I don't buy it. There may be distinct social divisions all over the world, but the dna has ways of sneaking through. The only way to evolve 2 seperate species is to have unbreachable genetic barriers. So until Chet and Rick stop diddling the help at the country club we'll get to be one big human family. Also there's no selective pressure for larger penises because they aren't displayed prominently when a female chooses a mate. The study also makes the assumption that our current lifestyle will continue, which without massive social change is impossible. I don't know why this 'scientist' is getting so much press. To me it seems like nonsense

Correct me if Im wrong, but in the H.G. Wells book, weren't the pretty Eloi simple, childlike and essentially cattle for the ugly underground dwelling creatures?

Dibs on the Morlock line. They were badass, man.

When I saw that in the news the first thing I thought of was Morlocks. This is why scientists should read a book every now and then; or at least catch up on the classics.

Jonah, good sir, is your posted image of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine supposed to...in someway mock Mr. Firth's article? Because, you know, I fucking hope so...

The human race will one day split into two separate species, an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures, according to a top scientist.

100,000 years into the future, sexual selection could mean that two distinct breeds of human will have developed.

Oh really? Aside from the mixed messages, exactly how does sexual selection itself prove this? Because I'm not seeing any reporting as to why that is. I'm only seeing that this "...alarming prediction comes from evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, who says that the human race will have reached its physical peak by the year 3000."

Mr. Curry's credibility ranges from something-nothing to being an evolutionary theorist. And he isn't really backing any of this shit up. At all.

[Bio]
Oliver Curry is a Research Associate at Darwin@LSE, a research group in the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also teaches Political Theory at New York University in London.

Okay...so he's basically on the line with Dr. James Dobson and Hank Hanegraaff, only less successful. He has a belief--regardless of what spawned this belief--and he's proving it by adhering to his top scientist status, and with this incredibly unsubstantiated bullshit.

These humans will be between 6ft and 7ft tall and they will live up to 120 years.

Uh huh. And how did you figure this shit out? Don't get me wrong, this is all fun & games, hypothetical, blah blah blah, right? Oh wait...that's right. It isn't being told that way in this article I'm reading in a Science & technology section of the Daily Mail.

"Physical features will be driven by indicators of health, youth and fertility that men and women have evolved to look for in potential mates," says the report, which suggests that advances in cosmetic surgery and other body modifying techniques will effectively homogenise our appearance.

Yeah. Uh, okay. Please, someone correct me if I'm being a moron here, which is actually super possible (so please do), but how does plastic surgery effect our spawn? I guess I'm struggling here because there is no supplied link to "the report". Or maybe "the report" is inexplainably embedded in the source. Maybe I should hack Daily Mail's "mainframe" and "reroute the encryption" and, like, find it and shit, no?

Men will have symmetrical facial features, deeper voices and bigger penises, according to Curry in a report commissioned for men's satellite TV channel Bravo.

Women will all have glossy hair, smooth hairless skin, large eyes and pert breasts, according to Curry.

Right. So basically, men will have bigger penises and women will have pert breasts. I wonder where he's been spending all of his research time...

Racial differences will be a thing of the past as interbreeding produces a single coffee-coloured skin tone.

Gee, really?! In only 100,000 years?! Astounding. Let me go smash my face on my kitchen's granite counter for 20 minutes. If I'm able to come back, I might be able to relate to this...these are theories, right? Not facts?

Medicine will weaken our immune system and we will begin to appear more child-like.

I'm sure medicine will weaken our immune system, but I guess I'm having trouble figuring out the retarded concept that we'll appear more child-like. I guess I need that report, huh?

"The report suggests that the future of man will be a story of the good, the bad and the ugly."

The report suggests that I'm not finished with my Bible II, because I've recently discovered (after my supposed completion) that I was too high on crystal meth in certain areas, and I need to work on those areas while being too high on something else. "Does crystal nine exist? I've heard of it before. Please, contact me if you know of any whereabouts!"

We'll get right on that, Mr. Curry. Right after we get off of the fact that there is no real science behind your absent report, or this stupid fucking article, you hack.

Sci-Fi class wars now!!

It's happening already-

Blue States: health care, education, mixed race dating giving rise to more attractive/healthier children, enlightened Buddhist/secular humanist ethos developing.

Red States: no health care, less education, race separation and/or inbreeding, fundamentalist observation of sky god cult.

Dynamite Stevens and Snoqualmie passes!

Jonah, you made my night.

With wicked awesome absent reports like this, maybe comments like this aren't so farfetched after all.

Dude...and I thought this was somewhat of a joke from Jonah...

And yet it's the main fucking headline on Drudge Report right now - 11:30 PM.

At first I thought this was pathetic, decided to take it pathetically seriously, and now it's on Drudge, which is indescribably pathetic. Who the fuck would humorlessly link to this tunamelt cuntfeed of a report?

This "scientist" certainly disposed of any claim to genetic competence, what with that uniform coffee color remark.

cmon poooeeee, and guuuyyysss, lets wait for the repoooooorrrrtttt...oh wait. the article doesnt mention when well see the report. poe ftw!!!

Is the scientist's name James Watson?

