On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:22 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:I am talking about _genetic_ changes
Any huge change in mankind would be suppressed by the other 6 billion human beings.
So far that hasn't happened. Socially and technologically tremendous changes have taken place in the last 200 years and not been suppressed by the majority.
Oh, I know; that's why I also wrote:
However, an assumption that seems to exist here is that we (as a global civilization) will not really change very much, technologically or otherwise, over timespans that register on the evolutionary scale. Even the small, rapid changes you see in PE take place in considerably more time than h. sapiens has even existed.
That is, pulling plain old evolution into it as well.
The thing is, as I've mentioned before, that we cannot account simply genetic changes. Intelligence alters absolutely everything; we are currently on the cusp of modifying our own genome deliberately.
It is obvious, abundantly obvious, to me that social and intellectual changes are *every bit as crucial* to us to factor in when we're talking about our species' development. Because social trends, coupled with the technology necessary to alter -- or eradicate -- ourselves, utterly trump evolution.
So when discussing evolution in our species I tend to include other factors that might not be biologically there but that still exist; I suppose I side with Dawkins in this regard. His combined view of genes and memes is pretty powerful at describing the behavior of *all* life, including us.
Returning to the main point, though, evolution happens (I think) both gradually and with phases of rapid change. As such it is happening to us now, at least probably, but we don't realize it because we lack the historical depth. At most we've been recording history for, what, 20K years at most? And we've been around eight times longer than that, or thereabouts. We've only been systematically observing ourselves for maybe 600 or so years, starting with the Islamic Caliphates -- trying to extrapolate anything about trends based on the data available to us is a little like taking one second from a day and, using it, trying to determine what the previous five minutes had been like. Or what the next five minutes will contain. (Or one minute to five hours, one year to 300, etc.)
IOW we don't know enough to know what kinds of changes are taking place, and even if they happen rapidly a la punctuated equilibrium they'll still be so slow that we'll fail to recognize the emergent species until well after it's totally replaced h. sapiens. (One could argue that we are currently a product of such a punctuation and are *still* in the middle of it and evolving -- 160K years is *nothing* against the geological record.)
So I don't see us as we are now being necessarily a peak, nor the peak, nor even a cul-de-sac, and I feel reasonably safe in guessing that we'll continue for a while, sort of like how the dinosaurs have by evolving into birds. (So in that sense I guess I could say we're doomed, as a species, to extinction, but only because we'll continue evolving. The question is whether we'll retain our intelligence and civilization-building tendencies, or end up being weird naked big-headed apes squabbling over plantains in a ruined city mostly reclaimed by forest.)
-- WthmO
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