Don't worry, kids, Curry is just making it all up

Eloi! Morlocks! Aiieeee!

Yeah, seriously, I took one glance at the article and started wondering just how many times this guy has watched The Time Machine.

Future changes in the human condition will be almost entirely from new human enhancement technologies. I don't see natural evolution having much of a role, let alone the garbage in the article...

Next, this Curry will predict the discovery of invisibility and a created race of animal/human hybrids confined to an island reserve.

In other news, an American politician claims Martian war machines will soon land on earth, because they hate our freedoms. He demands NASA's Mars mission carry a nuclear warhead.

The Daily Mail is -- what? The British version of the Weekly World News? The description "top scientist" always puts me on my guard.

LSE or LSD? It's difficult to tell ...

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

Bullshit nonsense. I'd bet some of us will be transhuman through genetic engineering and other technology in less than 30 years. (Spearing of furries alone, the market is already there -- they just have to develop the technology.)

"Two" breeds of humans. Tchah. There won't be two breeds, there'll be ten thousand.

British newspapers can no longer afford to employ proper science reporters.

Now taking bets on when creationists will latch on to this.

Ugh, I nearly banged my head against the wall on reading this on BBC. For an "evolutionary theorist" he has no grasp of how and why speciation occurs, nor human nature when it comes to cultural reproductive barriers.

And only two species? Sheesh, how unimaginative can you get?

Then he is working at the London School of Economics...

Noncarborundum: the Daily Mail used to be a sensible middlebrow newspaper up until the 1960's. It started to go downhill in the 1970's and hasn't really been worth reading since about 1990. Even my parents, who took it for 40 years, have now abandoned it. It isn't an equivalent of Weekly World News though - the proprietors still think it's a newspaper.

Tristram Brelstaff, it is not completely true that British newspapers employ no science staff. The Guardian certainly does and they run the excellent BadScience column on Saturdays too. The problem has been persuading the editors to use them for all science stories which is why we had the beatup over autism rates recently. The reporter for that one was a sports reporter by trade...

Those who care about science journalism are hoping they manage to force the Observer into a merger, then we can will be able to read well reported science on a Sunday too.

Note that although their conclusions are patently absurd, their reasoning is identical to that used by many evolutionary psychologists to derive our current state.

When loading the main Pharyngula page just now I was forwarded to a new page...(which forwards to another page)...

http:// blessedads.com/?cmpid=2chapter&adid=300

Which comes up with a dialog box that says....

http:// scanner.malware-scan.com
NOTICE: If your computer has been running slower than normal, it may be infected with Viruses, Adware or Spyware.

MalwareAlarm will perform a quick and completely FREE scan of your system for malicious programs.

Download MalwareAlarm for FREE now!

When hitting cancel it starts to do a bogus hard drive scan, and then informs me I have several malicious viruses infecting my computer (it's a Mac)...and then trys to get me to download an exe file, which is actually malware.

I've tried reloading a few times and haven't seen it again.

I had the same experience. WTF is going on over there?

PZ, did someone hack into Scienceblogs? I got that virus thingy over at Orac's site, too.

Here are demonstrated two of the most serious problems that plague the general public's understanding of science and it's very respectability :

1. the "pseudoscientist" who is looking to make sensational claims just in order to get a little bit of fame.

2. the journalist, who writes a little bit about anything which belongs to Science, Technology and Engineering (a rather large subject) without probably having received any proper scientific education.
Afterall, most "Science, Technology and Engineering" Journalists have studied Journalism and gotten themselves a very thin varnish of scientific litteracy (about 1 micron thick).
Whoever is not capable of understanding that what this pseudoscientist is saying is bogus doesn't deserve to be a Science Journalist.
Why are there strict exams and requisites to select our science teachers who have to educate our youth, but when it comes to educating adults (who get most of their actualised knowledge via the media), the selection criterias vaporize and we get this nonsense.
No wonder the public understanding of science is so bad.
Whe need many more Carl Sagans and Richard Dawkinses to counteract the misfeats of so many illeterate Science Journalists.
Shame on you, Oliver Curry and Niall Firth !

I got the same thing. I reckon scienceblogs hasn't checked the code in one of their banner ads carefully.

