Persuasive Essay On Human Evolution

Humans have been evolving ever since they first appeared on this earth. Evolution occurs over a very long period of time and it is hard for humans to believe that evolution is still taking place. It is difficult to imagine a future world where humans look and behave differently than we do today. We believe that the human race is constant. Although it is true that change in the human race occurred before our years on this earth, we believe that humankind has reached its plateau and has finished its evolution process. This idea couldn’t be further from the truth. Because evolution occurs over such a long time span, it seems almost impossible for a person to experience and see an evolutionary change first hand while they are living on this planet.

This change allows us to be better suited for environmental changes.

As a group, we believe that humans are still evolving, but in response to much different stimuli than before. For natural selection to occur there must be a variation of traits, differential selection, and heritability. We think the key difference between how we are evolving now and were before has to do with the differential selection. Modern medicine has made incredible breakthroughs allowing humans to maintain their health far beyond what was possible before. Because of this there is not much differentiation in regards to survival. Most humans live well into their 70s and beyond. Medicine has basically diminished differential survival because everyone has the potential to live a long life. We have vaccines for diseases and can cure or slow down others. But there is also differential reproduction, in which we believe to still be molding modern humans. There are many different reasons as to why humans choose a specific mate. Many times, people choose mates based on the similarity in each other’s traits. This causes certain recessive traits and genes to be passed down more frequently. For example, originally we all had brown eyes.

One key piece of evidence pointing towards evolution is the fact that people of today have no use for wisdom teeth, and in normal occurrences end up getting them extracted. But those teeth were once there for a reason, we just don’t have a need for them anymore due to our advanced diet. Our ancestors had much larger jaws than we do today. They needed these larger jaws with more molars (wisdom teeth) to enable them to chew their tough diet of roots, hard seeds, nuts and leaves. Wisdom teeth were the evolutionary answer to accommodate our ancestor’s eating habits. Today, we have utensils to cut and break down our food instead of an extra set of molars. We now eat a much softer diet than our ancestors once ate and have no need for a larger jaw. A study showed that around thirty five percent of humans are now born without wisdom teeth. These molars are on its way to disappearing all together. This example shows how our bodies are adapting to accommodate our new