Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
This is a fairly accepted view among cultural anthropologists, who pay their bills by digging up ancient cultures and studying the progression of ideas, religions, and technologies. One guy, whose name I forget, but whose paper they made me read in Anthropology 101 made the comparison between hardware and software evolution. In more modern terms, Windows, Linux, OSX, etc, all run on the nearly ~30-year-old x86 CPU, but no one is going to say that computer programs now are where they were 30 years ago, just because the instruction set hasn't changed much.
A fun question to ask people is: "if you could only have one, which would you rather do: author a successful book or be parent to a successful child (raised by others)". The answers tell you whether the person sees themselves as a bundle of genes or as a bundle of memes.
The overgrown human brain is just a big appendix the body provides as a home for symbiotic memes :)
(obviously, it's not Hawkings' area of expertise so we expect to find people who have already had the idea)
Not true, at all. I recall reading about a study (in Russia, iirc) where scientists attempted to breed a specific trait into wild foxes. They went through a program of selective breeding and in _seven_ generations, they successfully altered the genetic traits of the animal. Seven. So, 400 generations is _PLENTY_ of time for evolution to alter our species in meaningful ways given that it can be accomplished (admittedly, in a controlled environment) in just 7.
I think you are missing his point... what I hear is that the "external store" is an essentially new phenomenon on earth that has been exponentially growing for the last few hundred years, and that we, as a species, are evolving through development of the external store rather than changing our DNA.
Interestingly enough, within the next 25 year generation, that external store will likely become powerful enough to enable us to rewrite our DNA in meaningful ways, potentially bypassing millions of years of Darwinian evolution... unless SkyNet takes over.
Hawking is talking about cultural adaptation, which isn't a new concept. What's (relatively) new is the realization that human evolution has continued into historic times. So, Homo gets three bites at the apple: a chance to adapt via culture, enabling it to survive in environments that would otherwise select against it; adapt via thus far dormant or undesirable existing genetic characteristics; and adapt via continuing random mutation (most of which will continue to be undesirable for a given situation).
Luke, help me take this mask off
OK, to show you my POV - here's what I consider a big change- when humans get virtual telepathy, telekinesis and augmented brains.
;). In contrast Douglas Engelbart and gang really stretched the limits of technology in the 1960s.
:).
This is already being crudely done with mobile phones (communications and buying of stuff via vending machines).
And the tech is already there for:
1) humans (and other creatures) to control stuff just by thinking.
2) adding extra senses (google for "seeing tongue")
3) Small cams, microphones etc
Once you can do it safely and reliably, add some clever software and you can use "thought macros"[1] to control stuff and communicate.
You could then take a picture/video of something, tell your e-brain to save it and associate it with a particular thought pattern so that when you rethink that particular pattern the object is retrieved, and you can also send it to someone else[2].
Then humans, computing and culture would enter a new stage of evolution...
As it is, you can show me all that fancy AJAX and I'll just go "meh". Yes all that is very nice and useful, but looking at what's possible with the current state of the art I'd call that "underperforming"
Then again maybe it was a waste of resources and we would still have what we have today even if he and his bunch didn't do all that? Oh well, I'm just getting rather impatient though
[1] I bet nobody's thought patterns are the same - so you'd have to "train" the program to recognize thought macros.
[2] Trouble of course is the **AA might have something to say about that and want to collect toll on each retrieval and share. I wouldn't like that particular evolutionary path.
That's not entirely true. Modern medicine is one of the few clear ways very high intelligence and work ethic are well rewarded in the modern world. And one could imagine in a highly selective event, say a war, population groups who had a good knowledge of modern medicine, i.e. were well educated, would have a greater chance of survival and future prosperity than others. Natural Selection tends to be the type of process that is hard to beat, even when you think you are beating it, because it is infinitely patient in waiting for just the right selective event.
I'd approach it from the other angle: Knowing the subterranean levels of intellectual honesty exhibited by SJ Gould, I'd stop parsing anything after "Stephen Jay Gould told".
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Yes, our species is more than DNA. That is obvious. What is not obvious is that we should confuse the process of Darwinian evolution with cultural evolution. They are both fascinating and worthy of discussion and study. It is even worth thinking about ways in which they are similar. But I think it is also worthwhile to understand the distinctions and that models of one need not apply to the other.
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
We haven't entered a new stage of evolution, we have entered a stage of devolution. The incessant focus on all (human) life being precious has severely impacted our long term prospects by continuously contaminating the collective gene pool for instance.
I think there is something to this. I think we are entering a phase in human society where we use that information to actively control evolution. For example people with diseases that would otherwise make them unable to survive are being taken care of by medical science and society. I think it's being harder for evolution to happen to humans because we actively preserve people with genes that otherwise wouldn't survive "natural selection". One could argue that we are as much part of nature as the lion that would have killed them instead I suppose, but it seems we often take a preserving variation role rather than a culling of the herd role.
the modern ability to manage and/or cure a number of life-threatening conditions is greatly impacting the evolution of our species as well. people who would never have made it to adulthood a century ago are now passing on their crappy genes to their kids.
I think you guys are having a very productive discussion right here.
I'll toss in something that I occasionally think about, that's related to what both of you are saying: the design of the operating systems in common use for personal computers. The kernels for Linux, OS X and Windows XP are all basically server technology that has been pressed to serve for desktop use. For example, all of them have been designed to maximize system throughput with techniques that increase end-user latency, like swap.
For example, the OS X Dock has a feature that magnifies the size of the icons as you mouse over them. However, when an OS X system faces memory pressure, the kernel will swap out pages that are in use by the Dock. When this happens, you get a pause of a few seconds between mousing over an icon and the computer magnifying it. The Dock is an element that is always present in the OS X user interface, but the kernel apparently doesn't know about that, and treats it as just another application that can be paged out to speed up something else. And more simply, switching to an application that's been unused for a while is often not just slow, but sluggish; it's not that the application takes a long time initially to perform the commands, it's that the application takes a long time to even respond to user input in the most basic ways.
An OS designed from scratch for personal computing would look quite different from what we have now. There would be a lot more emphasis on real-time response to user input. That's not what we've gotten. What we've gotten is, at best, hacks on top of timesharing server operating system kernels to make them less bad at interacting with the user.
Are you adequate?
But would you not say that good knowledge of language and math helps a person to develop his intelligence towards its optimum (assuming there is any such thing)? I'd consider both language and math kinds of knowledge management, making thinking processes â" if they are essentially non-verbal and non-mathematical â" more efficient. And is not that what intelligence IS; thinking efficiently?