“Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”
04 April 2010
Humans are not the end point of evolution
It's understandable that we would consider ourselves to represent not only the "end" of evolution, but even the "purpose" behind the process. J.G. Ballard begs to remind us that modern humans have been present for only a few tens of thousands of years in a billions-of-years process, and that it doesn't stop now:
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Yeah.... that always cracks me up when people talk about humans being around for excessively long periods of time or living on a multitude of planets. If we did ever manage long-distance space travel and the colonization of other worlds, the result would probably be speciation. Humans settling on the new, exceedingly distant, world would eventually become a different species. It happens to less mobile species when populations are isolated on islands... and it could happen to us.
ReplyDeleteIt's a similarly myopic point of view to the one Queen Victoria expressed when she visited The Great Exhibition of 1851. She marveled at the height of current technology, saying that every invention that could exist seemed to be under that roof. There were no telephones, automobiles, or air conditioners... much less computers, artificial hearts, or any of the many other technological advances there have been in the time since.
It cracks me up how supposed educated individuals can swallow that mankind evolved from a single celled organism. There is no, and I mean no scientific evidence that any classification of species evolved into a different classification of species. The only evidence is evolution within certain classifications. Some huge holes based on theory which is based on theory. Doesn't sound like science to me. I'm not against theories and the pursuit of discoverable facts to prove theories... what I object to is the notion being taught that this THEORY is FACT and any who dispute it are ignorant or that any other theory is ludicrous.
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