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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 basically just a useless semantics argument.
...the singularity is already here...
Doctor Spaceman, when they check my DNA, will they tell me what diseases I might get, or help me to remember my ATM pin code?
Absolutely. Science is whatever we want it to be.
So it must be true.
So he's talking about memes.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Memes.
Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist of some note, coined the term to describe the ideas that people create, that reproduce in much the same way genes do.
This came from his earlier ideas of a "selfish gene" to postulate that genes existed to propagate themselves, which helped to describe a lot of aspects of evolutionary development, from altruism to various kinds of suicidal behavior. In other words, it isn't the lifeform itself that is important in the reproductive cycle, so much as the information they pass along.
Ryan Fenton
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.
I see that Stephen Hawking is ill in hospital again.
They shut him down for an upgrade and when he rebooted, Norton AntiVirus had deleted his childhood memories.
------
beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
It could be argued that we are devolving, since we now try to keep everybody live with modern medicine, and the "less genetically robust" are able to reproduce. Here's part of a not entirely unrelated discussion.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
and it's all your fault.
How CAN YOU sleep at night?
and windows? we should be ashamed as mankind of that. it's clearly not the best mankind can do? we should be capable of doing better than windows, i am not saying Linux/OS X are any better but my god! Windows is truly horrific!
And I thought he was smart?
Now, look at all the nations of Africa. The Africans produced nearly nothing, by comparison.
Evolution created a situation in which the Germans, the French, and the English have an IQ that is signficantly greater than the IQ of the typical African. The difference is about 20 points on a standardized IQ test.
IQ tests are not racist. So-called "White" IQ tests taken by Japanese folks also show that their IQ is approximately equal to "White" IQ. Japanese IQ is about 20 points greater than African IQ.
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, especially considering the millions of years it took to get us this far in the first place. Perhaps Dr. Hawking should stick to theoretical physics.
Of course having said that, he's a father, grandfather, world famous author, and Nobel prize winning genius, despite being a wheelchair bound victim of neuromuscular dystrophy who can barely speak, whereas I am single, childless, and broke, despite being relatively healthy.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I have created a new equation to describe this phenomena and published it at my blog. Proof is as follows.
3 + 5 = 8
3 + 5 = âz
3 + 5 = 8 or âz
10
12
TF
Try this with 3.14159 and see what happens! COOL, huh?
Two variable random number generators plus a true false switch equals the basic building block of artificial intelligence. A three dimensional switch.
A resistor works on a similar principle, it has three possible states, floating ground, ground or current.
Current equals 1. Ground equals 0. Floating ground equals 0/1 or 1/0 or âz.
Now combine the three dimensional switch with the two dimensional switch and start to link these switches together in a topological network and the ultimate decryption key is created. You just need enough Turing/Gibson swarm units.
My blog is located at http://lifeoftheoutrider20.blogspot.com/
Proof complete!
Next!
Yes, but we must be willing to use that knowledge to improve human chances for long-term survival, not to counteract the evolution just to feel good. If we take the latter course of action, as it is trendy to do, we are in effect using our evolutionary advantage against ourselves.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Now, look at all the nations of Africa. The Africans produced nearly nothing, by comparison.
Evolution created a situation in which the Germans, the French, and the English have an IQ that is signficantly greater than the IQ of the typical African. The difference is about 20 points on a standardized IQ test.
IQ tests are not racist. So-called "White" IQ tests taken by Japanese folks also show that their IQ is approximately equal to "White" IQ. Japanese IQ is about 20 points greater than African IQ.
Errrgghh.... Stephen Hawking said something that bothered me. I feel weird.....
Now, I am not a biologist, or even in the field. I have read The Selfish Gene, and consider myself up on evolutionary theory....
OK. There are several misconceptions about evolution that drive me nuts. Why? Because it's incredibly important to understand, as it helps explain so much about life on this planet. It hurts me that people accept the Law of Gravity, but poke at the evolutionary process....
Ok... Misconceptions.
1. Evolution has a goal.
It doesn't. We are not going to transcend or become ultimate beings. No. It just adapts critters to their environment. What's neat is that critters adapt to each other, together. Think about that, and ecosystems, and all that web of life stuff for a while and it's pretty neat.
2. Evolution is critter-centric.
We are simply carriers for genese. Evolution is gene centric. Most of your genes are useless to you. Stuff that is stupid at a critter level can make perfect sense at a gene level. Those little bastards are using us, and don't care about us at all, as long as we breed.
3. Survival of the fittest.
It's survival of the breediest, not necessarily of the fittest.
