…continued from Bamboo Lemur Knows…

I’m not some guy on the street corner holding up a doomsday sign, but technology will have an effect on our evolution, and that effect may be negative.

Just like the Lac Alaotra bamboo lemur, the more specialized a species is, the more vulnerable to change it is. Including our species.

The more we rely on technology and the more sedentary our lives become, the more adapted to that lifestyle we’ll become, at the expense of our ability to live any other lifestyle—i.e., in a world without technology.

Let’s say we don’t actually blow ourselves up or drain all of our planet’s resources (we’ve almost killed off the Lac Alaotra bamboo lemur and did kill off at least 15 other lemur species when we landed on Madagascar a couple thousand years ago—including a species that was the size of modern gorillas.)

According to National Geographic, human population growth in the last 40,000 years (especially the last 10,000 years with agriculture) has sped up our evolution.

“We’re evolving away from each other,” said University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending. “We’re getting more and more different.”

So here’s my question…

What if a few thousand years from now something changes in our eyes to make them better at seeing two-dimensional, static objects like a computer screen? At the same time, the change makes our eyes worse at seeing three-dimensional, moving objects like a deer in the woods.

What happens if technology goes bye-bye and we have to return to hunting and gathering (i.e., the plot of every apocalypse or zombie movie ever made)?

If Madagascar gives us any clues, we probably won’t survive very well or not at all.