Stabilizing Selection limits
Human Skull evolution on Human Birth Weight
In this episode of
the original 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 pelvis.
