What would a genetically perfect human look like

This is more speculation unless someone has some research articles or something of the like to share.

I've been fascinated with the idea of a genetically perfect human. Genetically perfect form of any species. I'm curious what that would mean for us however. I don't know where to begin considering. Hoping to hear someone's thoughts on the matter.

What makes a so-called perfect human body? How about skin like a squid's or legs like an ostrich's?

For anatomist Alice Roberts, a medical doctor and writer, the vision of human perfection had nothing to do with modern standards of fitness and beauty. Rather, she imagined how a person's body could be improved by swapping out some of our less-successful features for more-desirable body parts that evolved in other animals, documenting the results in the BBC Four program "Can Science Make Me Perfect?" which aired in the United Kingdom on June 13.

Roberts collaborated with artists and biologists to build a model of her own body that was modified from head to toe with adaptations intended to improve on the human form. Together, the team created a startling Alice Roberts 2.0, still human-like but with some very unsettling differences: flaring, feline ears; a marsupial's pouch; and oversize, octopus-like eyeballs. [The 7 Biggest Mysteries of the Human Body]

The project originated as a three-month challenge issued to Roberts by the director of the Science Museum Group in London, Roger Highfield, to "iron out" problematic details in human anatomy shaped by our evolutionary past and replace them with structures that were more durable, more efficient or less "untidy," Roberts wrote in a blog post.

To build her idealized body, Roberts submitted to a full-body 3D scan, which the anatomical artist and sculptor would use as the digital foundation for the new, improved body. Then, Roberts put together a "wish list" of modifications — from the inside out. 

At the top of her list were "large, feline ears" to amplify sound and enlarged eyes that would be wired like those of an octopus, to do away with the blind spot produced by the construction of our own optic system. She borrowed a birth strategy from marsupials — giving birth to young at a very early stage and harboring them in pouches — to alleviate childbirth difficulties presented by human pelvises (their structure, which supports upright walking, is less than desirable for delivering large-headed babies).

As a replacement for human legs, which have a lot of their mass distributed far from the center of the body, Roberts looked to bipedal ostriches for inspiration. Her new legs featured the bulk of their muscle concentrated closer to the pelvis, with bigger tendons "for shock absorption," she said.

Other improvements were under the skin — lungs like birds', which process oxygen more efficiently; a shorter and more stable spine, like those of chimpanzees; and more links connecting the coronary arteries, which would enable both arteries to funnel blood to all parts of the heart, as is the case in dogs and guinea pigs.

Roberts was kept in the dark about how all these features would come together; she was barred from the artists' studio while they 3D printed and assembled her new body, and she didn't see the finished form until the Science Museum unveiled it "in all its weird glory" on April 25, Roberts wrote on her blog. While the body she constructed seems pretty extreme, Roberts said she would have adjusted it even more if she'd been given more time to tweak and tinker.

The figure will be on display until December 2018 as part of the museum's "Who Am I?" exhibit on the science of human identity.

Original article on Live Science.

To understand our future evolution we need to look to our past.

Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel?

Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour?

Of course, we don’t know, but to consider the question, let’s scoot back a million years to see what humans looked like then. For a start, Homo sapiens didn’t exist. A million years ago, there were probably a few different species of humans around, including Homo heidelbergensis, which shared similarities with both Homo erectus and modern humans, but more primitive anatomy than the later Neanderthal.

Over more recent history, during the last 10,000 years, there have been significant changes for humans to adapt to. Agricultural living and plentiful food have led to health problems that we’ve used science to solve, such as treating diabetes with insulin. In terms of looks, humans have become fatter and, in some areas, taller.

Perhaps, then, we could evolve to be smaller so our bodies would need less energy, suggests Thomas Mailund, associate professor in bioinformatics at Aarhus University, Denmark, which would be handy on a highly-populated planet.

Living alongside lots of people is a new condition humans have to adapt to. Back when we were hunter gatherers, there would’ve been a handful of interactions on a daily basis. Mailund suggests we may evolve in ways that help us to deal with this. Remembering people’s names, for example, could become a much more important skill.

Here’s where the technology comes in. “An implant in the brain would allow us to remember people’s names,” says Thomas. “We know what genes are involved in building a brain that’s good at remembering people’s names. We might just change that. It sounds more like science fiction. But we can do that right now. We can implant it but we don’t know how to wire it up to make it useful. We’re getting there but it’s very experimental.”

We know what genes are involved in building a brain that’s good at remembering people’s names. We might just change that."

Thomas MailundAssociate Professor in Bioinformatics

“It’s not really a biological question anymore, it’s technological,” he said.

Currently, people have implants to fix an element of the body that’s broken, such as a pacemaker or a hip implant. Perhaps in the future, implants will be used simply to improve a person. As well as brain implants, we might have more visible parts of technology as an element of our appearance, such an artificial eye with a camera that can read different frequencies of colour and visuals.

We’ve all heard of designer babies. Scientists already have the technology to change the genes of an embryo, though it’s controversial and no one’s sure what happens next. But in the future, Mailund suggests, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes. With that may come choice about a baby’s features, so perhaps humans will look like what their parents want them to look like.

“It’s still going to be selection, it’s just artificial selection now. What we do with breeds of dogs, we’ll do with humans,” said Mailun.

This is all rather hypothetical, but can demographic trends give us any sense of what we may look like in the future?

Predicting out a million years is pure speculation, but predicting into the more immediate future is certainly possible using bioinformatics..."

Dr. Jason A. HodgsonLecturer in Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment

“Predicting out a million years is pure speculation, but predicting into the more immediate future is certainly possible using bioinformatics by combining what is known about genetic variation now with models of demographic change going forward,” says Dr. Jason A. Hodgson, Lecturer, Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment.

Now we have genetic samples of complete genomes from humans around the world, geneticists are getting a better understanding of genetic variation and how it’s structured in a human population. We can’t exactly predict how genetic variation will change, but scientists in the field of bioinformatics are looking to demographic trends to give us some idea.

Hodgson predicts urban and rural areas will become increasingly genetically diverse. “All the migration comes from rural areas into cities so you get an increase in genetic diversity in cities and a decrease in rural areas,” he said. “What you might see is differentiation along lines where people live.”

It will vary across the world but in the UK, for example, rural areas are less diverse and have more ancestry that’s been in Britain for a longer period of time compared with urban areas which have a higher population of migrants.

Some groups are reproducing at higher or lower rates. Populations in Africa, for example, are rapidly expanding so those genes increase at a higher frequency on a global population level. Areas of light skin colour are reproducing at lower rates. Therefore, Hodgson predicts, skin colour from a global perspective will get darker.

“It’s almost certainly the case that dark skin colour is increasing in frequency on a global scale relative to light skin colour,” he said. “I’d expect that the average person several generations out from now will have darker skin colour than they do now.”

And what about space? If humans do end up colonising Mars, what would we evolve to look like? With lower gravity, the muscles of our bodies could change structure. Perhaps we will have longer arms and legs. In a colder, Ice-Age type climate, could we even become even chubbier, with insulating body hair, like our Neanderthal relatives?

We don’t know, but, certainly, human genetic variation is increasing. Worldwide there are roughly two new mutations for every one of the 3.5 billion base pairs in the human genome every year, says Hodgson. Which is pretty amazing - and makes it unlikely we will look the same in a million years.

Featured image © Getty | Donald Iain Smith