How long would it take for minor divergent adaptations to occur...

how long would it take for minor divergent adaptations to occur. like a human offshoot developing unnaturally large pupils and near translucent skin. due to living on a planet with little to no natural light.or would artificial light sources render this unlikely

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sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin
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Longer than you'd think but also sooner than you'd think.

A good thing to keep in mind is that the earliest recorded evidence of proper humans was some 100,000 years ago - conservative figure - so that's a good ballpark to aim around.

Given environmental conditions, however (magic, deathworld, radiation), it could be sooner than that.

It depends on
1.) Competition and the mutation either being harmless or beneficial, making sure the mutation isn't fatal nor takes the mutant out of the gene pool.
2.) An environment that favors the natural mutation
3.) The mutation to randomly happen in the first place.

You're just as likely to develop an inexplicable or worthless fetish for icecream for no god damned reason compelling you to eat it as you are to develop extra rods and cones to see better color, user. It's all the same crap. Will this slight difference, this random mutation, benefit you or your children in any way that the mutation's lacking will be detrimental in others? If not, then you'll likely be outbred and it'll disappear from the gene pool.

White people came into existence roughly ten thousand to fifteen thousand someodd years ago. We came out of africa and parts of asia, mingled, interbred, then mutated into the caucasoids, and then further mutated into white people, specialized for surviving in areas with shit sunlight, since vitamin D is fucking important for human health. We mutated the ability to process dairy long after we're supposed to have been weaned, so sucking from animal udders meant we could survive living in a frosty hellhole while others would suffer malnutrition and die or shit themselves to death from the lactose in animal milk.

Meanwhile you go to east asia, they developed a different kind of resistance to alcoholism and an increased number of rods and cones for seeing colors. An asian woman could theoretically see more colors than any other kind of human on earth.

West Africans went from mild brown to Super Fucking Dark as they moved into areas where you either had protection from UV light or you got skin cancer and fucking died.

The real answer is; how long would it take humans to get environmental conditions that favored some strategies over others, naked of tools to help survive it?

sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin

It took about 4000 years for lactose tolerance to develop.

Light skin popped up over a few thousand years as well. This article doesnt tough on it very much, but I read that it happened shortly after the invention of farming, and they connected it to the grains grown in europe being very low in vitamin D.

Of course, this could be done much faster through deliberate genetic manipulation, and a bit less fast than that through deliberate selective breeding (just look at the russian domestic fox. That's only been around since the 60s or so, and it took about 10 generations to make those major changes).

I'm going to go a bit the other way, and say that such mutations would probably never arise. Humans have gotten past the point where evolutionary pressure define us. As long as the colony had functional technology pretty much equivalent to current day standards there would be no reason for genetic mutations to be seen as a good thing by the colonists, or to be a indicator of who would survive. Without that there is no evolution.

Now if you want to say the colony fell in to disrepair, then it might be possible. But you'd want to say they were without outside assistance for probably a good couple of thousand years, since they wouldn't likely have the tech to do gene alterations.

>We came out of africa

Oh good, the out of africa myth is still persistent among armchair intellectuals.

The out of Africa hypothesis, while not a certainty among anthropologists by any stretch of the imagination, is by far the leading and most widely accepted explanation for the distribution of humans. Your use of the word "myth" evinces a fundamental unwillingness to engage with probabilities that make you uncomfortable. Maybe you would be more at home in a board like /pol/.

With or without genetic engineering?

okay, guy. If we didn't come out of Africa, where?

Space seems to be the most common non-created by muh deity of choice answer.

>Humans have gotten past the point where evolutionary pressure define us.
lol

Well obviously from the United States of America, god's land he gave to his people, the Americans

USA USA USA

/sarcasm

It mostly depends on selection level.
If people get readily available light sources or night vsion and vitamine D the answer is - never. If not, it would take at least one hundred generations for barely noticeable changes. Less so if the environment is really hostile or resources are scarce or the desired features happened to become more sexualy atractive then vanila ones. Could be achieved even quiekr with eugenics program (deilberate or not), but it runs the risk of genetic deceiases - think jews with their noticeably higher then average human IQ but higher chances of geting cancer due to rougly 90 generations of untintenrional eaugenic selection.

I think the /pol/ approved hypothesis is migration out of africa before becoming anatomically modern, rather than after. It would help their argument that the races are subspecies rather than a singular species.

Thank you. That's what I was going to say.

If we're talking about modern humans it would probably never happen due to lack of necessity. Humans would simply create light rather than adapt to darkness and possibly down the line force mutation on themselves for convinience sake.

For evolution to function you need to have beneficial mutations passed on to the next generation, while at the same time harmful or non-competitive mutations cause their carriers to either die before they can mate, or produce unsuccessful offspring.

Current day medical science allows us to extend the life spans of those with harmful or non-competitive genes long enough for them to pass them to the next generation. Take for example children born with genetic heart defects, as little as 150 years ago, those children would have died either at birth or within their first year of life. Now they can have surgery and then go on to live a nearly normal lifespan, passing the defect on to their children.

So yes, evolutionary pressure no longer defines the Human species going forward. We aren't immune to evolution, mutations will still occur, but our technology allows us to stay the hand that would have culled the weak (or uplifted the strong).

All we can do is pray that genetic manipulation will catch on.

>tfw talking heads on the news call Slavery "America's Original Sin"
>tfw nobody remembers the Native Americans

Slavery ended 150 years ago, the destruction of America's original inhabitants was around 100 years ago, and yet we talk about Slavery significantly more.

So how realistic are the Belters from the Expanse novel/tv series? Would it be possible for humans to evolve so fast just because the environmental conditions would be so severely different (gravity in this case)?

Astronauts already suffer from dramatic bone density loss and cardiovascular alterations in zero-gravity after months in space, I can't imagine what would happen if that was allowed to happen over the course of generations.

I would imagine it's because the native population is low, and stuffed into corners, so they can't complain too much.

You would benefit from actually reading from this topic instead of attempting to extrapolate from what you learned in high school from that week and a half your science class covered evolution.

A different user here.

I personally had the idea that maybe humans arose around northern Africa near the fertile crescent and the Mediterranean sea but I don't know how one would prove or disprove that.

better looking people are more likely to breed than ugly people

therefore their DNA is passed along with greater frequency

eventually, people will get progressively prettier

evolution in action

evolution isn't about people evolving mutations to better survive although thats certainly part of it, its evolving mutations be become more likely to breed which in the animal kingdom usually means survive to maturity but in our current society means be able to attract a mate

in this way we're still evolving

That's not a mutation, just what would happen if a child grew up in low gravity, there health must be shit tho.

Nobody gives a shit about the Redskins, they aren't the talking head's favored pets they can use as a smokescreen for more important social issues.

>eventually, people will get progressively prettier
The problem is that standards of beauty change completely every few decades, and don't travel well even in modern times. Evolution takes a lot longer than 80-odd years to create a race of beautiful ubermensch.

>Nobody gives a shit about the Redskins
Even if they did, it wouldn't help. Natives are pretty much on the verge of being bred out of existence, and the alcoholism and suicide rate will get the ones on the res who are pretty much forcibly isolated from society. It's tragic and depressing as shit.