Will the Women of the Future Be Shorter?

Are we getting shorter?I would guess that 47.3% of my strangest news comes directly from the Telegraph. According to this recent and bizarre article, the women of the future will have different sized bodies and they will have the ability to have children for a much longer period of time. This is good news for all of the future career gals out there who would like to have children, but for a strange combination of reasons, can’t have them in their 20’s or 30’s.

The target year for the change is 2409, which is in direct conflict with the Mayan calendar’s prediction of doom and destruction in 2012, and will be roughly ten generations from now. The authors of the study predict that by 2409, women will be shorter and heavier, but will also be fertile for longer spans of time due to a later menopause.

The study was conducted by Yale researchers who studied the histories of 14,000 people of the town of Framingham, Maine. After pouring through the historical records, the researchers discovered that shorter, heavier women had more babies than taller, thinner women and predicted that evolutionary factors would lead to shorter women who researchers think will be about five pounds heavier in the future.

As strange as it sounds, the authors of the study claim that their predictions are based on evolutionary factors rather than environmental factors, so in theory, this will not only happen in Frahmingham, Maine, taking regional differences into account.  

The interesting part of the study is that it reflects the researchers belief that evolution is continuing in humans, which is something that was considered debatable. Just how fast are humans evolving? We are apparently, “slower than evolution in Galapogos finches and Trinidian guppies....and more on par with New Zealand Chinook Salmon...” While that might explain human evolution quite clearly to some evolutionists or ichthyologists, this data doesn’t actually give me anything useful by comparison as I am not particularly interested or knowledgeable in the evolutionary cycles of salmon.

Luckily for the future human generations, genetic influence over reproduction is believed to account for only 5%, so 95% of our reproductive choices can still be attributed to free will.