[mytailorisrich]

Even as the single human species we used to be spread into isolated groups, that's why different populations have specificities (e.g. skin colour, but also other adaptations).

Now that we have such a huge and interconnected population diversity will fade and adaptation will slow.

[enkid]

I don't think that genetic diversity will necessarily slow under those conditions. Genetic differences between people are already dominated by individual genetic differences over group genetic differences. Our diversity is more about us as individuals than as a collection of groups. Why, then, would the mixing of groups decrease diversity? I would think it would increase it.

[mytailorisrich]

For example, Tibetan people have developed a genetic adaptation to high altitude. This can only have happened because of the relative isolation of that specific population. Now that we are constantly mixing and have technology to fix everything such adaptations are much more unlikely to arise or even to be kept.

All in all, the global human population will become more homogeneous and less diverse.

[enkid]

People being less adapted to specific environments is not the same thing as being less diverse.

[IIAOPSW]

I'm not so sure. Even with modern transportation technologies, the price of moving is still high enough that the number of single ethnicity births will generally outpace multi-ethnicity births. I don't think we have nearly enough airplanes and jet fuel to homogenize the genetics of ~8 billion people. But I also haven't run those numbers so feel free to change my mind.

[corty]

Even if intercontinental interbreeding is still rare, societies and therefore breeding patterns have become far more connected on a local, national and intracontinental scale. Where there used to be the proverbial inbred populations in remote mountain valleys, mobility has completely erased the formation of such pockets. Same for marriages to other nationalities and religions. Where my german catholic grandmother might have gotten into trouble for marrying a protestant or a frenchman, nowadays that isn't a problem anymore.

Geographic variation will not dissappear completely, but the granularity and amplitude of those variations was and will continue to be smoothed a lot.

[mytailorisrich]

A few instances of "new blood" in a population can be enough because it will then spread over generations.

In many countries the proportion of foreign-born is >10%, so the mixing is quite intense in terms of evolutionary time scales.

If that continues for a few hundreds of years, diversity will have significantly reduced. Indeed, some suggest that e.g. skin colour may largely homogenise within a thousand years.

A thousand years might sound like a very long time wrt. a single individual's lifespan, but for these issues it is nothing at all. In addition, some traits (e.g. pale skin colour) are quite recent from what we know.

[bryanrasmussen]

So Science Fiction Story time, immortal finds it difficult to blend into future less diverse population because their personal characteristics are no longer widely enough found that they can just wander off and go live somewhere else.

The last X is an easy target.

on edit: for anyone unfamiliar with this trope, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requiem_for_Methuselah or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth (both written by Jerome Bixby, but many other examples by Neil Gaiman, etc. available) for easy clarification. One of the common ideas of the trope is that an immortal sooner or later becomes problematic to have in one place, they must wander of people will attempt to experiment on them to figure out the secret of immortality. Of course the second bit of the trope is the wandering immortal leave traces, and more intense searchers after immortality will follow them and attempt capture. If diversity decreases in the future based on present trends the story then becomes that it becomes increasingly difficult for the wandering immortal to wander without everyone being aware of them.

[nobody9999]

There are a number of other stories which address this as well.

Sometimes without the trope you mention (L. Sprague de Kamp's The Gnarly Man[0])

And sometimes with a variation on it (Heinlein's Methuselah's Children[1]), which he follows up with some of the same characters, but not invoking the trope (Time Enough for Love[2]).

There are many others of course, those are just the ones that came off the top of my head.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gnarly_Man

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah%27s_Children

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love

[nmca]

Visit Brazil, they did it with boats.

[_opc6]

Speciation is an ongoing process and it's happening right now in the human population.

https://news.sky.com/story/human-microevolution-sees-more-pe...

[mytailorisrich]

Evolution may of course be ongoing but not speciation in the sense of splitting into different species as we are now constantly mixing.

Speciation processes may return once we start colonising other planets as it is highly possible that physical contacts between populations will stop.

[_opc6]

Whether or not all populations on Earth are mixing enough to prevent speciation remains to be seen. But the process begins with the kind of mutations documented in the article.

[goldenManatee]

Are you advocating against interracial unions? On an argument that mixing leads to less diversity over time, thus implying that mating with those those most like ourselves is more genetically desirable? Ever heard of blue blood, or the Hapburgs?