• Question: Will evolutin turn backwards and we'll turn into apes?

    Asked by rosie123 to Mark, Paul, Sarah on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      If you’d met some of my rugby friends, you’d see that that has already happened to some people….!

      But no, unless there is terrible catastrophe that plunges humans back to the Stone Age, I don’t think that will happen.

    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      No – sadly not!

      That said in the future if our environment changes [significantly!] we might have selection pressures that would make us more like apes again, but I think that is highly unlikely and even then we’d by like apes, not actually apes.

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 24 Jun 2010:

      Reverse evolution is a controversial subject. Some scientists think it has happened in some species. For example, US scientists discovered that stickleback, a tiny fish, living in a lake had reverse evolved its body armour after the lake was cleaned up of pollution. When it was polluted the sticklebacks had evolved to lose their body armour because visibility was so low that their predators couldn’t see them and they were safe. After the lake was cleaned up and visibility improved, the sticklebacks lots their security and had to evolve their body armour again. This is the only case I know of. For humans to reverse into apes we would need to lose all the genes that separate us from them – this is highly unlikely and would need some drastic environmental conditions to spark it.

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