The Chronicle of Obstreperous Hypotheses: Are Humans Going to Speciate?

The Birth of a Slave Race

Lately I’ve been thinking that it would be cool if one of the four species of humanoid that went extinct in the past million years (five if you count those “hobbits") was still around so we could round them up, start a captive breeding program, and create a slave race suitable for tearing tickets at movie theaters, bussing tables at McDonald’s, tweezing back hair, etc.

(Surely Homo erectus would have been able to follow simple instructions, maybe even move up to dishwasher if he did a good job and didn’t waste too much time knapping parking lot gravel into hand axes.)

Slave Race Not Working Out So Well

But seeing as how those guys have been out of the picture for a few hundred thousand years, here’s plan B: let’s see how long it takes modern humans to speciate into a race of Elois (that would be you, dear reader) and Morlocks (that would be whomever you have a low opinion of).

Improbable, you say? Bullshit, I reply: respected scientists like Bruce Lahn of the University of Chicago have already declared that the speciation of Homo sapiens is a foregone conclusion. Others, like crotchety old Ernst Mayr, who will almost undoubtedly do a couple of turns in his grave on account of appearing in this article, have begged to differ. He was also famous for being contrarian about modes of speciation that later proved true, however, so I think we can safely disregard his objections. (I also have it on good authority that he would roll up all the windows and lock the doors and fart in the car with the heat up, while his family suffered… and he would laugh.)

Neanderthal Porn

If you’re not at all scientifically inclined (welcome, Google users searching for “neandertal porn”!) you probably already have some idea how this might happen, which is to say, you’re betting that all the ugly people are going to turn into a race of Morlocks who will be driven underground by their social betters. (You may go now—what follows is bound to bore you to tears.)

Everyone who’s still with me, you were probably taught in school that the way a new species forms is that mountain ranges erupt from the earth and split populations into a pair of geographically isolated groups who go on adapting to their new environments until half of them are wearing pants and the other half are cannibalizing the products of unions with their sisters, voting Republican, stuff like that.

You Idiot

That would be a slightly outdated view of how evolution happens. The cool new hypothesis that’s sweeping the salons of college towns everywhere is something called sympatric speciation, which can happen even when the organisms in question are living right on top of one another. (Yes, poindexter, I’m aware this isn’t actually a new or cool hypothesis, but its widespread acceptance most certainly is.)

Examples of sympatric speciation abound in nature if not the scientific literature (scientists can be slow to pick up on these things, God bless ‘em, but Darwin, he knew--he believed the primary mechanism of speciation was sympatric speciation, and it only took us 200 years to get back to that auspicious starting point).

Sexy Time!

The most famous example of this kind of speciation is the Cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria, and they illustrate the most important point in the entirety of this absurdist diatribe: one thing that can drive rapid sympatric speciation is sexual selection.

Which is to say, if a particular female decides that she happens to prefer only the males with green stripes, and this preference is heritable, it’s possible that within a few generations what you’ll get is a sub-population of green-striped males and their admirers. Since the members of this group aren’t exchanging genes with other members of their own species, they are already well on their way to becoming distinct from it.

When Cool Kids Rule The Earth

So all we need for humans to speciate would be for a mutation to arise that makes a particular segment of the female population find, say, hipster douchebaggery unbelievably erotic. ("But wait!” you say, “that’s already happened!” “Yes,” I reply, “now shut up and pay attention.")

Of course, hipster douchebaggery would have to be strongly heritable, and it is--all these upwardly-mobile Midwesterners running around the east village in ratty sweaters and beards are transparently the progeny of self-styled hippy parents who conceived them while on acid at Woodstock, in between turns at square jobs.

Take the behavioral isolation I just described, throw in some kind of selective pressure, say mass migrations and resource wars brought on by global warming, and we’d expect that within just a few thousand years there might arise a group of humans whose taste in music and fashion was so insufferably affected that the mass of humanity would categorically refuse to mate with them. Voila: a new species is born.

‘Deliverance Country’ Declares Eminent Domain on New York and L.A.

Or imagine this scenario: scientists discover that political preferences are heritable. (They are.) Then scientists discover that a particular political preference confers on its practitioners a selective advantage. (On average, conservatives have 40% more babies than liberals.) Finally, imagine that the divide between these two ideologies becomes so stark that their adherents stop breeding with one another. ("Want to meet a man who has more of the same goals in life as you?” reads the tag-line at Conservadate.)

Now throw in some kind of selective pressure, say apocalyptic nuclear war brought on by world leaders’ staunch belief in unicorns and fairies, and within a few hundred years biology might succeed where secessionists failed; that is, in cleaving the people of the U.S. in twain.

That’s Crazy! 39.95, and I Get the Vegetable Slicer at No Additional Cost?

By now you are probably asking yourself whether any of this could possibly be true, so let me help you sort it out. All the stuff about speciation? True. Those parts of this article were fact-checked by an expert in the field, an esteemed scientist who has spent years and years working on this kind of stuff (otherwise known as my girlfriend). The bits about hipsters and republicans becoming their own species? Trick question. Everyone knows they’re already there.

More to the point, could a trait arise that would lead to some kind of runaway sexual selection, generations of heated assortative mating, and the advent of a humanoid unrecognizable to us today? Absolutely. It’s happened only about a bazillion times before in the history of life on Earth, and to imagine that we occupy some privileged position that might make us immune to the forces of natural selection is about as logical as voting against your economic interest.

Superbabies!

What’s more, there are all kinds of things going on in labs all over the world right now that might actually accelerate the process. You don’t have to have sat through all two hours of that turgid 1997 vehicle for Ethan Hawke, Gattaca, to know that genetic engineering is going to allow us to fill the world with little blond-haired, blue-eyed babies, should we so desire.

As Dr. Lahn put it in a recent interview:

“I think we as a species now stand at a watershed moment in the history of life. For billions of years, evolution of life forms has been governed by the Darwinian process of random mutations followed by selection. Now, we are about to revise that principle dramatically by genetic engineering. Instead of starting with random mutations, of which only very few are advantageous, we can now prospectively change our genome (and the genomes of other species) in ways we intend.”

In conclusion, nuclear war, global warming, engineered superbaby monstrosities, and life marching on in a grand pageantry of cosmic amorality whose vast indifference to your petty human concerns could not be a more perfect form of nullity. Got it? Good - now don’t go lowering your standards and dating across political or class lines, or none of this will work: gene flow is the enemy of speciation and, by extension, my dream of creating a race of docile, simple-minded back waxers.

Christopher Mims is hereby ordained as Inkling Magazine’s Chronicler of Obstreperous Hypotheses AKA a columnist who delves into those stubbornly defiant and unruly hypotheses that science often entertains.