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Jennie is spot on.  The very idea that we can stop evolution is completely contrary to the idea itself.  I'm afraid it's just another example of are extreme anthropocentric view of things.  It's like when folks get too excited and say "We will destroy the Earth!"  Well, not a chance.  We might make it a miserable place, destroy ourselves and take a bunch of species down with us, but the Earth will just shrug her shoulders and be on to the next thing.  I mean we have all done the geological time scale analogies.  We are just a brief blip in terms of the planet's history.  Again, we don't see how small we really are in the overall scale of things.

Of course because we are so adaptable we may also end up as the "roaches" of the mammal world and continue living in the cracks and crevices for way too long. 

Erich Rose

Erich Rose Design
807 The Living End
Austin, TX 78746
512-626-9930; [log in to unmask]




On Jul 20, 2010, at 10:57 AM, Jennie Dusheck wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Hi all,
> I just joined this list recently and have been lurking.  I am a science writer with a strong interest in public science education, especially evolution. I am working on a science education project related to evolution.
> 
> I don't think it's possible to stop evolution of natural populations, whether human or otherwise. Even if small populations of humans reproduced through cloning--and really why go to all that trouble?--the rest of the world would carry on as usual. As far as humans not evolving, the most you could ever see is very strong stabilizing selection, which is typical of highly specialized species--the opposite of what we are. I think geneticists will continue to find lots of signs of recent evolution in human populations. In humans, as in all organisms, evolution is a dynamic, ongoing process, not something that "happened a long time ago."
> 
> Cheers,
> Jennie Dusheck
> MA Zoology
> Science Writing & Editing
> Santa Cruz, CA

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