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Asked by yaseen to Bob, Katie, Nisha, Sallie, Vee on 28 Jun 2012. This question was also asked by summer17.
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Sallie Baxendale answered on 28 Jun 2012:
Good question! and one that scientists don’t really know the answer to. Some think that we are whilst others think that we’re not. 200 years ago infant mortality was so high that it really was ‘survival of the fittest’ 50% died before the age of 21- that’s not the case now where advances in medicine and good nutrician means that 99% of babies born in the UK today will survive to adulthood.There is certainly evidence that some species are still evolving. There are some earthworms who live near an abandoned copper mine in Cornwall. They’ve adapted to such high levels of arsenic that they have become a distinct species, in just 170 years.
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Vee Mitchell answered on 28 Jun 2012:
The human race is certainly still evolving, the size of the appendix (it’s part of your gut) for example if getting smaller and smaller as it is no longer needed. One that’s a bit easy to see whilst your subject is still alive is whether they have wisdom teeth or not. These are teeth that come through right at the back of other other teeth in your late teens or early twenties but apparently more and people don’t have them (that is they are not there at all not that they don’t come through) as we don’t really have any use for them any more. I don’t know whether this means you can actually say we will eventually evolve into another being but we are always evolving and hopefully therefore improving.
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Bob Bonwick answered on 2 Jul 2012:
Geographical isolation is the fastest way to evolve a species. As a race, humans are rarely isolated as we have adapted to get out of those situations (technology helps). We are very different from human being of 500 years ago for example, taller, healthier (in some ways), better at reasoning and relativly speaking more intelligent, but thats quite subjective.
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