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Lurker, while there are many concerns regarding human evolution, it is a conceit to say that we now control everything that cold affect our ongoing evolution.
it is still continuing in many ways. for example, our jaws.
humans are the only animal in which nearly every single member of our species has dental bite issues. Our jaws and teeth and mouths are still evolving egneration to generation due to the rapid (in earth-time terms) development of easier to eat foods, cooking, and language, all of which make use of our mouth parts in ways that were not dictated by the environment.
OUr jaws are getting smaller and our teeth are getting smaller and smaller in number. Almost no one has a perfect set of teeth in a perfect jaw with a perfect bite. nearly all other vertebrates with teeth have nearly universally similar bites. You may see one dog in 1 thousand with some bite issues, but in the large sense they all have perfect bites. their jaws stopped changing until humans got involved in their breeding.
when vertebrate animals mature, their upper teeth nearly perfectly meet up with their lower teeth. this applies to all animals. Humans, not so much. There is a foreseeable possibility that as our food gets smaller and our use of language grows or shrinks, our mouths could become very small, even toothless.
humans have one thing that is new, at least a sfar as we know. that is the ability to willfully alter our environment and ourselves based on knowing what the outcome will be. we can exxcefcrise knowing we will be stronger for it. we can get dental work, knowing it will make for far easier chewing.
in this respect the second article you posted makes me think of a possibility put forth by many thinkers, that humans are on our way, mentally at least, to be able to comprehend the universe , ourslves,a nd our place in it, in a manner which can only be called god-like.
what if all our god myths all our creation myths, all our fables about supernaturaL beings are just our prescience, our human colecive unconscious preparing us for the time wehn we as a species will rise so far above the "natural world" that we will be like gods?
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