4. Evolution works through mutation.
Errrrgghh... I disagree with Stephen Hawking. Ok, mutation helps, but you know what? Evolution doesn't need it. Most mutations result in a f*kup, not something useful. Evolution just needs seperate populations and/or environments. Eventually populations diverge and become more suited to their environments.
I feel weird....
-Tony
Machines should stay machines. Just get smarter and be better able to be used by us. I can't wait to give my design for the best safety gunlock ever to Springfield Armory! Machines = Machines. Humans = Humans. Humans with too much machine equals broken doll with living soul! SCARY! Like Chuckie! Humanity should be able to decide on that and they will once everybody on earth has a laptop! World government! Also the U.S. government just made money worthless because we are a debtor with the biggest gun on earth so all we need is an economy based on money, credit and sex as work and women are liberated from being slaves to men and garden of eden results! Works for lesbians and homosexuals right now! Unless they become indeterminate! YAH!
HAHHAHAHHAHHAHAHHAHHA!
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
If someone is stupid enough to purchase a fake product for a flu that won't kill them in the first place, we can only assume this is for the greater good of the world. If they are a high risk factor (cancer, etc) then one would like to think they aren't on the Internet purchasing random drugs.
genius in a wheelchair versus moron with nine kids
ding ding ding round one!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think doctor Hawking is missing a step. Natural selection did not manage to produce humans without any external information. Humans are Mammals. Most (all?) Mammals tend to pass on behavioral traits in a non-genetic fashion from parents to offspring. So another major step in the evolutionary process would have been the appearance of animals whose mothers continue to care for them after birth, and impart higher-order influences on their offspring other than the contents of their genes.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.
Take that line a step further and you get transhumanism. We are no longer an isolated life form, but are inherently coupled with our tools. Tools that extend our minds around the planet. The Internet.
Books are cool, but they're pretty uni-directional. Wikipedia is cooler, updating our knowledge base in real time. Twitter is even faster; a brain extension so fast and light that it recently fomented revolution.
Yeah, we're past genes. What's more, we're rapidly passing static tools like rocks, newspapers, and books. Our minds are connected to each other in real-time, planet-wide. Our individual minds are gaining connectivity to the hive mind and extending our capabilities, much as our giant neocortex lifted us above the other animals.
See: Transhumanism
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Life isn't just about passing on your genes. ...anger, joy and sorrow...
We can leave behind much more than just DNA.
Through speech, music, literature and movies...
what we've seen, heard, felt
these are the things I will pass on.
That's what I live for.
We need to pass the torch,
and let our children read our messy and sad history by its light.
We have all the magic of the digital age to do that with.
The human race will probably come to an end some time,
and new species may rule over this planet.
Earth may not be forever,
but we still have the responsibility to leave what traces of life we can.
Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.
... and use higher and higher levels of abstraction so to communicate and develope more and more refined technology that will someday allow us to advance beyond where we can see ourselves going today. To the point of enabling us to create a black hole for the purpose of its rebound effect of creating a galaxy so as to continue on the expansion of the universe for the insurance of the continuation of conscious life.... to repeat the process.
One of the things I have noticed about our evolution is that it seems to be related to population growth. As our population grows we face new problems that we must adapt to and this generally leads to advancements in social development. One recorded event is the story of the tower of Babylon and how the population growth and specialization grew to the point of a bicameral mind break down that lead to expansion and now so long after, we have come back together in population growth with further advancements.
Another interesting analogy or extension of this process is that of open source software where branching projects off to eventually bring the best of the branches back together.... and its all based on, in essence, Abstraction Physics of code development. Where the difference between human to human language and human to machine to human, is automation of human created abstractions...
how does a population "diverge" if it cant mutate ?
Sure, he's a smart guy, but what are his qualifications? He's a physicist. He should leave the biology to the biologists. You don't hear Richard Dawkins speculating on the nature of black holes, do you?
Stephen Jay Gould told an anecdote about Richard Feynman excitedly announcing that he had discovered new principles of evolution. On inspection they turned out to be either well known findings or well known fallacies. Basically he was largely ignorant of the literature in the field. It says more about physicists than about evolution that he would deem himself qualified to wade into the fray with such minimal preparation.
It is not surprising that Stephen Hawking, another great physicist, similarly feels empowered to speculate about evolution without apparently having read Richard Dawkin's popular works. Others have mentioned memes, but Dawkin's notion of the extended phenotype might be even more pertinent. Hawkings appears to be taking the notion of the meme to the extreme of thinking that species evolution is now relying on actual gene analogues outside our physical corpus. Rather, our genes remain internal, but their somatic expression is external to ourselves.
