Evolution extreme
There’s a rather silly article on BBC at the moment describing one scientist’s idea that in the future humans will evolve into an elite, physically perfect upper class and a troll like lower class. Basically, his idea is that as people become more and more choosy about their partner’s physical (and mental?) attributes, the “best” will only marry the “best” leading to further division. For the most part, I’ve got to think this is downright silly. I think pretty few relationships are based on purely physical looks or fitness, and environment is at least as important as genetics for intelligence, so it seems pretty unlikely we’re really going to see an evolution into Eloi and Morlocks like in H.G. Wells’ Time Machine. And given the report was for “men’s satellite TV channel Bravo”, I think we can safely take it with a grain or fifty of salt.
I would be interested to know, however, whether there really is evolution gonig on with humans anymore - it seems that, at least to a large degree, everyone has the opportunity to find a partner and a family, and so selection pressure (”survival of the fittest”) doesn’t really seem to be a significant effect. There’s some suggestion of evolution over our brains over the last 10,000 years, but whether that’s still going on today? I would wager that the more likely route forward is technological advances - cyborgs, brain-computer interfaces, etc.
On a vaguely related note, there’s a great article in New Scientist about “swarms” of robots which are capable of moving an object too heavy to move for a single robot. The movies are far and away the best part! The behaviour of the robots was tuned through simulations and “genetic algorithms”, where you basically let the program parameters evolve - instead of telling the robots what to do, you give them some basic ideas then keep the best programs, “breed” them, and keep exploring. This kind of emergent phenomena is fascinating; check out NetLogo for some more great simulations you can run yourself!