What is the next step in human evolution?

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Are we the next step in human and evolution?By "we" i mean autistics.It might be better if we were.maybe were not as likely to rape the planet or start a nuclear holocaust.

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Although I'm not officially confirmed as an Asperger my sexual appetites certainly have their limits. I'm not ambitious enough to exercise my prowess on an entire planet. Maybe a small village.[/quote]


by raping the planet i mean destroying it or abusing earths resources.

I very much doubt that the next step in human evolution is autistics, given that we reproduce less than the rest of the population and are not hugely successful in terms of sexual attraction. I also doubt that it is going to be more intelligent than we are, as the majority of the intelligent people I know are either not reproducing at all, or far less than the less educated and less intelligent majority.

I'm not sure we have a huge amount of selection pressure on us at the moment (in terms of survival or sexual selection), as technology means we can overcome a lot of our genetic limitations. But as soon as a novel virus comes along, or some other type of selection pressure we'll be selected for survival against that.

i think we are the next phase in human evolution. unless the expotentual groth rate in the incidance of autism is diagnosed and put in check, in about 250 thousand years the entire human population will be on the spectrum.. live long, prosper, and breed tiny monsters.

I really get pissed with this 'we are so superior we are the new path for the species' BS. Evolution requires beneficial mutations that aid survival and therefore increase the chance of offspring.

So lets explore the mutations that increase the chance of someone with an ASD having offspring

THERE ARE NON, in fact the opposite is true, a high percentage of males with the disorder do not have offspring.

So no we are not the next step in human evolution, and anyone that thinks this is a self-agrandising delusional fool


And as for the assertion that those with an ASD are less likely to destroy the planet WHY, EVIDENCE

I second Dent's annoyance.

Also, Malthus? Come on. Malthus was a douche. And he was wrong- population has multiplied many times over since his time and we still don't seem to have passed the Earth's carrying capacity.

Here we go again...another "aspies are the next stage in human evolution" thread. Personally I think it would be cool if the next stage in human evolution was superpowers, like on Heroes (American TV show). But it's more likely that we'll evolve to become more and more dependent on our own technology, possibly to the point that most people are semi-cyborgs. It has taken us 6,000 years from the first widespread city building to becoming almost completely city dwellers with only a few percent of people farming. In another 6,000 years we may well become cyborg-like.

It's even possible that the high incidence of autism is a false start in an evolutionary attempt to align humans more completely with their technology. Higher functioning autistics do think a lot like silicon based computers. But there's too much variation, with many autistics being completely unable to function at all, to say "autism is the next stage in evolution".

Technology has outraced biology, and biology is struggling to catch up. When the capability of technology that doubles every 18 months is put up against an evolutionary process that takes thousands of years, technology will outrace biology. Even human law systems and ethics systems are being left in the dust. It once took a woman 25 years to have 14 children, meaning that her body was worn out by the time she stopped, and the older children could raise the younger to an extent. In societies that have valued extremely large families, such as 19th century Utah, that's what's happened.

But now we have a 33 year old woman who has 14 kids under the age of 7, including 8 at once. All through artificial means. She seems to have no idea that she can't handle it. People are outraged, but with an economic crisis unfolding, legal prohibitions are far in the future. So she has done it because she could. If US law prohibited it, she could have gone to Korea or Mexico. We have 70 year old women giving birth. Human society, not to mention evolution, is left far behind.

The danger is that we'll destroy ourselves with some technology that we have no clue how to use, nor any clue of its capabilities. We can't handle what we've created because technology is far ahead. We have no idea of the real consequences of large numbers of modern nuclear bombs going off, for example. Atmospheric testing was last done in the mid 60s, with bombs that were a tiny fraction of what we have. There's a possibility that we could punch a hole in the spacetime continuum, for example, and the universe would literally drain out. Or we could create an unstoppable chain reaction, and create a wave of destruction that swallows the universe at the speed of light. We don't know.

The computer models could be wrong, like the financial programs saying that subprime mortgages couldn't fail were wrong. The world's best physicists were paid billions by Wall Street to create these crazy securities, and the physicists assured us everything was cool, right until the bottom fell out. What will they do now? Go to work for the government and create the ultimate weapon? One that ends reality? Oh, nothing bad will happen, they will say, then they do a real live test and that's it, the end. The human brain can't handle it, and the odds are that humanity will destroy the universe before we evolve a brain that CAN handle it.

aspies don't have teh behbehs. EOM.

well given that baboons devopoed uber rears due to NS becasue of their habit of sitting down a lot, I assume that humans, being more imbolie nowadays infron of a computer may get a nice rear themshelves.....eyes with shorter focus capabilities, Longer ars so they don't have to get up. Per haps grasping fet so they can compute as they eat and drink?

I have evolved beyond the need of spelling, grammer, proper syntax, good manners or good taste.