Ah yes, this is the story of how in 100,000 years an underace of short, thick people will evolve.
No need to wait 100,000 years, just bimble down to the west Wight and you can see the future!

Actually, I have been saying something like this for ages - we would have a "labour" species and a "thinker" species which may or may not be the same as an "artisan" one. It makes absolute sense from an evolutionary standpoint

I think that's somewhat of an over reaction to say it scares you. Writing the whole thing up would take longer than I have, but it comes down to roles within society, the people most likely to take on those roles and the traits valued in those roles and therefore among those people. Which is all evolution is, if you think about it

*blinks* FFS how up your own arse are you?

The phenomenon it's talking about is called sympatric speciation, whereby two species diverge in spite of no geographical barrier between them, and from what I gather it's largely disreputed in academic circles owing to the lack of evidence for it and the unlikely conditions which would need to be in place before it occurs.

What's interesting about this example, though, is that it's proposing a cultural barrier rather than a geographical one. It's probably analogous to reproductive isolationism. There was a study in butterflies early last year which showed a similar phenomenon, whereby two different subspecies of butterfly, distinguished by their wing markings, would avoid each other as mates based on this cosmetic difference. The Time Machine example had the distinguishing feature being socioeconomic background, which actually makes sense if you look at indicators like education and access to birth control being correlative with how much money your parents earn. The above article, however, seems to be using physical attractiveness as its feature of distinction.

Here's where it becomes clearly bollocks, because, shockingly, this happens already, and has been happening for millions of years. All other factors being equal, people tend to partner up with other people of roughly similar attractiveness within the confines of their own culture. People also tend to find attractive other people who look somewhat like them or their family, because on a genetic level that increases the likelihood their offspring will be like them. If you take a bunch of random people off the street and give them a series of butchered wedding photos, they'll have a startlingly good chance (about 85%, I think, but I can't find the citation online) of matching up husband and wife based on how conventionally attractive they are.

Anyway, the reason why this makes it clearly bollocks is because conventional cultural attractiveness exists on a very wide and quite internally inconsistent scale rather than bifuricating. People who are a bit attractive will mate with other people who are a bit attractive and have similarly partially-attractive kids. If people become more selective about their sexual partners, all that will do is reinforce this, because then people will opt for the most attractive person they can find which will normalise to someone at around their own league.

Naturally, attractiveness isn't the only trait on which people select their partners, but the same argument applies to any appealing trait you might find in a partner. The reason you won't see races of artisans or intellectuals or grunts is because these traits exist on a scale as well. So either people select partners who are like themselves and it normalises to about the same spread of species characteristics or everything I've said is all bollocks, people select partners based on whatever criteria they like, and it randomly normalises to produce the same effect.

Either way, no speciation.

The bigger penises and perter breasts thing sounds good ;)

I did read that didn't I? I hope my imagination isn't running riot again.

I do enjoy the oversimplification of the ignorant and stupid - unfortunately such people are likely to be with us for the foreseeable future :)

Always good to see a pile of dog's do make it onto a BBC news site. uh. *sigh*

Anyway if people didn't say and do stupid things, we wouldn't look clever ;)

I got this story syndicated in the Boston Globe this morning. I have never heard as big a pile of shite in all my life (althouth I have heard alot of equally big piles of shite). It is writtin by a economics guy with zero understanding of population genetics. Pure, absolute and complete tripe

A lot of people can be trained to do something - and do it well, but not really think about what they do from an abstraction of that thing. They are probably the same people who believe in speciation! ;)