If there is a next step in human evolution (which there will

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I must hold my hand up and take responsibility for the subject of the poll, since it was me who brought this up in another thread.

As it's absolutely correct that evolution doesn't have "steps" it looks like I chose the wrong word. "Stage" would have been better.

I have heard that too and used to believe it but I don't anymore. The people making that argument point to medical technology that allows for the survival of just about anyone. Survival can equal reproductive success, especially when there are also reproductive technologies to help with that. It seemed like an airtight case.

The thing is, that enhanced survival and reproduction that supposedly makes natural selection moot is dependent on medical technology. The argument completely ignores the huge numbers of people who have no access to those technologies. It also assumes that those technologies will forever be available. But things change, and sometimes in unpredictable ways.

The future may belong to third world people who didn't have the money to escape natural selection using medical technology and are thus able to out-reproduce the populations that grew dependent on it.


The future may belong to people who have a mutation that allows them to reproduce even when surrounded by enviromental toxins that reduce the fertility of others.

The future may belong to people who have a mutation that allows their liver to detoxify enviromental toxins faster and more effectively than others.

We just don't know who the future will belong to. That's the sort of thing you can see only in retrospect. I think that seeing things in retrospect is what gives the illusion that there are steps. But if you take the really long view and look back over the 4 billion years of earth's history, what you see is a series of unpredictable events that doomed some life forms while leaving others with a wide-open niche that they could expand into.

Wondering whether the genetic mutations that give rise to autism are helpful or hurtful is an interesting exercise. On other threads where this is discussed, good arguemnts have been made for it being both simultaneously. It very, very rarely gives the individual a reproductive advantage. But it may give the species as a whole an advantage due to technologies that an autistic person developed. And so it stays in the gene pool.

Or maybe the above scenario is not how it works. But in the long run, it probably doesn't matter. The future belongs to whichever people can survive and reproduce after X has altered the enviroment. What is X? There are many possibilities but no way of knowing for certain. The only thing that remains constant across the 4 billion years of earth history is that the enviroment always gets altered and the future belongs to those who can survive that.