We don’t often think about it, but humans are still evolving biologically, behaviorally, socially, and culturally. While people are still evolving biologically these changes often occur at a much slower rate and require greater external pressures to bring about change than behavioral or social evolution. We may see some future biological changes due to climate change, super bugs, increasing fat in diets, and other things, but right now there isn’t any obvious biological evolution ongoing so I’m going to focus on behavioral and social evolutions. One of the most obvious examples of ongoing social evolution is the LGBTQ movement. This process has been building up for the past hundred years or so, but we have seen a drastic change in the past twenty to thirty years. The stigma around being an LGBTQ person has lessened significantly, recently, gay marriage is legal everywhere in the U.S. and continues to be legalized around the world, more and more people are viewing gender as a spectrum, traditional gender roles are becoming more blurred, and generally there seems to be less bigotry and greater acceptance of LGBTQ people around the world today. What’s interesting to me about this social evolution is that some of the same concepts that surround the biological evolution we’ve discussed in this course are also occurring in this social evolution. For example, we talked about evolution being an ongoing process, and how hominins were a mosaic evolution, meaning they had both primitive and derived traits. This is true for social evolution too. While the legality of gay marriage has increased significantly over the past thirty years it is still illegal in some countries. This is true for general acceptance of LGBTQ people as well. It seems generally that there is less bigotry towards people that are LGBTQ, but there is still hate towards these groups. Also, we discussed how one adaptation can lead to others and have a snowball type effect. Similar to how the change in the location of the foramen magnum led to more upright walking which lead to other morphological changes. This can be seen in the evolution of the LGBTQ movement as well. The women’s suffrage movement led to increased rights for women which led to more women joining the workforce which led to less traditional gender roles which led to greater acceptance of people who don’t fit traditional gender roles. Similarly, the civil rights movement led to anti-discrimination laws which led to the more recent pro-LGBTQ legislature, legalizing gay marriage. One cultural change has been the shift from agrarian societies to industrial societies. This has been a very long process starting thousands of years ago but feels like we have, or we are close to reaching an equilibrium. Slowly, humans have been increasing farming technology which has increased yield while lowering work. With the industrial revolution we saw an acceleration of this process where now there are very few farmers required to produce lots of food. Again, we see a mosaic of evolution as there are still mostly agrarian or pastoral societies in the world, and there were changes which led to changes causing a snowball effect similar to what I talked about earlier. Ultimately evolution is an ongoing process with no ultimate goal or perfect design, with the world constantly changing so will human’s biology and culture.