wrote

No, it's not something we evolved to do ... that we can do it is a side effect of adaptations, it's not an adaptation itself.

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FireFight t1_ivc8nyg wrote

Is there anything to read about how humans far in the future will be compared to now? ☺️

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DeadT0m t1_ivcgamh wrote

There's a bunch of stuff on the subject. Just google "future humans" and you'll find a good amount of reading.

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