Here’s a cool slide that was shown during the Ancestral Health Symposium. It’s the average of many female faces from different countries in Europe.
As you can see an average face tends to be beautiful, in every country. But that’s not the point that this slide was supposed to make. This is evolution at work.
All these women have common ancestors, but a few thousand years of semi-isolation has led to a divergence of their genetic averages. Continuing isolation would eventually lead to these people diverging into different species of humans. I guess that would take hundreds of thousands of years of isolation though. Not likely to ever happen.
Another piece of information from the conference: Only 14% of the American population completely believes in evolution. If you happen to belong to the other 86%, then feel free to make up another story about the faces.
PS
Do you want to see average female faces from across the world? Here’s a bigger and better-quality picture.
Update august 19
WOW! A huge number of people are reading this post as it just went viral on Reddit. I decided to do an update.
If the women at the top demonstrate the difference after a few thousand years of divergence, what would happen after tens of thousands of years?
This:
Average female faces across the world
This is the result of roughly 40,000 years of evolution in semi-isolation.
What kind of difference can result from millions of years of genetic divergence? Here’s an example:
Distant cousins
This is a chimpanzee and a human – distant relatives. Our last common ancestors lived around 5 million years ago, maybe somewhat more.
How will humans evolve in the next five million years? Nobody knows.
You can call them nutty right wingers, buy might I remind you that its those nutty left wingers who are wanting to ban fats, sodium and other things that their high-carb/Big pharma backers are preaching to them.
Is it nutty right wingers pushing vegetarian "Meatless Mondays" in the state of California on public school children?
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Los-Angeles-City-Council-Embr...
It would be nice if people could tone down their smugness a tad and agree that it is okay to disagree without getting into name calling and labels.
Rather, the crocodile and the duck share a common ancestor. The archosaurs are a clade basal to both birds and crocodilians. The population of archosaurs developed different traits which each helped suit them to the environments in different ways. As these changes became exaggerated over many generations, there were then two types of archosaurs. One of these is Crurotarsi, recognizable by genetic evidence of paternity and fossil evidence of homology. Members of Crurotarsi have specialized articulation between crus and tarsus, specifically between the fibula and calcaneum, with a hemicylindrical condyle on the calcaneum articulating against the fibula. Crurotarsis are still archosaurs! They never became a different kind of thing, they just ALSO became Crurotarsi. On the other side, there is Avemetatarsali, also recognizable by genetic evidence and fossil homology. Members of Avemetatarsali develop more birdlike footprints instead. They are still archosaurs! You never outgrow your ancestry. This means that birds ARE STILL dinosaurs, and men STILL ARE apes and STILL ARE monkeys.
Each of these terms has a meaning, and provably applies to us today. While this is a list of numerous stages we have been and still are, this is by no means our full phylogeny:
Cellular, Eukaryote, Unicont, Opisthocont, Holozoan, Filozoan, Animal, Eumetazoan, Bilateral, Deuterostome, Chordate, Craniate, Vertebrate, Gnathostome, Eugnathostome, Teleostome, Tetrapod, Amniote, Synapsid, Eupelycosaur, Sphenocodont, Therapsid, Eutherapsid, Neotherapsid, Theriodont, Eutheriodont, Cytodont, Mammaliform, Mammal, Theriiform, Holotheric, Cladotheric, Zatheric, Tribosphend, Theric, Eutheric, Placental, Boreoeutheric, Euarchontoglire, Euarchont, Primate, Haplorhin, Simiiform, Anthropoid, Catarrhin, Hominoid, Hominid, Hominina, Homo, Sapiens.