Human evolution IN SPACE

[CraigM]

Originally Posted by Nosforontu

If your initial colonist were selected from Olympic Level Athletes, and the environment of the colony really requires very athletic/fit people to survive then your colony is probably going to have a fairly high preponderance of people with various Athletic Talents. They will probably also have a higher Health Attribute/Dex/ or Strength scores as well. Just because the initial genetic starting pool might exclusively be composed of the top 1% of people in athletics in the world.

You could of course set the criteria differently and get different results as long as your starting population is not generic humans but humans selected from the greater population because they all share trait x or lack traits y. As a bit more crude example if your colony is composed elusively of Asians then none of them are going to be blondes or red heads barring extreme environmental factors on the colony world.

This is quite likely to have unpleasant and/or unexpected consequences.

Example 1: Bio scientists have been selectively breeding lab rats for over a hundred years now. The breeders try to pick the healthiest animals, and tend to use rate of mass gain during infancy as a proxy for health. As a result, the most common strains of lab rats now used grow to adult size much more rapidly than wild rats, but also tend to have much shorter potential lifespans (if given time; in reality, most wild rats become prey or starve before they grow old, and most laboratory rats are eventually euthanased). The candle that burns twice as bright, etc.

Example 2: There is an island off the coast of the U.S. (Martha's Vineyard), that was isolated from the mainland for a long time, and was settled by a group from a single English village. By chance, this village had a higher than usual rate of hereditary deafness. By the time they built a bridge to the mainland, something like 20% of the population were deaf. As a result, deafness had become something akin to colour-blindness in the severity of its impact. As everyone had deaf relatives, absolutely everyone on the island was fluent in sign language, so Deafness had lost most of its isolating and disabling effect.