What will our stupid faces look like?
There have been a lot of big-eyed, orange people floating around on the intertron recently, with people talking about the “evolution” of humanity. Sorry, but if your future history includes genetic manipulation or artificial selection, that’s art and fashion, not evolution.
Evolution (that is, natural selection) is what happens when parts of a population breed more than others. That’s it. And yes, it does apply to humans. I’ve talked about some recent positively-selected (i.e. “beneficial”) mutations in humans, and you can also hear what actual biologists have to say on the subject. But without going into details, how can you get a PICTURE of what humans will evolve into in the next X generations?
Step 1) Establish a baseline. Chose an age (say 30). Make composite faces based on every male and every female human being aged thirty. If you don’t have the resources for that, make composite pictures based on a representative sample of humanity. Here’s a twist: the baseline won’t look European. It will, however, look beatiful.
Now that you’ve established what the average man or woman looks like, now it’s time to project into the future. Of course we have no idea what selective pressures may affect the relative frequency of our genes in the future. However, we can take a stab at what selective pressures are in operation right now. And that’s grandkids. The more grandchildren you have, the more successfully you have spread your genes and the more selected-for those genes must be. What did those genes actually do to get you to have so many grandkids? Who cares? All we know is that the people who breed more have more influence on the genes of subsequent generations.
So Step 2) Take the top 50 percent of grandkids-havers and make a composite of their features and that will be your picture of humanity in the near future, assuming no new mutations and no environmental changes.
Step 3) Take the top 10 percent for a more exaggerated and therefore more distant future.
Unfortunately, we don’t have good global statistics second-generation fecundity. The best we can do is look at fertility rate (number of births per woman) and factor out infant mortality (deaths per thousand live births). No, you can’t just use population growth, because immigration is part of that. And you can’t look at young populations, because that might be due to a war or something that killed old people.
Step 4) Here are the countries with the highest fertility rates, in order of which has the best fertility/infant mortality ratio.
East Timor
Burundi
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
So will everyone look like East Timoreans in the future? Not necessarily. Developed countries have low fertility, but also low mortality. Maybe enough to swing things.
Adding the 10 countries with lowest infant mortality to the mix, we get a new list.
Monaco
Bermuda
Iceland
Sweden
Japan
France
Singapore
Italy
Hong Kong
Macau
East Timor
Burundi
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
Obviously there’s a huge gap between countries with lots of dead babies and countries with a very small number of living ones. The people who’s grandkids inherit the future should be somewhere in the middle. How to find it? Why, gapminder of course.
Obviously there’s a correlation between infant mortality and total fertility.
If things stay the way they are (they won’t, but if they do), as time goes on we should expect to see those countries in the middle taking up a bigger and bigger percentage of the total human gene pool. Those would be the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which have the (evolutionary) golden combination of high fertility and low death. Again, this isn’t a measure of number of grandchildren, but at least people in BRIC countries have more chance of having grandchildren than the extremes in Monaco and Afghanistan.
Superimposed over each other, those average faces give us someone who looks like this: (drum roll)
Except that when added to our list, here’s where the BRIC countries fall out:
Monaco
Bermuda
Iceland
Sweden
Japan
France
Singapore
Italy
Hong Kong
Macau
Russia
East Timor
Burundi
China
Uganda
Liberia
DR Congo
Brazil
Sierra Leone
Niger
Guinea-Bissau
Mali
Afghanistan
India
Ouch, India. So the future face of humanity is…Russian? Huh.
Obviously all of this stuff is very back-of-the-envelope, but it’s an example of the kind of thinking that should tell us what our descendents might look like. For less hedging and more certainty, I will need a grant for 10 million dollars to fly around the earth in my hover-census-photobooth, taking pictures of everyone and asking them how many grandkids they have.
I’m sure Kickstarter will help me.
