Comment by Thaddeus Dombrowski on June 5, 2010 at 5:20pm

Interesting question. As a species we are just really becoming aware of ourselves and our history in the last few hundred years. Until recently, our outlook on life has been grounded in superstition and belief. Our scientific understanding of the world is a recent phenomenon, and hasn't been fully embraced. But, our survival as a society depends on a deep cultural acceptance of what science has to say about us and how we live.

I would have to say that in the short term the development and propogation of scientific memes is going to be the next big evolutionary event determining our success as a species.

Comment by jimmy dean cooper on June 5, 2010 at 6:51pm

"the brain has been largely recognised as the lead for humans" this is an incredibly arrogant statement.
The suggestion that intellect and or conciseness are important, superior, necessary is simply unproven.
using survival as a gauge, bacteria would clearly win out.
The comment "Our scientific understanding of the world is a recent phenomenon" panders to the virtue of science. Again an unproven statement.
Science has shown some very recent convenience but the long range outcomes are unknown "recent phenomenon".
To state that science generates a more comfortable way of life than the eye of newt is sound however the notion that science is the cornerstone for all future revelations is questionable at best.
Further the concept that homo sapiens are in someway instrumental in evolution puts one on the rim of insanity.

Comment by Thaddeus Dombrowski on June 5, 2010 at 7:24pm

jimmy dean cooper said, "using survival as a guage, bacteria would clearly win out."

I agree with your statement. However, I understood Ian's questions to be about human evolution. At least that is how I responded. Within that context, you can't ignore the value of the human intellect in allowing us to reach the point we are at.

The intellect may not be the superior means of survival for all life, but it's all we humans have to work with. As for the virtue of science being debatable, you might have a point. Who's to say whether human culture might work without it among a small population of people whose impact on the planet is mitigated by their relatively small footprint? I suppose that small bands of nomads might be successful at survival.

However, I answered Ian's question with humanity's current state in mind. I don't think the value of science to a civilization of six or seven billion people is debatable. Whether science will ultimately work for us might have more to do with our ability to come to terms with what it tells us than any of science's 'innate' virtues.

Comment by Jānis Ķimsis on June 5, 2010 at 7:25pm

Jimmy, I think what Ian meant by saying that the "brain has been largely recognised as the lead for humans" is that it was our brains and not any other aspect that allowed our species to survive, thrive and expand our habitat to the scale we see today. We are inferior to some other species in any natural habitat in every way but brainpower.

Scientific thinking and therefore understanding are relatively recent - as understood today, it began around the 19th century.

And finally, seeing what major changes human society can bring about in the environment, you can't deny that we are an instrumental part in evolution - by affecting the enviroment, we change the demands that natural selection puts on the affected species. Unfortunatelly, we can't predict what will be the outcome of these changes, let alone direct evolution. I don't think it is completely impossible, though.

Comment by Blue Sage on June 5, 2010 at 7:32pm

The next big thing is Singularity, with human intelligence amplification or with human+ level AI, possibly leading to recursive self improvement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Comment by Thaddeus Dombrowski on June 5, 2010 at 8:13pm

I'm not convinced that Singularity is the next big thing. That assumes that we are on a one-way path up a technological staircase. I sometimes think about the possibility that we might be painting ourselves into some kind of a corner. What if our technologies are more like a house of cards? What if we don't have an answer to peak oil? What if some sort of magnetic event wipes out all of our digital data? What if our agriculture fails us in some fashion?

Perhaps large scale failure is another sort of 'singularity' lurking in our future.

Comment by Galen on June 5, 2010 at 10:32pm

I rather like to think that, given the large time scale on which evolution works, we aren't likely to make any further natural progress before we're able to control our own evolutionary progress. For instance, it's not likely that we'll evolve a great deal (if at all) naturally in the next 1,000 years. But imagine the level of genetic and biological engineering we'll be capable of in a thousand years if we keep progressing technologically as we are now.

I suspect natural selection may have had its way with us for about as long as it's going to. Artificial selection - guided evolution under human control - could very well be the next big thing. Whether that's ethical or feasible is an entirely different question :)

Comment by Jānis Ķimsis on June 5, 2010 at 10:39pm

Another reason why natural evolution is quite unlikely to bring about visible changes in humans is that because of globalisation the gene pool is very large and it takes a long time for changes to accumulate enough. I agree with Galen, it will probably be humans themselves that will determine the way our evolution goes.

Comment by Christopher McGuire on June 5, 2010 at 11:47pm

I believe our body's ability to fight off infection and bacteria has been (and will remain to be) our best foot forward when it comes to evolution.

Comment by Galen on June 6, 2010 at 12:46am

It's not like we haven't been doing artificial selection already. We turned wolves into those little weenie dogs, for fuck's sake! We've just never done it to ourselves because doing so would've required unthinkable acts against human beings and their offspring. Killing all the blind children to breed out blindness, for example; absolutely unthinkable to us. But if we can just give the fetus a shot to genetically weed out blindness... Well, that might be different, eh?

I just hope we get all our shit sorted out before anything like that ever comes to pass. Could you imagine the religious right trying to breed out homosexuality? UGH! The next BIG step in our SOCIAL evolution has to be getting rid of ancient superstition. Humans can't be trusted to artificially evolve the species until we do.

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