Stabilizing Selection limits
Human Skull evolution on Human Birth Weight
In this episode of
the 1960's TV Sci-Fi series "The Outer Limits", a scientist
develops a means of accelerating human evolution experimentally. A
young Welsh miner agrees to the experiments. The photos show
successive stages of the treatment, from a very high forehead, to
a greatly enlarged cranium with obligate "pointy ears", to a
massive skull with exaggerated bony ridges reinforcing the
sutures, complete with psychokinetic powers, and pre-Spockian
ears. Intellectual development is accompanied by a loss of
ordinary human feeling, as the New Man is contemptuous of "primitive"
humans.
Exaggerated developmental of the skull in
imaginative literature is often accompanied by weakening of the
post-cranial skeleton, including narrowing of the hips and atrophy
of the arms and legs. However, any 21st-century mother can
speak to the compatibility of a greatly expanded baby skull with a
narrowed maternal pelvis.
