I think any animal adapts to it's enviroment and humans are no different. If things carry on evolving the way they have in the past 40 years it will mean more people working in jobs where they're bodys are used less and they're minds are used more. This would lead to an enlargement of the brain and a reduction in the size of the body to compensate. The result will look remorkably similar to the aliens a lot of people claim to have seen. Could our future generations have already invented time travel?
First of all, I'm new to the list, so I'd like to say hi from Sligo, Ireland.
An interesting point Red Mist, but really just the stuff of science fiction and/or the wishful thinking of ufologists. Any prediction we make about the future 'design' of our phenotypes is bound to be highly improbable. After all, phenotypic change happens over a geological time-frame. The human form has not physically evolved (not noticeably, at least) since the beginning of civilization. We can expect to wait thousands of years before any small changes are obvious, and society could be radically different then to the way it has been 'in the past 40 years', which is a mere eye-blink in the evolutionary time-frame.
Of course, the whole point about memetics and cultural evolution is that humans no longer rely on the biological substrate to evolve. Through culture, we can 'interfere', as Sodom puts it, with that biological substrate itself. Perhaps, then, our interference will favour small bodies and large heads, and perhaps even green skin, but for the moment genetic engineering is concerned with *stasis*.
That is, we strive to remain the same; to preserve what we consider are the most attractive and healthy features of the human organism, in generations to come. Quite where large heads and small bodies will enter this foray, I'm not sure, though I concede that any move towards this type of form in a geological time-frame would be so incremental as to be imperceptible to any one generation.
The more immediate effects of humans working in jobs where 'bodies are used less and minds are used more' is that our phenotypes become *extended*. In place of our bodies, we use other machines - computers, automobiles, etc. - to carry out our work. Our extended phenotypes will change dramatically in the coming years, but our bodies are going to stay the same for quite a time yet.
Michael H.