One gets the impression that, when offered a considerable amount of money by Bravo TV to say something about future evolution, which he was, he was hardly going to be reticent.

Also, the Mail (together with the Express) is notoious for loving its pseudoscientific dreck - UFOs, MMR scares, pseudohistory - a real jamboree of bullshit. My personal all time favourite article was the simply titled 'WHO BUILT THE MOON?' and concluded that aliens probably did it.

How can you expect this journalist to understand evolutionary biology when he can't understand simple fiction? His interpretation of The Time Machine is completely off.

It is sad to think that the London School of Economics used to have such intellectual giants as Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos based there and now look at where it is heading.
Time to change its research programme?
By the way, I also got that nasty virus like webpage within the past few minutes.

Note that although their conclusions are patently absurd, their reasoning is identical to that used by many evolutionary psychologists to derive our current state.

That's because everything that's been pulled directly out of someone's looks about the same.

For years I`ve been under the impression that the human race was divided into two species anyway, you know, the organized, intelligent competent ones and men.

on www.olivercurry.com :

"In the summer of 2006 I was commissioned by Bravo Television to write an essay on the future of human evolution. The essay was intended as a 'science fiction' way of illustrating some aspects of evolutionary theory.
Bravo then sent out a press release on the essay, but did not release the essay itself. As a result, a wildly distorted version of what I had written ended up being reported as 'science fact' in the media. I do not endorse the content of these media reports."

Original essay : http://homepage.mac.com/scottukgb/publications/bravo.pdf

Still, after having read this, it is bad science fiction, so I stick to what I said in #17.

Please note this point :

"But now, thanks to international tournaments and the like, players such as Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf can meet, mate, and produce super-tennis-playing offspring. Or Brad Pitt can meet Angelina Jolie and have super-attractive children.
One could imagine that this process, taking place over the next 100,000 years, will create more and more genetic inequality, and with it social and economic inequality - so much so that the circles in which the genetic elites move become ever more exclusive, until they lose contact altogether with the rest of society, and come to constitute their own 'celebrity' gene pool. At this point we may begin to see a parting of the ways between the genetic 'haves' and the genetic 'have-nots'. "

His main hypothesis is that unions such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are going to have many more descendants, no wonder...

meet Brad "Adam" Pitt and Angelina "Eva" Jolie....

"Homo Jolipitticus" sounds nice for a new species...
Or "Homo Tennisicus" for the descendants of Steffi and Andre.
BTW, how does he know that Brad and Andre have large penises ?

Cheers negentropyeater for that.

Hah, he doesn't even know about the nearly neutral theory on top of using highly subjective terms and forgetting about the advantages of genetic asymmetry and how that can translate to asymmetric features...

This "assortative
mating" increases the degree of genetic inequality in the population, and creates the conditions for "sympatric speciation" -- that is, the formation of new species in the same geographical location. This could lead to new varieties of human: the 'gracile' descendants of a genetic upper class and the 'robust' descendants of a genetic underclass.

Looks almost right, aside from not even mentioning why intermediate forms will be selected against, and not thinking about selection occurring within the "underclass" that might mirror his supposed elite. And gene flow, can't forget the gene flow.

If anything, such a situation (not that he's actually right...) would lead to something akin to ring species, interbreeding subspecies of Homo sapiens. Or another analogy would be the situation that exits between the Canis lupus subspecies.

In short he's horribly, aggravatingly wrong.

The only part that's even right is the bit about off world colonies, but only if there's very limited or no gene flow and sufficient divergent selection or genetic drift. That's assuming those populations don't either Terra-form of alter themselves directly for the local environment(s).

One could imagine that this process, taking place over the next 100,000 years, will create more and more genetic inequality, and with it social and economic inequality

So he envisions a synergy between economical and genetic status. I still don't buy it, as there isn't a hard lock-in effect in reasonable economies. You have to add specific social pressures to achieve that.

And isn't Jolie a bad example here? Her father Jon Voight isn't anything like her classical beauty, and more to the point out of Jolie's 4 children only 1 is her biological.

His interpretation of The Time Machine is completely off.

