I was watching an interesting documentary on National Geographic this week, entitled, "The Human Family Tree". The topic was The Genographic Project, an effort to trace genetic lines of ancestry back to a single point of origin, and also to trace the path that different genetic lines took to get from then to now. In other words, by examining someone's DNA in context with the hundreds of thousands of other samples, they can begin to build a map that shows when and where your ancestors might have lived, and what path they took as the earth became more widely populated. It's interesting stuff and I highly recommend checking it out.
Anyways, during this program there was some discussion about how some of the different physical characteristics may have appeared, primarily due to adaptations to different environments. This got me thinking, if evolution is supposedly driven by adaptation, has technology stunted our own evolution? After all, these days if you need to adapt to your environment, you don't do it by breeding out the members of your society that don't cut it - you do it with technology.
It could be said that perhaps technology is the means by which our species will continue to evolve, and I suppose that's true. As someone who doesn't subscribe to the theory of evolution as the only viable explanation, I'm not privy to what the "official" position on this is; it just made me think. What will mankind look like in another ten thousand years, assuming we make it that long? Will our physical form change to adapt to whatever environment we happen to find ourselves in, or will we simply rely more on technology to do that work for us?
