Evolution can be defined as descent with modification.
The implications are
- It's biological
- the critter that is evolving can NOT (or only minimally) control it's environment. It must adapt to it's environment or die.
Fun fact...biological evolution takes a LONG time....hundreds of thousand of years if not longer.
I would submit that man, since we control our environment. (if it gets cold, put on more clothes, light a fire, turn up the central heat...etc. If it's too hot..get cooler by what ever means). The same would apply to other factors in our environment. We change it to suite ourselves.
THUS...man no longer evolves..
It is the environment that tends to cause evolution. It is survival of the fittest within the environment.
I do think we will still evolve, but it is no longer as clear how that might happen as due to the fact we change our environment (as you wisely stated) we also change what things will tend to be most beneficial in those environments. This also makes it increasingly difficult to determine which traits will be the most desireable and thus go the furthest within our environment. We tend to gravitate towards different traits at different times.
I definitely still see hints of evolution even in man. I also see hints of devolution. We also have been known to make environments that seem good at the time and not really think through the long term ramifications of our choices. Sometimes these can bite us in the ass.
However, you essentially were getting close to the thoughts I was having that inspired me to write this. Mankind with our tools both physical and conceptual has altered the environment and thus changed the potentialities with regards to evolution.
Evolving as animals do based upon temperature, availability of food, defense, etc... I agree that type of evolution seems to have stopped for man.
Yet there is nothing I've seen which constrains evolution simply to such things.
It just takes a few generations. There are experiments with fishes who do a lot of evolution (like all colors except one disappear) in less then 10 generations.
In controlled conditions designed to accelerate the process, yes. Like the experiment involving the rapid domestication of Russian silver foxes.