Hey DV, I was just thinking... if our population is so much larger then it ever was in the past... couldn't evolution happen in a much shorter time frame?

Here are some number for you to consider:

homo habilis (ape people, for those of you who don't recognize the name) existed 2,000,000 years ago.

Their population was somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 1,000,000.

Today we have a population of about 6,600,000,000

Today about 2,000,000,000 people live in conditions where natural selection would still be prominent.

Doing quick math, that means there are 20,000-2,000 times as many people undergoing natural selection now then back then.

If we divide 2,000,000 (length of time to go from homo habilis ---> homo sapien) by the difference in population we get 100-1000 years.

Thus, just as we went from homo habilis --> homo sapien in 2 million years, we might be able to evolve from homo sapien --> (largely different species) in 100-1000 years provided we keep this sudden explosion of population...

Discuss.