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

Anthropologists have been saying this for a while

[RightwingNutjob]

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.

Re:Memes

[Fractal Dice]

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)

Re:ten thousand years

[whisper_jeff]

Ten thousand years is only 400 twenty-five year generations. That's not a lot of time for any significant alteration in how our evolution works...

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.

Re:ten thousand years

[JoeMerchant]

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.

Evo: Cultural v. Mutation v. Bring What You Gots

[cmholm]

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).