[mike777]

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/...-evolution.html

"Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year."
------------------------------
"This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution."
------------------------------
"If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life."

[kenrexford]

I have to believe that this evolution, as is usually the case, is one that is not universal. Thus, whereas some may have added new DNA of value, other experiments in DNA by Mother Nature may need to be weeded out.

[helene_t]

So cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution. What else is new.

[mike777]

helene_t, on Jul 6 2009, 12:40 PM, said:

So cultural evolution is faster than biological evolution. What else is new.

Knowledge evolution is faster than biological evolution which then speeds up biological evolution?

[matmat]

wait... our knowledge is evolving?!

[jdonn]

matmat, on Jul 6 2009, 01:16 PM, said:

wait... our knowledge is evolving?!

In both directions, thus the average among all people is relatively stagnant.

[barmar]

I'm a bit skeptical that we're going to make any major changes to our genetic code in the foreseeable future. As geneticists learn more about how genes work, they're discovering that they're more and more complicated than we thought. For example, last month's Scientific American has an article about what scientist call "silent mutations", changes in the genetic code that don't change the amino acids (and hence proteins) that are encoded (there are more codons than amino acids, so multiple codons encode the same amino acid, and a mutation within one of these sets was presumed to be negligible); it turns out that they DO make a difference, because of differences in how efficiently they can be transcribed. Most genes serve many purposes, and trying to unraval the correspondence between genes and traits, especially such complex traits as "intelligence" (as if it's a single thing), may end up being impossible; you can't change feature X without also impacting features Y and Z.

It's not unlike cosmology. Until the 80's, scientists thought they had a pretty good grasp on most of the big picture, they were just filling in the details. Then wham! They discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which led to the conclusion that there's dark matter and dark energy out there, and in fact 75% of the universe is made up of this unknown stuff. Similarly, once we decoded the genome, it set the stage for learning just how far we really have to go to actually understand it.

[Al_U_Card]

homo ignorens - homo sapiens - homo consciens

all co-existing albeit not too peacefully.. ...does this mean we are all homos?


The expansion of available data places pressure on the development of our awareness and thence forces a new equilibrium in our ability to treat and discern the information (useful or not) that results.

It is all part of the process as we continue our evolution. As you accelerate at a regular rate, your velocity increases, as it should. We just have to watch where we are going.....