If you have read HG Wells’s “Time Machine” or seen the movie you will remember that the main character travels into the far future where he encounters a race of beautiful, graceful humans called the Eloi. Their idyllic life hides a horrible secret, the threat from a race of literal “undermensch”, the Morlocks. Descended from the economic underclasses, they are the opposite of the Eloi and embody Hobbes’s description of man’s life being “poor, nasty, brutish and short”.
As with so many of HG’s predictions, it now seems that this one will come true and possibly in a shorter time scale than he envisaged.
The BBC has a report about the extrapolations made by an elvolutionary theorist at Oliver Curry at the London School of Economics, a world reknowned college and therefore he should be considered a reasonably authoratitive source. There is however a caveat that he explained his projections in a program for the Bravo channel.
Assuming his theories hold out, mankind will peak around the year 3000. That’s presumably based on the assumption that we have not completely buggered up the planet by then. By then everyone should average between 6ft and 7ft tall and lifespans will extend to 120 years.
Physical appearance, driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility, will improve, he says, while men will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.
Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds.
In the words of the 1970s song the “great big melting pot” will have produced a race of “coffee coloured people”. Unforunately their dependence on technology will start a decline.
In 10,000 years time, reliance on technology and medicine will start to take a toll.
Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.
Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.
Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.
There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.
As a result of sexual selection and economics as in the HG Wells novel, there will be an eventual split into two distict types.
People would become choosier about their sexual partners, causing humanity to divide into sub-species, he added.
The descendants of the genetic upper class would be tall, slim, healthy, attractive, intelligent, and creative and a far cry from the “underclass” humans who would have evolved into dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures.
If we discount the economic aspects that have yet to play out, maybe we can already see the prototypes of the Eloi
and the Morlocks