If Hawking is saying our evolution is now dependent on our (for most people) public education system... we're fucked.
Pack your bags, it's Idiocracy time.
I am ready to become one with my robot overlords.
But computer programs aren't that different compared to 30 years ago.
;).
Just look at the operating systems:
Unix is pretty old. When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
And look up the "Mother of all Demos" - they had real time video conferencing, working together with a remote user over a WAN on the same document. So many innovative concepts, 40+ years ago.
The hardware available then naturally limited these pioneers, I'm sure they had plenty more they could think of but could not implement.
Linux - just Unix revisited.
Mac - The WIMP from PARC finally makes its way to the public (note the scrollbar was invented in 1977).
Windows 95/2K- ok the taskbar was nice (I think the Acorn had it first).
Windows XP - whoopee a new colour scheme, and some rearrangements, no big improvements
Windows Vista - I can't say this is a big improvement, in many ways the user experience is worse.
KDE/GNOME - basically the same old thing as "X" years ago, now with Wobbly Windows and stuff copied from Windows 95.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive
Sir Stephen Hawking is a very smart man, and I have the utmost respect for him.
However, he should stick to the areas of his expertise and let biologists talk about evolution, because that's their area of expertise.
I wouldn't expect anyone to take Dr. Richard Dawkins' thoughts on quantum mechanics as definitive, and this is no different.
Soylens viridis homines es
Dawkins only claim to fame is mocking Muslims and Christians. He's a good showman and a mediocre scientist.
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
You mustn't allow yourself to be chained to fate, to be ruled by your genes. Human beings can choose the kind of life that they want to live. What's important is that you choose life... and then live.
I thought he was an astro-guy, probing the heavens, and trying to prove that something (literally) could come from nothing so as to make God go away before he dies.
Where's this anthropologist been hiding all this time?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
I see where Hawking is coming from and I guess that he's right if you accept his new use of the word evolution, which is fine. But in the classic Darwinian sense I would argue that humans have STOPPED evolving. Our weak and stupid are allowed (rightfully i suppose) to live simply because we have created a civilization to support each other (in most countries). There is seldom any real natural selection in the traditional sense since the weak (whatever your definition of that might include) live on and most likely will breed along with all the strong. You could argue the Idiocracy point of view that we are "devolving" based on the same kind of argument but I wouldn't take it that far... yet.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
Hawkins is right about the external store.... But the real change is when we began to code processes for computers. The interesting thing about books isn't that they exist, but that we can read something from 2000 years ago and continue processes defined by such texts.
The interesting thing about programs isn't that they exist external (like books), but that a machine reads something defined external to itself, perhaps from another country or time, and executes the processes defined by such tasks.
In the latter case, no HUMAN was required. We successfully built a mechanism by which processes can be defined and propagated without direct human involvement (other than supplying the computer, and putting it in touch with the software).
Suddenly I can have access to processes meticulously defined and tested by others without having to read a book or study or practice. I just load up a program and execute.
We have not only externalized the genetic store, as it were, but also the role of the organism in executing the processes.
That's the point of what cultural evolution is. The basics nuts and bolts haven't changed. But what you do with it has. 30 years ago, you didn't do your personal banking online, you didn't read news online, you didn't do your research online, and you couldn't get a quick sanity check on your calculations by looking up something on google or wikipedia. But after 30 years of purely software innovations running on the same hardware, the (cultural) mindset us geeks have when using a computer has adopted useful practices and rejected the dead ends, which is exactly what cultural evolution is.
I think this highly oversimplifies things.
Yes, many "mechanical" things about computer software hasn't changed that much in 30-40 years. The C language is 40 years old and still is the language of choice for many things. Most other languages are similarly imperative, if not downright derived from C (functional languages, while at least as old, never really caught on much). Operating systems still basically work the same way: they allow separate processes with isolated memory, separate users, restricted access to hardware by programs, preemptive multitasking, etc. Even GUIs aren't that new, since the WIMP interface was invented by PARC in the 70s.
What's new is all the high-level stuff done with it: having an internet that not only connects universities, but is accessible by everyone from their home or their mobile phone. Buying stuff on the internet, communicating with each other on Facebook, etc. The thing that's changed is who uses this technology, and what they use it for.
