Hawking Says Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution

movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: "'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race,' Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, 'an external transmission phase,' where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. 'But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,' Hawking says, 'has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.'"

Comments

memetics vs genetics

[circletimessquare]

genius in a wheelchair versus moron with nine kids

ding ding ding round one!

Jake and Dinos Chapman...

[teleny]

...have already weighed in on this subject. Stephan Hawking is a man who is not the world's greatest physicist, nor is he doing any work now that is in any way in the forefront. Mostly what he is is a motor neuron disease survivor. If he were to die tomorrow, it would be a tragedy, but not in the way that he had great work in the future. He would have had significant work towards unifying quantum mechanics and relativity theory, at least thirty years ago, a beautiful family, and a wonderful face on what is often a very hard disease. I long to kiss that cheek. But I don't deny that flesh has had its day in about it's fortieth year. Let the world's embraces be felt. But he is not a Homo Novis.

Where goes external store after nuclear war?

[claysdna]

Hawkins may be brilliant but he is missing a core value of human beings.
Someone ALWAYS wants to rule us all.
We fight wars.
We have the bomb.
The arabs will soon have the bomb.
The arabs are crazy.
Soon we will all die.
When we are all back to living the 'green' life and there are only 10% of the people we have today.....how good do you think that store of knowledge is going to be?
How will people access it? After the first generation, how will they understand it? After ten generations is will be all lost and mostly myth.
I think I will trust to my dna in order to continue life in some way rather than the vague hope that someone one day will read the technical papers I have written.

Sorry, but I think we will blow ourselves back into the bronze age sometime soon (at least in evolutionary terms).

Re:Only honest discussions are useful.

[haifastudent]

Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.

So what you are saying is that specialization, and acknowledgement of the fact that women differ from men is inferior to the Western ideal that "all men are created equal" ("men" including women, of course) and just letting everyone do everything with no regard to specific gender-related (or race-related, or handicap-related) differences?

Just because a culture is different than yours does not made it inferior. I would argue that Western culture, women's rights and all, is inferior to Eastern culture in that Western culture idolizes drug abuse, pornography, violent crime, and ignorance. Try to listen to some popular music with an objective standpoint, or popular movies, and see exactly what Western culture is.