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0 pointsIIAOPSW5y ago0 comments

I'm not so sure. Even with modern transportation technologies, the price of moving is still high enough that the number of single ethnicity births will generally outpace multi-ethnicity births. I don't think we have nearly enough airplanes and jet fuel to homogenize the genetics of ~8 billion people. But I also haven't run those numbers so feel free to change my mind.

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corty5y ago

Even if intercontinental interbreeding is still rare, societies and therefore breeding patterns have become far more connected on a local, national and intracontinental scale. Where there used to be the proverbial inbred populations in remote mountain valleys, mobility has completely erased the formation of such pockets. Same for marriages to other nationalities and religions. Where my german catholic grandmother might have gotten into trouble for marrying a protestant or a frenchman, nowadays that isn't a problem anymore.

Geographic variation will not dissappear completely, but the granularity and amplitude of those variations was and will continue to be smoothed a lot.

mytailorisrich5y ago

A few instances of "new blood" in a population can be enough because it will then spread over generations.

In many countries the proportion of foreign-born is >10%, so the mixing is quite intense in terms of evolutionary time scales.

If that continues for a few hundreds of years, diversity will have significantly reduced. Indeed, some suggest that e.g. skin colour may largely homogenise within a thousand years.

A thousand years might sound like a very long time wrt. a single individual's lifespan, but for these issues it is nothing at all. In addition, some traits (e.g. pale skin colour) are quite recent from what we know.

bryanrasmussen5y ago

So Science Fiction Story time, immortal finds it difficult to blend into future less diverse population because their personal characteristics are no longer widely enough found that they can just wander off and go live somewhere else.

The last X is an easy target.

on edit: for anyone unfamiliar with this trope, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_Methuselah or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth (both written by Jerome Bixby, but many other examples by Neil Gaiman, etc. available) for easy clarification. One of the common ideas of the trope is that an immortal sooner or later becomes problematic to have in one place, they must wander of people will attempt to experiment on them to figure out the secret of immortality. Of course the second bit of the trope is the wandering immortal leave traces, and more intense searchers after immortality will follow them and attempt capture. If diversity decreases in the future based on present trends the story then becomes that it becomes increasingly difficult for the wandering immortal to wander without everyone being aware of them.

nobody99995y ago

There are a number of other stories which address this as well.

Sometimes without the trope you mention (L. Sprague de Kamp's The Gnarly Man[0])

And sometimes with a variation on it (Heinlein's Methuselah's Children[1]), which he follows up with some of the same characters, but not invoking the trope (Time Enough for Love[2]).

There are many others of course, those are just the ones that came off the top of my head.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnarly_Man

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love

nmca5y ago

Visit Brazil, they did it with boats.

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