When I was in high school in 1989, the only people that had computers at home were either adults who needed them for work, or geeks like me. Most people didn't have computers, and thought anyone that spent their spare time on a computer instead of watching some crap on TV were crazy. Now, every knucklehead has a computer and knows how to use the internet. People spend all kinds of time screwing around on sites like MySpace and Facebook. So many people read the news online that newspapers are going out of business left and right. All kinds of people are using Craigslist to buy and sell stuff locally, or to meet each other.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
Actually, browsers have evolved a lot in the last 15 years. They started out as just a way to display marked-up text, and now they're a way to not only show all kinds of data (text and video), but a way to interact with other systems. For instance, look at Google Maps, or other AJAX apps. That's not static data, it's basically a way of running an application remotely. IMO, the whole HTTP legacy of web browsers is holding them back. The entire way interactive web pages are written now seems like a giant kludge, when for many things it seems like it'd be simpler to just write an app in C++ or Java or whatever, run it on the remote server, and display it remotely on the user's computer.
This is a slippery road to finding God... or something.
Otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Human genetic evolution is Darwinian, but cultural (memetic) evolution is Lamarckan.
So, he is comparing the natural (genetic) evolution with our intellectual (externally carried information) evolution.
Then, we could compare the stages:
speech <==> multi-cellular organisms
writing <==> central nervous system
printing <==> dry-land vertebrades
internet <==> ???
What's next?
factor 966971: 966971
And we can evolve faster than ever thanks to that!
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.
An organism interacts with it's environment by slightly modifying it's behavior. That behavior alters the environment, sometimes radically. Sometimes a positive feedback loop is established between organism and environment that causes unusully rapid evolutionary change. Man is the most extreme case of niche construction . See Niche Construction for details.
Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.
...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.
teleny, friend of cats.
This is not a new idea, and it's beatifully told here: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Medawar/technology-and-evolution/
The human race has enjoyed an exponential growth phase, in which reproduction was so easy and common that natural selection hasn't been much involved or observable in humans. As our numbers increase to many billions and we destroy our environment, environmental pressure is going to kick natural selection into overdrive. Then we'll possibly see the human race evolve at a noticeable pace even within an average lifetime.
hawking must have believed the 2012 stuffs afterall.
"The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what mythos is."
-Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
While I agree with Stephen Hawkings that we are more than the sum of our genes, we currently use the term "Evolution" to mean "Darwin's Theory of Evolution", which is all about accidental genetic changes that happen to be beneficial. Lamarck's Theory of Evolution may be closer to Mr. Hawking's statements, if we must call it "evolution", but I do believe Mythos over Logos is a better way to describe the mechanism of change that we're seeing with humanity as a whole.
Or go on tour with Peter Frampton, either way. He oversimplifies how complicated evolution is and overestimates human knowledge of genetic engineering. ps I say this knowing that he is more brilliant than I, or anyone on this board, can ever hope to be.
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive ;).
One good CDADDDR deserves another!
The CB App. What's your 20?
First of all, not all computing is x86 based. Even now that's not true. 30 years ago it was just an insignificant platform.
But even if we just focused on that, so much has changed in 30 years. Comparing a 16bit 8088 that could only run in real mode with the latest core i7 which supports 32bit protected mode, an instruction set that has been revised a number of times (i386, i586, i686) along with specialised instructions additions (mmx, sse and their own successors), all of which are indispensable by now.
And as of a few years, even hardware assisted virtualisation and the jump to 64bits.
Sure, the principles are still the same, but there's more difference in 30 years of x86 evolution that between primates and modern humans
Don't conflate human offspring and inanimate books. A much better thought experiment for this question is:
If you had to choose one, would you rather raise a randomly assigned adopted child as your own, or have your biological child randomly assigned to adoptive parents. In neither case does the adopted child have any contact with its biological parents.
This is how you determine the value placed on genes or memes.
2. Undesirable traits are not usually identified as evolution. To evolve implies continued survival of the species, otherwise the species was unable to evolve. An undesirable trait that leads to extinction, such as human overpopulation or habitat destruction, is therefore not an example of evolution.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I just re-read the parent and realized he was making the same point. I thought he was trying to say that cancer and overpopulation were examples of evolution.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
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).
Because the more we are, the less does any single person need to know, to survive and successfully reproduce.
Also we have two types of reproduction now: The genetic one. And the reproduction of thoughts and ideas.
So you can leave children in this world. But you can also leave a philosophy/mindset that changed people. (Or both.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Studies on evolution is a field which is very less explored. There haven't been many substantial additions to Darwin's first theory of evolution. I think this field will attract more scientists and researches, than nanotechnology or biotechnology would.
Many of us believe that evolution takes thousands of years, to change an organism. But, in contrast, I read an article on dailygalaxy.com in which a lizard-like animal evolved in a period of 36 years, after it was relocated to a new neighboring island. It has its digestive system changed with new features, a larger head and a completely new diet.
