Thought experiment, if a bunch of people went to live underground, would they evolve differently? Assuming they would live, die and reproduce the same as they did on the surface?
Like, does evolution only stem from survival of the fittest, or does our offsprings genetics change at all from the environment (outside of radiation and such of course)?
I’ll try to explain my thought process. Due to modern medicine and other aspects driving down mortality, human evolution isn’t really based on survivability (I assume it’s more based on attractiveness currently?). If we assume that people who have less sensitive eyes would have the same survival rate, would people still evolve to have more sensitive eyes?
Death is not the only driver. Reproduction is by far more important. Death only affects evolution because it prevents reproduction. With modern medicine then sexual selection becomes a bigger driver.
And even then evolution will always happen as mutations will always happen. Even if it is mostly just random drift in features.
We see many aspects of this over and over. Birds on island tend to lose their ability to fly. Larger animals on islands tend to shrink over time. Even isolated humans in extreme places (like high up on a mountain or that do a lot of deep sea diving) show adaptations to their environment. Once isolated even small pressures on your ability to reproduce will affect the population over time. It just might take a lot longer.
Oh you mean because we have developed technology to balance out evolutionary pressures and the people going underground would take that technology with them. Good question.
I’m no expert (just an interested layperson). But I’d assume the evolutionary pressure would be lower so evolution towards larger eyes might be slower. There’d still be a certain advantage in being able to see better in low light. Technology can fail after all.
The thing is that we’ve had technology to circumvent our bodies’ weaknesses only for an extremely short amount of time, from an evolutionary point of view, so there’s no precedence. There are scientists speculating that we’re now driving our own evolution.
Attractiveness btw is just fitness made visible. We generally find things attractive that promise offspring that will be able to adapt to the environment. That’s the very very short version, in reality it’s of course a lot more complicated. And again, we now have technology to fake fitness so who the fuck knows what’s going to happen.