IT IS great fun to speculate about how human beings will evolve, but the progress of natural selection is fiendishly difficult to predict.

Oliver Curry’s “Evolution Report” makes interesting reading, but some of his predictions are quite bizarre from a scientific point of view.

He is probably right to suggest that humans will live longer and grow taller, though some scientists think that there will be a natural ceiling on the age to which humans can live.

Other parts of Dr Curry’s forecast, however, rest on shakier ground. He suggests that interbreeding will lead to the emergence of a uniform coffee-coloured skin tone. After that, distinct socio-economic groups will become so delineated that they rarely interbreed, producing independent sub-species of human.

Neither idea is implausible, but predicting both looks like having your cake and eating it. If interbreeding can trump sexual selection to dissolve races, it should probably be resistant to social pressure, too.

Some of Dr Curry’s medical predictions are scientifically strange, particularly the idea that relying on technology to protect health will lead to cancer “not being weeded out of the gene pool”.

This misunderstands why cancer still affects us. Natural selection “weeds out” deleterious mutations only by killing people before they have a chance to breed. Cancer escapes because these errors kill their carriers only after they have been passed on.

The role of cosmetic surgery generates another mix-up. It is a principle of evolution that acquired characteristics, such as enhanced breasts, cannot be inherited.

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