An example of medical practices influencing selection pressures on humans is the widespread use of the Cesarean section. Back in 2016, a group of researchers led by Philipp Mitteröcker, a theoretical biologist at the University of Vienna, suggested the current prevalence of Cesarean sections could be impacting human evolution.
In our evolutionary past, women with more narrow hips were more likely to die during childbirth, but thanks to Cesarean sections, slimmer women now have a much higher chance of surviving childbirth and passing on their genes. The practice also relieves selective forces toward smaller head sizes in babies. While this could mean babies will grow to be larger at childbirth, babies of smaller weights, or those that are born prematurely, are also much more likely to survive today than in the past.
Evolution and Agriculture
The mass production of food through agriculture has also shaped humanity's evolutionary landscape. The advent of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago enabled urbanization and the drastic increase in population density, along with the mass domestication of animals. As such, people became increasingly exposed to pathogens carried by other groups of humans and animals, causing the human immune system to adapt in response.
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