Moreover, the way the human population is increasing, the most basic concept of Darwin's theory-the Survival of the Fittest-collapses miserably.
Many biologists will now rethink and possibly edit Darwin's theory to involve human evolution into it, which will have many side-effects, including a "see-I-told-you" kind of reaction from the Church.
Moreover, I think evolution is taking the path it was destined to take.
From the beginning, life-forms always tended to unite or team-up with the output being a more advanced organism. The mitochondria united with the cell, many cells united to form tissues, organs, organisms. This may look like the biological hierarchy of an organism, but if you look at it closely it is the path of evolution.
Now, we are at the organism stage. The next stage would be the stage in which many organisms unite to form one system composed of organisms. Doesn't that system of organism fit the definition of civilization?
So, in theory the next step in evolution would be the development of civilization, if the planet lasts.
Hawking wrote the same book twice. In it he first said that all old philosophies were null and void because they did not include quantum mechanics. In the second book he omitted this part and then put in a new ending based on his old philosophy ( positivism I believe ).
What human evolution means and how it interacts with culture is an active field of research and has been so for a long time. There are mathematical models, empirical observations, and long scientific debates. It's so typical of physicists to ignore all that and jump in with the kind of observations that a smart lay reader of popular science books would make. Hawking should stick to physics, where he actually is an expert.
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 for one welcome our new human overlords.
Now, every knucklehead has a computer and knows how to install malware
There, thats fixed it for you!.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
30 years ago it was a very poor ripoff of the PDP11, which was already nearly 10 years old, and the biggest thing in computing.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
What do you think is going on now ? You CAN write your app in whatever language will run on the server. HTTP is merely the popular protocol that's used to transmit data back and forth. The clue is in its name. It is tolerant of delays and dropouts (due to its underlying transport mechanism) and has the concept of sessions. Apache isn't written in HTTP, it's C. MySQL is written in C and C++. Java is Java. What do you suggest instead ? A networked X session ? HDMI over continental distances ? RDP ?
Web browsers are web browsers, not dedicated to your proprietary application. So get on with it and write your server app. But write a client too, don't try to shoehorn an application meant for interpreting and displaying text into being your perfect client. Google Earth is a client server app, that seems to work just fine. There are a myriad of FPS games that work just fine too. Just let everybody else know what port you'll be using for your dedicated app, and be prepared for a fight if something else is already using it. There aren't unlimited ports, there are a lot, but there was a big IP space when IPv4 started. Look how that's turning out. So you would be sensible to use an existing protocol for transporting your data. This has nothing to do with what language your client server app is written in.
Seriously, I love his black hole theory as much as any other nerd, but from the article, it sounds like he doesn't even know what he's talking about re: evolution and natural selection. Evolution is differential reproductive success, through the functioning of natural selection. Books aren't genes aren't attached to individuals and transmitted only to offspring - otherwise the idea of school would be a lot more fun.
It's not useful information that is added, but useful information added and passed down to a larger number of offspring than another representative but less useful bit of information. Once you've had your last child, you're out of the pool. How do books work into that scenario?
For example, say a child was born in a library with no humans around, and its mother dies in childbirth. Nothing in the library but books and food. That child could grow up and die and it would never have necessarily learned to read. Real evolution isn't that easy to derail. Unless he's saying that humans transmitting information to successive generations in order to boost their survival skills is evolution. In which case, he should be mindful that John Tooby doesn't write books about black holes, and that his contribution is not neccessary or helpful.
I also liked how he's quoted as saying that in the 18th century, there was a man reported to have read all existing books. Is there an entry for that on snopes.com? Because I call shenanigans. That's completely ridiculous. There was a lot of books in the 18th century, and the 17th, too. Could I request that we add the 'getoffmylawn' tag to this story?
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.
If Hawking is saying our evolution is now dependent on our (for most people) public education system... we're fucked.
Pack your bags, it's Idiocracy time.
That movie was missing the Morlocks. All we ever saw were the Eloi.
You can't take the sky from me...
When people stopped competing on who could keep eating enough for survival and as social interaction between people increased, the evolutionary battle moved from being physically based to one based on knowledge.
Though this is really a different way of thinking about evolution, there are a lot of parallels I can think of between classic evolution and a knowledge based evolution.
I'd say that as knowledge became more important this evolutionary race moved from just being about independent people a common pool of knowledge grew, almost as an ant hive has a swarm life of it's own, all building for a common purpose, the advancement of that race as a common goal.