And the misidentified ruling über-Morlock with his intelligence and IIRC mind-reading also invalidates his whole example of an underclass, dim-witted, genetically under-endowed species.

You have to add specific social pressures to achieve that.

And even then those are not guaranteed to prevent gene flow between different groups. Jews being the only example I can think of at present, who while religious rulings are meant to prevent others in principle from immigrating and breeding, the reality is that happens anyhow, even historically.

That and cultural changes can conceivably (and do) dissolve such cultural barriers. They just are nowhere near as effective as geographical and genetic barriers to interbreeding.

This Oliver Curry's lab is called Darwin@LSE. He edits publications called "Darwinism Today".

Look what I found on his webpage :

Praise for Darwinism Today
'Buy these books by the dozen, and send them to all your relations instead of Christmas cards.'
Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene

I wonder if Richard would also praise this nonsensical essay.

PZ, what do you think of that ?

Just seconding what Stephen said in #11: The Guardian does employ knowledgeable science writers (albeit they aren't always used effectively), and runs the weekly excellent Bad Science column by Ben Goldacre. However, their Sunday sister paper, The Observer, seems to be going downhill and might be developing a habit of featuring front-page woo-woo. (Dr Goldacre has criticised some of the stories both on his website and in his Grauniad column.)

Another paper in the Irish and British islands which is usually quite good is The Irish Times, albeit most of their website is subscription (pay).

What that economic guy says about evolution is a bunch of claptrap because it's impossible to make such 'detailed' predictions. But the thread that goes through his story can make you think. In the course of the hundred of thousands years and so on, it would be almost inevitable that our species don't split up. Geoffrey Miller for exemple wrote some interesting things about this topic in his book The mating mind.

The series may not be as bad as Curry's fallacious piece... You'd hope so since it has talks from leading figures in evolutionary biology...

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep04234247.pdf
He also wrote the above article on the naturalist fallacy, I hate philosophers some days. He basically tries to get around the is-ought problem via use of the adaptionist program (aka just-so-stories) and convoluted moral reasoning. It's a semi failure, I want to agree with some of what he's saying, but his reasoning is grounded in undefined, subjective terminology and I can smell a circular argument in their. Or maybe it's just the lack of sleep and looming finals...

Either way, Curry is something of a hack, at least from what I've seen.

While I think the article is rubbish, you have to admit that some weird things are likely going to occur due to the LACK of selection. I heard somewhere that we will be blithering piles of goo because there's really no selection. All we do is sit around and when we have ills, we usually can fix them with medicines. There's no reason for us to be fit and healthy anymore (in a survival perspective) if we can be kept alive by medication.

"Kuhlmancanadensis": That doesn't get you a "lack of selection", just a different set of pressures. More focus on intrasocietal pressures (e.g., overall height increase), but there would also still be pressures against "quick-kill" and environmental problems -- say, we might eventually lose those immune over-reactions, pick up a resistance factor for hemmorraghic fevers, or even general resistance factors for air pollution.

Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.

Not a surprising prediction at all, given that the "report" was commissioned for a men's satellite TV channel. :-D

D Harmon-
Ah, you just have to pull me out of my well of despair! You're right.

What do you know (or have a link to) on the height pressures? I have heard that "we" are getting taller, but I really couldn't understand why. Myself... I am 5'0" and I think this is pure discrimination. ;) Anyway, I am curious about it. I'll try to do a google on it.

I want to be a Morlock!

Eloi intelligent and wealthy? That's hysterical, and must indicate the sarcasm in the article. Right? Right!? Please?

This old story popped up again in the BBC News website --- it appeared on their "most emailed" list last week.

Perhaps someone's figured out a way to hammer their server with bot requests for crusty old articles, to get them to rise up from the dead, as a way of advertising them or something?

Kuhlman,
"I have heard that "we" are getting taller, but I really couldn't understand why."

I always thought it had to do with nutrition (dairy intake...) and juvenile health improvements...

