February 5th, 2009

This is part two to my thoughts last week:

I think that I sometimes make the mistake that most other people make, which is to assume that human (or any other) evolution is an arrow, with a definite direction and a definite goal.

It would be closer to the truth to state it as the notion that there is never an arrival point and never a time when we will stop adapting and mutating. For good or bad, we are not ever going to stop changing. As far as I'm concerned, the perfect human and the perfect elephant already exist ... at least in potential, since we are constantly adapting to our environments which themselves are constantly adapting. What is more perfect than the machine that can change itself to match its surroundings?

What messes around with this, though, is that we have already sped up by orders of magnitude our ability to understand our environment and ourselves through this concept of education. It's only one of many survival tricks (and might not even prove to be the "best" one) but intelligence has dramatically increased the rate of change in humans and also in the rate of change of the flora and fauna we touch (e.g., certain grains, breeding of animals).

I believe we're just about ready—like within single digit years kind of ready—to start altering ourselves so much and so quickly that we will make evolutionary adaption look like it is standing still.

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