Josh Hill  wrote:
>
> I agree that bioengineering is likely to swamp Darwinian processes.

Uhm, that's not how the words work.  If bioengineering changes
the demographics of the populations of future generations then
bioengineering IS a Darwinian process.  But your point is noted -

Now that humans understand genetics at a level more advanced
than selective breeding we are driven to give our children better
lives than we have had.  As a result genetic engineering WILL be
used on humans.  The movie Gattaca is a wonderful tale of what
happens during the time when it's not yet universal but laws or
not it will evenuallt become universal.

> Still, I've long suspected that our species has continued to evolve in
> modern times, and I gather that biologists are starting to come around
> to that view.

Remember how evolution is defined - Genetic change from
generation to generation.  Anyone who has studied biology
has known from the gate that evolution has coninued all
along.  It's not the scientists who are starting to come
around to that view; they've known all along.  It's the general
population that's gradually coming to realize that humanity is
a work in progess not an end product.  Heck, there's only a
few religions that teach that humanity is an end product; they
just happen to be among the most popular religions on the
planet at the most.  But one of the "big three" Buddhism
doesn't teach that humanity is an end product that I can
tell.  And lots of ancestral faiths understood the concept
that we're included in the gradual change.

> Most recently, I read that people in Southeast Asia have
> extra copies of a gene involved in the metabolism of starches,
> apparently as a consequence of their ancestors' post-agricultural
> diet. The way we live has changed radically, and evolutionary
> pressures have remained intense.

There's also lactose tolerance evolving into more and more
of humanity becasue we eat dairy products.

> Beyond that, will the reduction in
> mortality rates reduce the rate at which evolution occurs?

I bet it will.  Combine that with universal genetic
engineering and the result will be strange changes
in both fitness and longeity that will gradually push
the rate of change per year down even though the rate
of change per generation increases.

> Will it last?

History says any period of exponential expansion of
anything eventually tapers off.  We're now seeing that in
transoprtation.  We got to the moon in the 1960s and have
not been back since.  We had supersonic planes in the
1950s and no longer have any doing commercial flights.
In the US there are now more train tracks being pulled
up than put down.  We are already out of the expontenial
growth phase in transportation.  Travel Earth to Earth now
has maybe 95% of the population under a week of travel
from each other.  Now that number is tapering down.

It won't be until interplanetary travel becomes common
that the next exponential phase starts.  Maybe a couple
of decades, maybe a couple of centuries.

> Immortality would
> effectively end human evolution, unless we found a way to evolve
> without dying. Interesting premise for science fiction, isn't that . .

Except it doesn't effect the change rate of new generations
just the pressure to go somewhere else.  Heinlein scratched
the surface of that trend without doing much about humans
changing.

> .. And of course there's the premise, beloved of science fiction
> writers, that we unimproved humans will coexist with and be
> manipulated by more evolved versions of ourselves, and everyone by
> thinking machines. That would be in line with the usual progression of
> evolution, in which later-to-evolve and usually more complex species
> co-exist with earlier ones rather than supplanting them.
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