Great Interest In All The Motorcrashes

Recently, there were some stories online about am Australian publicity stunt to promote car safety: they created a modified human body to survive car crashes. And they named him Graham. They described the project as the human body catching up to automobiles, since we really haven't had time to adapt to them. So in some hypothetical world where cars have been around for millions of years, we'd end up looking like Graham.

That's interesting, because I've always wondered how evolution would change modern humans. See, contrary to what you may have heard from your biology teacher or Marvel Comics, evolution doesn't make living things "better." It responds to their environment to make changes to make them more likely to survive. Or at least, to reproduce. For instance, a creature won't just suddenly become a faster runner unless there's some reason why running faster will make them more likely to live (say, by outrunning predators.)

So, for modern humans, it's hard to say which way evolution will take us. To use that running example, it's unlikely we'd evolve to be better runners, since we rarely have to outrun predators anymore. However, if you can run fast, you'll be successful at athletics, which will increase your likelihood to reproduce.

To be clear, I realize that this discussion is moot. It would take tens of thousands of years for any evolution to be noticeable, and it's increasingly clear that long before that we'll have either destroyed ourselves or transcended biology.

But it's interesting to contemplate, because there's all kinds of ways modern life might change us, and not necessarily in positive ways. For instance, it takes a certain maturity and forethought to make the decision to use birth-control. And people who have that maturity and forethought will be less likely to reproduce, thus breeding it out of the human race.

And Graham's creators have a point: since car crashes are one of the things most likely to kill a person before they can reproduce, surviving them would probably be a big influence on our evolutionary path. The only other factor that would have such an impact on our chances of reproducing would be impressing the opposite sex in high school. And I think the idea the idea that we would evolve to become a fifteen-year-old's ideal is even more horrifying than Graham. Suddenly the choice between apocalypse and uploading or consciousness to computers doesn't seem so bad.