But wait, there is also the creationist explanation, it's because of homosexuals. It goes like this : God chose to make Northern Europeans much taller (it's true that the Dutch, the Scandinavians and the Germans beat the height statistics). Why ? Because he knew that they'd be the first to allow homosexual marriage. Then you have to turn to Genesis 6.4-7 : giants were on this earth, and they had evil thoughts, so he exterminated them (the flood).
So, it's a sign that god is sending us , the Dutch are the tallest because they were the first to pass permisive gay laws, and the flood that will come will exterminate them first.

Believe it or not, that was really explained to me years ago by a Dutch priest to whom I had told I was a Gay man...

Somewhat off topic, but why the HELL does CNN have a "top story" on ghosts? This is ridiculous:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/homestyle/10/26/toh.got.ghosts/index.html

A lot of the comments are expressing the same disgust but there's all sorts of woo responses as well. It's ridiculous and pathetic. This is what passes for news because we're close to Halloween? Argh!

#8: Spearing of furries

Can we give a special Molly award for "best typographical error"?
=======
Anyway, so this story turns up in the low-brow conservative Daily Mail and gets picked up by the low-brow conservative Fox News. I submit that the notion of a non-human permanent underclass is simply a conservative wish-fulfillment fantasy, an expression of their seething resentment and authoritarian belief in natural aristocracy.

Isn't it about right for the cons to re-institute social darwinism so they have horrible things to blame evolution for in the next 100 years or so? Oh wait, the end is near for evolution, so, given that the "theory" ('cause it is only a theory after all) will be thrown out any minute now.

Hmmm, which wins this morning, cynicism or irony?

When hitting cancel

Never hit cancel on a malware pop-up. "Cancel" is a lie. Close the window.

I got it at Tetrapod Zoology. It must be a Scienceblogs ad.

In the course of the hundred of thousands years and so on, it would be almost inevitable that our species don't split up.

If reproductive isolation comes from anywhere -- which may or may not happen.

So, it's a sign that god is sending us , the Dutch are the tallest because they were the first to pass permisive gay laws, and the flood that will come will exterminate them first.

Wouldn't the tallest have a (very minor) advantage in a flood?

Also, I cannot pass up mentioning the Almighty Tallest from Invader Zim.

Thanks, Cal. Zim was brilliant, even my poor insane son thinks so.

Curry's future anthropology belongs part of a larger genre of speculative zoology: future life, alternative histories, extraterrestrial life. Some are more science-based than others. It's only problematic when it's taken seriously. (But Curry's speculations are especially unimaginative and mediocre.)

'Man After Man' by Dougal Dixon, 'Future Man' by Brian Stableford, 'All Tomorrows' by Nemo Ramjet.

MSNBC, 2005: Future human evolution
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7103668/

Spider Robinson said something like: We're all idiots (he used a different word), but the worst idiots devote all their energy trying to be mistaken for non-idiots.

This is me, attempting to be mistaken for a non-idiot:

"Spearing of furries" -- I laughed at that this morning, too, even though I wrote it.

That's what comes of posting late at night, not reading what you wrote, and then signing back on late the next day to read it. It's too late to follow up with a fixit. But, but, but ...

SPEAKING of furries ...

Thirty years from now we'll have people walking around looking like anthropomorphic foxes and wolves, lions and otters. At the least.

I actually think that's kind of neat. If nothing else, whatever godders we have left by then are just gonna shriek.

I'll bet it says nothing at all about transhumanism in the Bible, but I'll also bet they'll find it there somewhere, the crystal-clear statement that Jesus doesn't WANT us to have prehensile tails, or to have computers hooked into our brains.

(And yeah, I do know about this guy: http://www.stalkingcat.net/ ... but, well, yuck.)

...

PZ ... any chance you might eventually do a post on transhumanism? It's a sort of speculative futury thing, but it's also something I really think we'll be facing, and soon. And it's very much an issue of biology.

Jesus doesn't WANT us to have prehensile tails

Damn it! I'd LOVE a prehensile tail. He's probably keeping us from having flying monkeys, too. Bastard.

PZ; I agree. I thought for a moment about posting on this but then decided not to. I'm glad you are pointing out the folly of this sort of prediction.

In other news, an American politician claims Martian war machines will soon land on earth, because they hate our freedoms. He demands NASA's Mars mission carry a nuclear warhead.

don't blame me; I voted for Kodos.

