(June 24, 2013 at 8:11 pm)Gods_Unreal Wrote:(June 24, 2013 at 7:49 pm)bennyboy Wrote: Of course most species are now extinct. That's because they failed.
It's true that there will eventually be no organisms that we'd recognize as human. But it's not necessarily because we die out. We may simply survive long enough, and encounter enough new environments, that we evolve out of it.
You don't seem to understand very much about evolution. There will come a day, however you define that day, when there won't be a single homo sapiens left on this earth. "Evolving out of it" is still "dying out," in the view of homo sapiens, which won't exist anymore. It won't be "us." Forms will have mutated sufficiently for their classification to fall outside of "homo sapiens," and those remaining who are will eventually die. Maybe not the first time, maybe not the second, but, eventually, natural selection will favor the new forms over us. Those new forms will be a new species, and it will have its own concerns. I don't much care about what those are.
Uhmm. Disagree. there is no real "homo sapien" it's just a name we give to ourselves cos humans like to name things (especially scientists, just take a look at all the proteins). There is no point in time where homo sapiens came into being, it's a continuous change. Gradual and slow change but continuous. We name things not to reflect reality but for organizational purposes, in this particular case. (Species has a functional purpose because separating populations that way does help us understand them better, but in evolutionary terms ... species across timescale, eg. if you go back far enough, you'll be biologically unable to breed with your own ancestor, I don't see the point of having this separation, because it has no practical purposes and doesn't help us understand evolution any better, which is not discontinuous.) Other than that if we don't go extinct, we'll be the ancestors of whatever occupies the face of the earth, just like forever ago a single celled organism was our ancestor. Whether it's "us" or "something else" is something for people to play with depending on their definitions, but it's not something that any evidence will speak to, it'll depend completely on what one defines to be a homo sapien.
I don't think evolving into something else is extinction. Extinction requires that a population completely dies out. Evolving is a state of being for every population. As long as a population is evolving it is not extinct. And every population is evolving.
