Question: Can we make adaptations to animals and/or humans happen faster?

David Christensen answered on 14 Nov 2013:

That’s an interesting question, thanks nicole84!

Adaptations are a result of mutations or changes in the DNA of individuals. If that mutation helps that individual to survive and reproduce, then that mutation is more likely to be passed on and those organisms have an adaptation that helps them.

To make evolution happen faster, we can choose which organisms to breed together and which not to allow to mate. We have done this for a long time with farm animals and with crops. Farmers have chosen animals with more meat or more wool or more milk and plants with bigger edible parts. This helps evolution happen faster because we make it more likely for plants or animals with particular adaptations to survive while others without those adaptations do not.

Similarly, we could do this with people and many people in the past have suggested that we do this, but this is morally questionable. To decide that some people can have children and others can’t seems horrible, don’t you think?

The other way to think about this would be to try to make us gain more mutations because maybe we might find more different adaptations that could be useful. It makes sense that a faster rate of gain of mutations would mean faster changes in adaptations and faster evolution, but many of the mutations will be unhelpful and will cause diseases. Therefore making adaptations happen faster by making us have more mutations is also bad. Unless we can choose to only get the good mutations. But the problem there is how would we know which mutation would be good until we tried it?

I don’t think there is a way to change how humans evolve although we can still easily do it with plants and animals.