It's the Daily Mail, people. Chances are this "scientist" doesn't even exist. The Daily Mail is the worst newspaper in the history of the world. On an average day you can find someone railing against the nig-nogs in the Daily Mail, or demanding that the Pakis be clamped to the underside of trains.

I am particularly insulted by the two future-people illustrated in the image accompanying the BBC online article. The ruling elite human is clearly a man while the underclass human is noticeably female. Or just a squat man with flabby tits.

He might be right on height and race. We are getting taller, though natural selection has little to do with it.

As for race, the selective advantages of skin color become less important with modern technology. We also have substantial more migration and "Race-mixing" though that term has little actually meaning. Skin-color mixing would work better.

Skin color is a pretty simple, mostly Mendelian trait so evolving away distinctions is not really all that difficult. A few thousand years of no barriers to mating should substantially reduce skin color differences. Not that they would go away, but would cease to be so, well black and white. Think of eye color and hair color, both are inherited, but with more in-family variability then race.

I'm not really sure that selective pressures though could actually get rid of skin coler differences, unless something was selecting for one over another. The genes are there and aren't going anywhere, no more then hair or eye color genes have vanished despite offering no real survival or mating advantages.

As for the rest, the guy might want to brush up on his Darwin In order to have evolution you generally need some kind of selective pressure (though genetic drift and other process can affect change too). That process has to make it so organisms with the trait have more grandkids then organism without the trait. I don;t really see that happening with say, reliance on technology. Even if we are able to keep alive people whose poor immune system lets say would have killed them before breading, that number is rather small and given declining birth rates would, in a thousand years, only be able to have so much of an affect on the population as a whole. Even then, since there is no selection pressure for weak immune system there is no reason to suppose that there actual frequency would increase that much.

I don't really care, I'll be dead.

The article, as said by many, obvious bullshit. It was trotted out unquestioned by the editors of a shitty newspaper to move sales a little, like the "Was Darwin Wrong?" articles you see on MSN every 6 weeks or so. So of course, Fox News is likely to spend a few days going wild over it.
Frankly, it's obvious the "scientist" is describing his sexual fantasies. Child-like, sexually perfect beings frolicking in the upper class while morlocks toil in the fields? (and of course not much mention of the fact morlocks ruled the eloi in HG Wells.) This guy fancies the days of fucking your slaves for dirty kicks while your blue-eyed child bride bats her eyelashes in the Savannah sun.
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Wells' 1895 novel should be seen in the social context of his day. Victorian Britain had a rigid class structure resulting from urbanization during the industrial revolution. The workers lived in squalor while the wealthy lived in luxury. A solid middle class was emerging by this point but the Marxist bourgoisie/proletariat dualism was still the reality to observers of London at this time. Wells projected this idea to its logical conclusion with the two groups evolving into distinct species in the distant future. A similar theme appears in the 1926 German film Metropolis, although in the two-tiered society of the year 2000 both are still recognizably human.

Of course predictions about life 100K years from now, or even in the year 3000 is pure speculation, about as reliable as Buck Rogers, Star Trek or the Jetsons. New diseases appear that kill millions--AIDS was unknown in 1895 and recent talk about new superflu viruses like Stephen King's Captain Tripps may or may not happen. Global warming will certainly have an effect on the availability of habitable land, production and distribution of food and other resources, weather severity and many other things, some of which have already come to pass and some which depend on whether we are willing to modify our behavior. Of course there is also the possibilty that the human race will annihilate itself in nuclear warfare, something I grew up believing was inevitable (I read Neville Shute's On the Beach in high school at the height of the cold war). Basically, it's all a crapshoot. And as Monkey says, I'll be dead.

I just want to know that in the diagram, the 3rd guy from the end with a receding hairline and no chin/big overbite - is that supposed to be us now? If so, I'm in big trouble of becoming obsolete. Oh well, wasn't going to have kids anyways...

I thought this had already happened. I mean, hasn't anybody ever been to Eastern Washington?

Yes, it has already happened! The Descent was a documentary!

The idea humans will be around in 100,000 years at all is pretty much a fantasy. We've had modern, industrialized society for, what, a little over a century so far and we're already on the brink of environmental collapse and seeing mass extinctions on a par with an asteroid collision.

We should get started building intelligent robots now, cause this homo sapiens thing looks like a dead end. We had a good run of it, though.

The world is already two species. Jews have a unique soul that is closer to God. Gentiles have only darkenss and ignorance within them.

Jews are more intelligent, more spiritual, more rightous and better educated than any other people on this planet.

@24: Jews are tastier, too.

that future is now and it is the exact opposite. The ugly goblins have been in power for almost a decade with head ugly goblin Bush sending goblin hordes around the world. you have goblin bill oreilly on tv, goblin hutcherson preaching. The goblins may be dimwitted but they are very good at working in hordes to stay in power.

All you have to do is look at African Americans and you will see that it's all true!.. Talk about the missing links! All the hair straightening, green contacts lenses and diet experts can't change Oprah's profile and skin color! LOL!!!

@various trolls- Holy shit. Impressive levels of bastardy. I salute thee.
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huh, i just re-read this book the other day...how timely.