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So, a little deserved mockery heads the way of the LSE’s Dr. Oliver Curry and his “study” (coughcoughbollockscough) about the – drum roll, please – FUTURE EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY. In case you missed it, his two-month “study” predicts that in 1,000 years, people will have become coffee-coloured giants, and that in 100,000 years, humanity will have split into two species, one a race of tall, healthy, intelligent beings and the other into “dim-witted, ugly, squat goblin-like creatures”.

Now, needless to say, this is a load of made-up-on-the-spot cock, and if Dr. Curry actually billed Bravo TV – who commissioned the “research” as a promotional stunt – for two months work then, well, good luck to him. Any attempt at predicting evolutionary trends so far ahead is so unreliable as to be meaningless, even when you don’t have to factor in little things like “will our society have collapsed?” or “will we still be living on the same planet?”

Of course, it got oodles of media coverage – it’s currently the most emailed story on the BBC, living up to their usual non-standards of science reporting – so everybody’s happy. Well, Dr. Curry and Bravo are, at least.

But what’s incredible about this isn’t just that some hand-waving sword & sorcery futurism can get so much coverage if you just stick the word “expert” in there (which everybody knows), or just how willing some scientists are to encourage the perception that science is just a form of story-telling in lab coats (hey, widescreen plasma TVs don’t just pay for themselves). It’s how little Dr. Curry seems to know about population genetics, human behaviour, history, or any of the other topics you’d think would be a pre-requisite for even making an vaguely educated guess at possible human futures.

I’ll skip over his year 3,006 predictions (the “we’re all coffee coloured, race does not exist” idea is plausible, but crap; regardless, little of what he’s talking about here is strictly evolutionary, it’s developmental, medical and nutritional in nature), and plunge straight into his year 102,006 ideas. The general idea is that a combination of global travel, technology, genetic engineering and, oh, you know, other stuff will have resulted in a genetic elite – the “gracile” form – who are tall, beautiful, healthy, intelligent, and awfully good company at parties.

Meanwhile, the genetic underclass – the “robust” or “chavvy” form – will be stupid, fat, ugly and tiny. These two groups will not interbreed, and will have in fact become different species. Woah.

This will have happened because greater sexual selection – facilitated by greater geographic and social mobility – allows the beautiful, healthy and intelligent to choose good matches for themselves, resulting in a growing gulf between the sexy elite and the drab masses. Meanwhile, better healthcare will have preserved genetic defects that would have previously been weeded out.

But this is completely arse-backwards. Greater opportunity for interbreeding is a barrier to speciation, not a prompt. Sympatric speciation – speciation without any geographic barriers between populations – is really rare, and when it happens, it relies on very clear, discrete distinctions in behaviour or genotype. For example, in a situation where the heterozygotic genotype (that is, where the offspring gets two different version of a gene from each parent) is worse than any one of the homozygotic forms (where they have two identical copies) then gradually the “middle ground” forms of a species might vanish, splitting the population in two. Other means include very specific behavioural cues (like times of fertility) resulting in two populations that never get to interbreed.

For example, the Californian grunion famously times its mating orgies according to the phases of the moon. But if, say, fallout radiation from North Korean nuclear tests (stay with me) induced a mutation in 5% of grunion that meant they timed their mating to co-incide, not with the full moon, but the finale of Strictly Come Dancing, then that 5% would never get to interbreed with the moon-guys – and in the course of time, they’d become different species. (I think I explained that well.)

But such specific circumstances are nowhere near being the case in a globe-hopping, sexy-partner-seeking humanity. The factors Curry suggests will mark out the superhumans aren’t simple, discrete, Yes/No things that can be simply seperated out like this. And there’s absolutely no reason to believe that they’re linked – that beauty gets packaged with intellect and with height and with being good at watercolours. Rather, a quick glance around suggests that, well, no, they’re not, and they never have been. “Yes, but what if they had my looks and your brains?”, as George Bernard Shaw said to the actress.

The idea that assortative mating – like breeding with like – could produce speciation that seperates out such a wide range of factors relies on a very rigid assortative mating holding true for many generations. But then, even for such trivial (and immediately discernable) factors as height, we know that assortative mating only holds true within certain parts of a population. Yes, by and large, people seek out mates who are in roughly the same percentile as them for height – except for the outliers. Very tall people tend to seek out very short people (otherwise known as “the Rod Stewart effect”), and boom, you’ve got an automatic negative feedback loop.

Then again, Curry’s ideas also require consistent non-assortative mating as well to blend non-linked traits together, so who knows. Hey, it could work – a few milennia of exclusive Brad/Angelina pairings, followed by many generations of Arthur Miller/Marilyn Monroe hookups, we’re nearly there.

But while Curry’s idea of an elite that has all the genetic advantages is unconvincing (ignoring as it does social mobility, economics, and the plain simple fact that elites are so not the most genetically healthy segments of a population – European aristocracy, anybody?), it’s nothing compared to the guff we hear about the goblin-people.

There’s simply no explanation – and no explanation possible – for what selection pressures could possibly lead humans to evolve in less fit directions. Sexual selection? The uglies get rejected by the sexy elites, so they deliberately seek out ugliest and stupidest mates they can find? Nonsense. There’s some suggestion that over-reliance on technology will turn us all into useless slug-creatures. So we all pig out in front of the holovision and get transported everywhere in flying pods, get fat and rubbish and thick, and thus humanity actually evolves into fat rubbish people? That’s called Lamarckism, and it doesn’t bloody happen.

No, the idea of human devolution into feeble, stupid hobgoblins is purest fantasy, without even implausible science ot back it up – but it does, however, appeal very nicely to class prejudices, and the hand-waving, woo-science justifications that everybody loves to have when they want to explain why they’re better than others.