Quote:
Originally Posted by Janszoon
Well in that case, here's what I think: we'll keep evolving until we are no longer human, at which point the world will cease to exist because there will be no more people.  |
That's a potentially interesting discussion on speciation and taxonomy
If I remember correctly, Willi Hennig, the father of modern cladistics, suggested that a species goes extinct (changes) when it has diverged into two species that are sexually isolated from eachother. At that point in time, as if that could happen in one recognizable moment, the parent species is considered gone and two new species have appeared. From some points of view, it makes a lot of sense, but alas not always and becomes horribly impractical in practice as taxonomic relationships are probed, tested, reviewed and changed over time.
Divergence of the human species is a possibility though. Perhaps we'll one day genetically design humans which are sexually isolated from us "naturals", but are still able to successfully have sexually viable offspring with eachother. Or perhaps we'll colonize a distant planet, but then a catastrophy isolates a colony for many hundreds of thousands of years so that they evolve differently from other humans.