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Originally Posted by 100_Percent_Juice
Would you say that these mutations are still happening today? If so, what would you say one of the more recent events would be? The reason I ask is because I think most evolution theorists, similar to you, refer to animals as having learned and instinct being passed on. Shouldn't that still be happening with animals? What mutations would you say, if any, have happened with humans in the last few thousands of years other than continual learning?
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Evolutionary changes happen all the time, but remember that the process takes extremely long periods of time to create new species or subspecies or even common characteristics. It speeds up as life grows more and more diverse but it's still not a super fast process. It's easy to look at the myriad complexities of the human body and throw up one's hands and assume it simply must be the result of God's plan. But, if you think about statistics (you know, the high school math that isn't really math) it can make sense. Genetic mutations that are terrible happen fairly frequently- congenital diseases, birth defects, etc.- and favorable ones infrequently. We're talking winning the Powerball Lottery every day for a year kind of odds. Many are also the result of very slight, repeated incremental changes. Giraffes and Zebras have a common ancestor, but the Giraffes came from a herd or herds that had just slightly longer necks and tongues, so they were just a tiny bit better at eating Acacia leaves. I could go on and on with that sort of analogy but you probably get the picture. The difference between you and a Horseshoe Crab is an astronomically high number of these tiny changes resulting from very rare errors in the chemical process of replicating DNA.
Those who study such things think the last major leap in human evolution was between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, whereupon we became Homo Sapiens. To answer your question specifically, there haven't been any significant changes in our biological makeup in that time, though there have been many, many changes in how the average human falls into the ranges our genetic code allows. We are much, much taller on average than we were even 1,000 years ago because of changes like better diets, better medical care, etc. Our genetic code hasn't changed, but many environmental factors have.