The face of human evolution

What will we, Homo sapiens, look like in 100,000 years, if we don’t destroy ourselves before then? That is so far, far into the future that it is difficult to answer straight away. If evolution is allowed to take its normal course, we will look different than we do now, though it may not be much of a difference.

On the other hand, 100,000 years is a long time. Mankind will have made astonishing leaps in technology by then - including, most probably, interstellar travel. We may colonise other worlds in addition to Earth or may have left the Earth altogether. Conditions on Earth itself could change drastically in the intervening 100,000 years that we may need certain evolutionary adaptations to survive. Technology will be sufficiently advanced to give us completely bionic organs, and as I speculated in a recent column, immortality itself. In other words, we may be able to speed up or alter evolution.

What does all this mean in terms of our natural evolution and survival? Scientists all over the world are striving to answer that vital question. As revealed in the media recently, visual artist Nickolay Lamm of Pittsburgh, USA too tried to answer that question. Interested in illustrating how humans would look like in 100,000 years, he asked scientists for guidance and answers.

He got in touch with Dr. Alan Kwan who gave him an educated guess at what humans may look like in 20,000, 60,000 and 100,000 years from now. In 100,000 years, people might have much larger heads, Google Glass type contact lenses and sideways-blinking oversized eyes that glow green with cat-like night vision, according to the study.

Evolution

Working with Dr. Kwan, who has a PhD in computational genomics from Washington University, they established “one possible timeline” to future human evolution. It's not science per se - just a “thought experiment,” Kwan has clarified - but it's fascinating to think about. Although some scientists have criticised his project as a mere fantasy, it does offer some clues and insights into what a combination of nature and technology can achieve in the future. Since he has based his renderings only on scientific knowledge and theories which are already known, many more yet-unknown technologies could be introduced in the future.

In fact, these changes to modern-day humans were based on the assumption that by the 210th century, scientists will be able to modify human appearances before birth through zygotic genome engineering technology. Humans will thus be able to control their own evolution. In this future,” Kwan said, “humankind has wrested control of the human form from natural evolution and are able to bend human biology to human needs.”

The principle behind their primary research is simple. Kwan based his theories on the accepted idea that between 800,000 and 200,000 years ago, the Earth underwent a period of fluctuation in its climate, which resulted in a tripling of the human brain, as well as skull size. Scientists agree that the rapid changes in climate may have created a favorable environment for those with the ability to adapt to new challenges and situations.

This trend has noticeably continued, for scientists have found that modern humans have less prominent features and higher foreheads than people during medieval times. As our brain sizes grow, our skulls will get larger.

The duo also guess that millennia of space colonisation could also produce much larger eyes to account for dimmer environments when humans live farther from the sun/star and darker skin in general to protect against UV radiation beyond the Earth's ozone. Just as a pointer to such a future, more than 78,000 people have applied to get a one-way ticket to Mars from the non-profit Mars One organisation which seeks to colonise the planet from 2023. That time-line may be too ambitious with current levels of technology, but there is no doubt we will get there in the ensuing decades. And that is just the start.

Thicker eyelids and a more prominent superciliary arch, the bone above the eye socket, could offset the same kind of disorientation that today's astronauts sometimes feel aboard the Space Station.

Future

Their most remarkable conjecture is that future humans could start to blink sideways like owls to “protect from cosmic ray effects”. That would be essential while exploring deep space. Such a new blinking mechanism would have to be genetically introduced.

“This human face will still be heavily biased towards features that humans find fundamentally appealing: strong, regal lines, straight nose, intense eyes, and placement of facial features that adhere to the golden ratio and left/right perfect symmetry,” Kwan says.

While the Future Face is pure speculation, there is no denying that natural evolution is underway as we write. It is an unstoppable force of nature. We will look different one day. As I was writing this article, a colleague commented that we might one day have very weak limbs because robots would be doing all the tasks for us, while we sit and wait. Remember, even self-driving cars on their way. Technology will indeed affect our evolution in many ways, even if we do not introduce technology to the very process of evolution.

Evolutionary trends are notoriously difficult to predict. One possible way is to look at the past and study the variations among different species - and variations among similar species - to get an idea as to how it actually happens in nature. We already know that we look a lot different from the first humans, leave alone the Neanderthals. Extrapolating that knowledge 100,000 years into the future is no easy task.

Nevertheless, there is one difference. For the first time, we are in a position to genetically alter living organisms and even resurrect long-dead (extinct) animals. We thus have a chance to complement and compete with Nature in the process of evolution. As Peter Parker’s uncle says in Spiderman, “Great power comes with great responsibility” - it is an adage that evolutionary scientists should heed if they are to avoid any missteps.