How/When Do You Think the World Will End?

**Janszoon** · 11-29-2010, 02:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RezZ

Point taken, but for the threads sake it sounds 10x better if the title is WORLD ENDING! Anyways if there is no more people to verify the worlds existence we may as well call it over since we would have no way of knowing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GuitarBizarre

Because this thread title is snappier and encompasses at least one way of viewing the sentence you're taking issue with.

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.

Guybrush · 11-29-2010, 03:15 PM

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.

**Janszoon** · 11-29-2010, 03:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tore

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.

Have you ever heard of the book Man After Man? It's pretty much about that exact thing. It's an illustrated future history of the human race that starts with some groups of humans being genetically engineered for various reasons and then throughout the ages follows the evolution of these divergent human species. Kind of an interesting cross between science fiction and evolutionary biology and definitely worth checking out if you find that kind of speculation as fascinating as I do.

Guybrush · 11-30-2010, 12:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janszoon

Have you ever heard of the book Man After Man? It's pretty much about that exact thing. It's an illustrated future history of the human race that starts with some groups of humans being genetically engineered for various reasons and then throughout the ages follows the evolution of these divergent human species. Kind of an interesting cross between science fiction and evolutionary biology and definitely worth checking out if you find that kind of speculation as fascinating as I do.

Cool, thanks for the book tip! I really need to read something else than Pratchett these days, so I'll try and keep this one in mind.