Just my 2 cents, as I said I've never really considered this before so I'm only just getting my head round it
Sounds like a wonky way of noticing that culture matters in a techno-barbaric age.
The answer only tells you if you've had a child yet. No parent, without a serious psychological problem, can look at his or her child and think that there is any higher calling on Gods earth, nor believe for a moment that anything would be worth trading that child's existence for.
The knuckleheads know there is an internet, and they know there is porn available on said internet, but it is a stretch to say that they know how to use the internet.
They know how to clicky-clicky blue e.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Wittgenstein said: That the world is, is the mysterious.
In other words, why is there anything rather than nothing at all? That's the definition of God.
It's good to see science people accepting the Mystery again, thinking you have all the answers was the mistake of the religion people. It's all just this big Mystery that somebody set up for us.
What Hawking may be referring to is similar to the ideas found in the series and the first movie. Hopefully someone can summarize those ideas in the following posts for those pathetic souls, on Slashdot, who are not acquainted with the stories.
Thanks, you expanded my knowledge of computing history with this post.
"It's good to see science people accepting the Mystery again, thinking you have all the answers was the mistake of the religion people. It's all just this big Mystery that somebody set up for us"
..
Nothing in the quoted article does it have Hawking refer to mysterification, rather he address well under process in Evolution. There is nothing mysterious about passing on information through human culture, it's called a viral meme
"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"
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?
It's a kludge because applications are written to seem like they are based on a constant connection, when in reality, because of HTTP, the connection is set up and broken quite often relative to how long the application is used.
There are numerous security problems with this model, in addition to the overhead associated with guaranteeing the server "remembers" the client between connections.
The browser and JavaScript and HTML/XML documents are quite close to being a really good application platform, but a stateful, connection-oriented protocol is what you want for the information transfer between a dynamic client and server, not HTTP.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I know this is a bit offtopic to this article, but there is a dianetics advert on slashdot! What the hell is going on guys!?!? Get rid of it!
After the science of genetics has been developed to the point where DNA sequencing has become almost trivial and now we're able to do some degree of slicing, dicing, and splicing such that it has become an industry (genetic engineering), I'd say it's safe to say that evolution is going to become a whole new ballgame. No longer an entirely natural process. And this change is not just for humanity, but for any species closely associated with us, or even those that are particularly interesting such that they may be considered useful.
Ethics and laws aren't much to stop this either, the proliferation of the knowledge and technology means jurisdictions and social norms can be skirted just by virtue of relocating. I'm not so sure of a full blown Isle of Dr. Moreau situation, but it's not completely outside the realm of possibility anymore.
in my LSD and Weed smoking days, no one interviewed me, and I certainly had no magazines or authors contacting me for my "evolutionary knowledge"
meh
I am totally "mesmerized" (! can't believe I wrote that word, but I wanted the most grand and elegant expression for - fucking unbelievable !!!!X@&%$!@-+_@#()*#@@) that someone who is supposed to be as smart as Hawking and he believes in CCCRRRRAAAAPPPP like evolution of the human race (yes us) from an elementary cell !!!!!!! But then I come to think about it, Indians are great in math, hydraulics, science and programming, and yet they believe that their destinies and fortune are controlled by cows ! And ancient Egyptians also believed that they would be judged in the after-world by a half-man half-hawk (or something to that effect) and they worshiped a bundle of creatures that can surpass anybody's imagination : hawks, rhinos, birds, cats, frogs, coyotes, alligators .... and again they were a smart civilization - they built Pyramids and other stuff.
Its like farting out loud in a fully dressed formal consulate dinner in the presence of 200 people and not even being bothered of what people would think ...
The final simple / logical / un-debatable fact is that GOD created us, and there is ONLY ONE GOD. Like it or not, its THE FACT.
....back in the 80s when Sagan said it.
When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
So when you strip away all the things OS developers have been working on for the past 30 years, they're just as primitive as 30 year old OS's? You don't say!
Perhaps we could call the GUI improvements "memes" compared to the "Darwinian" aspects under the hood, but the whole point of the article is to convey the notion that memes have become as influential as Darwinian DNA. Can't think of a better example.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The article describes an evolutionary "external transmission phase" referring specifically to the propagation of information, but doesn't mention the Internet as a driving force? If there's anything that has caused a recent escalation in this scheme it's gotta be the Web. The article only refers specifically to books! Meanwhile Facebook has to have changed human behavior more than any single book published in the last 50 years.
