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)?
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.