Hmm. Transhuman? Well, I always thought the women from Dark Angel was damn hot. lol Then again, I also rather liked an online comic called, "Shayla the Pink Mouse". Warning, if you google it, its an **adult** comic. lol

Seriously though, this clowns theory would be reasonable if you where talking about humans separated by some huge distance, like if we did settle Mars, then some political mess caused contact to be broken for 100,000 years... The problem is, it requires significant environmental drives to cause the changes, as well as long separation. The drives that exist are *not* significantly different between groups, nor is there sufficient distances to even create "ring species", never mind something more extreme. Worse, the only thing that would, even with significant changes in morphology, also cause speciation would be some key change in the genetic make up that "prevented" cross breeding. We can see from dogs and cats that even artificially induced morphological changes are not necessarily sufficient to create a the gap needed. We would need something like a donkey/mule/horse difference before you see the more extreme cases of radically different species. Its possible we might find "some" limitations like that in humans, the cases of blood types and complications with certain pregnancies being one such, but unless that escalated to such an extent that it happened in 90% of the population, instead of what... 2%, or what ever it is, it just isn't feasible to think that this is going to happen.

But, it **is** possible. I peg this on ignorance of statistics and lack of valid evidence that such a shift is/will happen, not on being totally 100% wrong. As long as intermixing keeps happening, its damn unlikely that the few oddball things, like blood type incompatibilities, are going to expand into some huge species gap. Its the rest of his **predictions** as to what the species are going to "look like" that are complete and total BS, not the basic premise. lol

Biggest problem in assuming any sort of divisional split on any grounds in Homo sapiens: somewhere there is a male human who, however gorgeous multiple women thought him hours ago, does not, as of this moment, have his penis inside of something. Anything presented, or imagined to be presented, will very probably be sought out, and thereafter penetrated.
Good gravy, I live in the twenty-first century, and I know of several men who have violated livestock! The very idea that "male sexual selection pressures" exist is silly. Men will always stick it in the nearest available, and the term "available" is disturbingly ambiguous, hole. Species, sub-species, knothole, between cushions (yes, I'm sorry to any women with male adolescents who think that their furniture is still virginal), I've never encountered the least bit of "selection" in the human male.

Heehee. It's all very silly. What's disturbing is that it was one of the BBC News Website's "most read" stories a few days ago.

As for the malware problem, I haven't had it. Then again, I use the adblock plugin for Firefox, so I don't even see said banner ads. And even if it did manage to download something, I use Linux, so it wouldnt affect me :)

Sadly, this is pretty typical fare for any UK tabloid whose title begins (or once began) with the word Daily. None of them are worth either the paper or the webspace on which they are printed. They'll pretty much print anything these days. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them ran a story to counter this one that ran along the lines of us living in a future where there are no over-30s, or where the rich breed the poor just to provide them with a reliable supply of super-nutritious snack food...

On the way home for lunch, I heard Rush Limbaugh read this article on his broadcast. He then went on to further his agenda of diminishing science by portraying scientists as a bunch of wacko liberals who don't have anything better to do than waste tax money coming up with this crap.

He furthered his commentary by saying there are already two species of humans, liberal idiots and "republicus erectus"

One could imagine that this process, taking place over the next 100,000 years, will create more and more genetic inequality, and with it social and economic inequality

So he envisions a synergy between economical and genetic status. I still don't buy it, as there isn't a hard lock-in effect in reasonable economies. You have to add specific social pressures to achieve that.

And isn't Jolie a bad example here? Her father Jon Voight isn't anything like her classical beauty, and more to the point out of Jolie's 4 children only 1 is her biological.

His interpretation of The Time Machine is completely off.

And the misidentified ruling über-Morlock with his intelligence and IIRC mind-reading also invalidates his whole example of an underclass, dim-witted, genetically under-endowed species.

When hitting cancel

Never hit cancel on a malware pop-up. "Cancel" is a lie. Close the window.

I got it at Tetrapod Zoology. It must be a Scienceblogs ad.

In the course of the hundred of thousands years and so on, it would be almost inevitable that our species don't split up.

If reproductive isolation comes from anywhere -- which may or may not happen.