No doubt Dr. Hawking has not ignored the Internet in his deliberations, but it's strangely ironic for an online article to overlook its influence in this matter.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
WTF does Hawking know about evolution anyway, he is a physicist. He has no scientific credibility in this area, and is trying to act the big man (ironically) because of his fame, exploiting the man on the street who thinks he is an expert on everything. Language is just behaviour, as is the recording of information. Evolution does not work in 'phases'. What he is talking about is memetic replication, which has nothing to do with genetic replication and evolution. He is not saying anything new anyway. Dawkins blah.
Stop pushing new areas of evolution when the old areas have not been factually and clearly identified.
There are large gaps of evolution that have yet to be found before and after the prehistoric and other areas of time. Fossels do not evolutionary fact make.
This is 2009. Stephen's comments were made in 2007, don't you know? This is pretty old news.
You're not making the point you think you are. Humanity still uses fire and the wheel, still makes furniture out of wood and prints books on paper, and still communicates through speaking. Truly new ways of doing things only come around occasionally, in the meantime existing ideas are improved upon incrementally.
Way, too, many, commas.
Sorry, I know not everybody cares, but some of us find it harder to read when we're distracted by spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. It's sort of like hearing sour notes in music.
Feel free to ignore me. I'm just venting.
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
The point Hawking's making is interesting, and potentially relevant, but it's hardly a novel claim. What he's talking about it often called "cultural evolution", and people have been talking about it for a while now, starting(?) with Cavalli-Sforza et al back in the 80s. It's regained momentum with the recent (~ last decade) resurgence of interest in the evolution of language (cf. papers by Simon Kirby, Henry Brighton & friends in the 2006 PNAS).
Also, it seems doubtful to me that we're literally no longer evolving in the "traditional" sense of the word. Sure, we're doing things to artificially prolong life and enhance reproductive success, but that doesn't really change the fact that natural and sexual selection are still at work.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a biologist. I AM a linguist.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. -- Wernher von Braun
The "all cultures are equal" line is bunch of liberal B.S. Some cultures are absolutley superior to others. Cultures which treat women as property, for instance, are inferior cultures.
Treating women, or any other group, as property would get a big old "inferiority" label from many (including myself). Except it's a crude oversimplification, and thus not scientific, to judge a whole culture by one practice, especially one not shared by every person in the culture. The US has a huge gap in wealth for the top 5% versus the bottom 95%, does this 2 class wage slavery make the whole culture inferior, or just that part? Compared to (nearly?) all other countries combined, the US puts more money into offensive weapons and uses them; does that make the whole culture inferior? Monkey and dog packs have pecking orders, does that make them inferior to swan pairings? To get back on topic, can we pick and choose the best parts from historical records, and shy away from the worst; much like species mutations that live longer or die early based on their environment?
... because of external factors as noted in Guns, Germs and Steel: geography, suitability for agriculture, etc.
Guns, Germs, and Steel is an interesting premise, but like you said it ignores oil, minerals, water, food, other natural resources, power, government, propaganda, education, and many other aspects of people and life. An overwhelming difference between ruling parties and people is the desire to generalize and control by the former, and the need for individuality and freedom by the latter.
The people from these cultures are interchangeable: take some African-born infant and raise him in Western Europe with advanced medicine and European parents and he's going to turn out basically a dark-skinned European, with European culture and probably just as smart as an average European.
You came so close! Skin color is irrelevant, leave out the "dark-skinned" and we're left with a nearly perfect assessment.
Or at least stop smoking that Obama Gold crack cocaine that you arrogant ass holes must be smoking. Are we to believe that rather than taking very long periods of time, even millions of years, that smoking dope can increase the speed of evolution some how?
So, is it Hawking's assistant that helps him smoke drugs, or
is there a special chocolaty mealtime treat involved?
Pfffttt!!!
Who put Hawking in charge of the obvious?
Can some of you people who believe in "crap" - sorry - evolution (!!!) ask themselves : if evolution was true, and that everything we have today as a feature of our human body is a result of selective growth for a purpose - then a) what are eyebrows used for ? b) what is hair for ? c) what is pubic and arm-pit hair for ? what is the use of virginity ? what is the use of a beard ? if evolution can develop muscles as "tireless" as a heart muscle, and as strong as a jaw muscle, why didnt ALL the muscles be from the same fiber, then you can run like a jaguar maybe - or jump like a flea ? and if evolution were capable of equipping bats with radar sensors and hawks with hi-res eyes - why didnt we get some - we needed vision too ? why dont we have hair on the inside of our palms ? why one heart and two kidneys ? why "five" fingers ? why an ass ?
FACT is : GOD created us - and HE IS ONE GOD.
I am not sure why that matters: on a packet-switched network like the internet, all connections are just abstractions created by a session-layer protocol (usually TCP).
