Daily Archives: April 5, 2015

The founding director of the Harvard Business Schools Life Sciences Project, Juan Enriquez, posed a question at a TEDxSummit in Doha, Qatar, in April 2012. Enriquezs question was one that he had been enthralling audiences with a lot. He spoke about the history of life, tracing it from the Big Bang, to the birth of the stars, to the perimeter of the galaxy, to parts played by the sun, earth, and man, a history that spanned 14 billion years, involved trillions of stars, and then he asked the audience one question: What was the purpose of all this? He moved on to the next PowerPoint slide to provide the answer: A photo of Pamela Anderson and then Michael Jacksonthe point being that man is the almighty purpose, the be all and end all of life, after which, he claimed, evolution flatlines to the end. His next question was Wouldnt that be slightly arrogant? There has been something like twenty-five human species; why couldnt there be another?

Indeed, why couldnt there, particularly if we were entering a mass extinction? Many scientists believe that natural selection operates mainly on the frontiers of change.

Seventy-seven thousand years ago, a human sat in a limestone cave in Africa on a cliff overlooking the Indian Ocean, cooled by a sea breeze and warmed by a small fire. He picked up a sharp rock and made a crosshatch design on a piece of reddish brown stone that scientists claim is the oldest known example of an intricate design made by a human being. It demonstrates the ability of man to communicate symbolically, which scientists believe sets Homo sapiens apart from other hominids on earth at that time.

This symbolic communicator with his stone tools and weapons had a competitive advantage as he moved out of Africa on the Great Migration into territory occupied by other species of the Homo genus. Homo sapiens first traveled to Asia eighty thousand to sixty thousand years ago. By forty-five thousand years ago this new hominid had settled Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia.

Keep in mind that by this point there may have been four different species on the planet: Homo sapiens, Homo floresiensis, Neanderthals, and Denisovans, the last a potential new human species described from a finger bone fragment found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. But Homo sapiens eventually won outthe actual last man standing.

Harpending and Cochran think there has been significant evolution in the past fifty thousand years between human populations separated by great distance and geographical barriers. No Finn could be mistaken for a Zulu, no Zulu for a Finn. There have been substantial changes in the genetic makeup of humans since man spread out of Africa, and those changes have taken on significant characteristics in different populations, they wrote in The 10,000 Year Explosion.

Robert Fogel, a University of Chicago economist, while studying the effects of American slavery, discovered that over the past few centuriesparticularly in the last fifty yearsAmericans in general have been growing taller, living longer, and getting thicker. In 1850, the average American male was five feet seven inches tall and weighed about 146 pounds. By 1980 he stood five feet ten inches and weighed 174 pounds. A team of economists extended the statistical search worldwide and found the trend was global.

It turns out that advances in medicine, better nutrition, better working conditions, cleaner water, and a general reduction in pollution have netted humans a biological advantage. Its most dramatic when you consider age. When Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago, the average life expectancy was twenty years. By the year 1900 it had become forty-four years. Today it is closer to eighty years, almost doubling in only a hundred years. And these are heritable trends passed on from parents to children, generated by improvements in health and medicine.

So is there another species in the wings?

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