> > As a species, we're staying fairly constant
> But are we? I read in the paper the other day about human height increase. I'm not even talking about height increase over *centuries*, only decades. Apparently the average Asian teenage boy is 10cm taller now than in the 1950s. That's something which is passed on. Major evolutionary changes are generally considered to take effect over thousands of years, from what I understand, so when you can see a significant change like that in half a century, we're still moving along at quite a rate.
>
> This is where our technological evolution assists physical evolution, since I assume the *reason* for the original height increase is nutrition-related.
>
> Brunnen-"would reveal my sources for that statistic, but I threw the newspaper away"G

I agree that the height increase is both dramatic and attributed to diet. But I believe that it's an environmental change, not an evolutionary one. If you make the diet of the next generation poor, they'll be shorter - it's in their genes.

But I must agree that technology is assisting evolution. Medicine and technology have made it so that many lethal phenotypes are no longer lethal (developmental retinal degeneration comes to mind). This kind of evolution is because we're changing our environment to attempt to make every possible combination of human genes livable.

The dramatic changes in the world's species has always been because of dramatic environmental change - a new river, a drought, icebergs. We are doing the oddest thing in that we're changing our environment and then selecting who survives based on the changes we've made. So, we've almost taken out 'natural selection' and replaced it with 'technological selection.'

The problem is that technological improvements only improve life for us and our immediate symbiotes. It changes the world faster than other animals can evolve (this is where the ecological webs will catch up with us, possibly.) The second problem is that if technology starts to fail (like if we can't fight the next strain of bacteria), a lot of us that had it easy will not be around. But I don't know how I got into this ending so I'm just gonna stop here before I start writing a manifesto or something.

Eugen'I still think it's cool we can fly'e