So here's the idea...Evolution happens because of natural selection, right? Creatures that survive long enough to create offspring pass on their genes, and creatures that don't survive long enough to create offspring don't pass on their genes. So, the traits that tend to allow for survival and procreation get passed on, and other traits don't. Is it possible that human technology had reached a point that it has effectively made natural selection obsolete? With medical technology and everything else we have, survival is not really a funstion of our own personal traits. Nearly everybody in our society, regardless of any of their traits, can survive to pass on their genes, so natural selection (and therefore evolution) can not occur. It has been effectively shut down. Or, if we have not reached that point with our technology yet, is it possible we might in the future?

So, assuming that is (or will be) the case, a possible effect is that human evolution gets completely halted by our easy access to advanced technology. But that is only our society, right? Other societies that don't have such a proliferation of technology would not suffer that affect and would continue to evolve. Perhaps it is possible that another society, maybe a third world country or something, could then evolve beyond where we are in our halted evolution.

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So, assuming that is (or will be) the case, a possible effect is that human evolution gets completely halted by our easy access to advanced technology. But that is only our society, right? Other societies that don't have such a proliferation of technology would not suffer that affect and would continue to evolve. Perhaps it is possible that another society, maybe a third world country or something, could then evolve beyond where we are in our halted evolution.

So does anybody have any ideas for what those evolutionary changes that we miss out on because natural selection is not in effect for us might look like? What advantages could third-world countries have over the first-world countries in the future because they are still evolving and we are not?

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• We homogenize and Pasteurize milk so that people who would have died from drinking it survive and reproduce.
• We create vaccinations and cures for diseases that would normally have wiped out scads of people, and their inferior immune systems are reproduced
• We create weapons that give us an edge on competing species, so we all don't have to be as big and fast as the competition
• We alter our environment (air-conditioning, heat, shelter, etc.) so the less hardy members of our species survive
  

If you want to be pessimistic about this, you could say that we are dooming our species. One day, after the "inevitable" plague, or Armageddon, or cataclysmic meteor strike, we will find ourselves weakened as a species, our stronger traits too diluted to survive.

Or...

You can be optimistic and realize that we are actually ensuring the survival of our species. Our minds, through our technology, are what move us ahead of other species, and we are ensuring the survival of more and more "brainy" people (and not so brainy ones, too, but even the shear weight of numbers is an advantage).

In The Long Tomorrow, after humanity is decimated by a plague, we don't have the numbers to maintain our technology, and the last great hope in the microcosm neighborhood, the genius boy who might be able to bring back our advances, dies for lack of medical technology.

I kind of fall into the pessimist camp, since every day I see people that in the past would not have reproduced, and know they will not only spawn, but will probably flourish in our nerf'ed society.

That said I couldn't endorse euthanising people who I deemed to be inferior, given what an arrogant prick I can be that would be alot of bodies :-)

Now that's a survival mutation that could be very affective.

Actually, the most modern theories of evolution is where an extinction event eliminates the larger forms, and the unlucky. It usually decimates other life forms too.
The ecologies change, many times entire climates.
The survivors, the size of which depends on the extent of the extinction event, are now in isolated populations.
The largest of the smaller forms grow into the vacated large form ecological niches, with the necessary physical changes to handle the increased size.
With every appearance of a large form found in the fossil record, you can usually find a small version of that form two or three extinction events previously.

Look up Punctuated Equalibriam by Steven Jay Gould.
That is one step behind catastrophic evolution that I adhear to.

Forms like humans are a general form, and really has not changed much over time. Humans can live on almost anything and can live almost anywhere, even without heavy technologies.

With any world wide disaster, the humans closest to the planet will survive. Those in the city towers, and those in the ivy league clouds will not survive.