I think you forgot a link. I am not sure if you just wanted the Wikipedia page on BeOS or a link straight to Haiku.
Linux has some tweaks in the kernel settings which are pretty much labeled "use this one option on a server and that option on a desktop". I assume desktop-oriented distros like Fedora and Ubuntu choose the desktop-friendly options. Then again, you may remember the drama over Con Kolivas maintaining a fork with more desktop-friendly options and saying that the other kernel devs just weren't that interested in working on such improvements.
Also, if a modern desktop/laptop computer is swapping out programs, something is wrong. With over 1GB of memory or so, that should not be necessary. You could probably get away with a good amount less memory and still not need a swap file/partition.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Social Science is not a science.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Richard Dawkins already suggested this.
I guess Hawking entered a particular phase and the humans another one, opposite to him (brain and no body, against body and no brain).
Never mind that you left many OS's out of your comment. There are actually OS's that ARE *SMART* and they truly optimize (pretty much by themselves the work load and they also have an very high I/O thru-put). Non of the OS's you cite can come close. And this has been done with more and more sophistication over the last 50 years that it would make those OS's you listed are arcane and should be set out to greener pasteurs.
Basically, human beings are just means of transport and habitats for bacteria.
These bacteria have been injecting us with their genetics for ever.
If this view changes your idea of 'self', then that must be what they want.
You have just reproduced verbatim an argument put forth by Carl Sagan in "Dragons of Eden"...about thirty years ago.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
mister hawking, it is because of these 'externals' that we do not evolve. The externals take away the reason for evolving
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If one watches children work their video games and examines the effects of clandestine and conventional pharmaceuticals on individuals and society, one can see that we're driving our own evolution now and in some odd directions. Our medicine allows challenged individuals the opportunity to reproduce that they would never have had. ...and just wait until genetic experimentation has chimeras walking the streets. Will they be sexy? Maybe so.
The point he is trying to make (or might try to make) is that all humans
are more or less the same. The difference is not in hardware, but only in software.
We are all x86 processors now, and the difference is not in the clockspeed, but
in the knowlegde / programs which are run.
What knowledge we seek, and how we are able to deal with new information is all that
matters. In the end we're are not different from our ancesters, but we have new and
better meme's. The ways in which we are able to filer out the bad meme's will be leading,
not phisical changes.
The person with the right meme's will survive, and getting the right meme's is a matter
of education and upbringing.
Uhm, I thought that was the point of Adam & Eve? Is the symbolism of the "tree of knowledge" and "realizing that we're naked" so obscure that it goes over most peoples' heads?
No, I will not work for your startup
1. It's an analogy. Pointing out commonalities between unlike things is what's known as an "insight".
2. Evolution does not have goals; it can lead to expansion or to extinction. Pointing out different ways of looking at something is also known as "insight".
Hawking misunderstands the very nature of Human DNA. He looks at it as a mathematician would, as an absolute definable entity and hence lies the flaw in his reasoning.
Human DNA has taken on a massive difference in the last 500-1000yrs, concentrated via the growth of large cities. An organism's definable DNA is comprised not of just one sampled individual but it is also all the other DNA around itself in the population with which material is common to, or could be exchanged, recent ancestors and future bearers of offspring. (it is certainly not information which exists only as corollary and part-agent) Thus a true DNA assay is actually a matrix of probabilities for the discrete genetic data (codons) that can occur for the entire population (impossible) so with this impossibility acknowledged, an error margin for each attribute for the samples population must exist too and so DNA is not just an archetypal series of discrete values representing one individual as Hawking believes.
The implications of this reasoning are that rather than change manifesting in the DNA of an average individual, this change instead has taken place across CITY POPULATIONS, with the distribution of different desirable and selectable traits being concentrated and thus made more prevalent under these different environmental pressures. To satisfactorily understand the change that is occurring in human DNA, envision a genetic map, like a contour map dotted all over with individuals living in discrete phenotype 'altitude' areas as defined by the contour lines. Within these strictures, genes are meeting and amplifying, given that intellect and many other traits are likely to be due to hundreds if not thousands of different genes, all this is happening under enormous and deliberate pressure, a mass refining. The mincer of Pink Floyd's the wall working in an entirely different way.
With the growth and advent of cities, and universities and an educated elite, the requirements of objective analysis need definable and repeatable excellence, I.e. biological as well as environmental talent; thus very real selection has recently taken place for this intelligence. Remember that it being far more likely that 'intelligent' people will form partnerships with people of similar mind-set, career, interests. This has produced a super-set of genes for intellect. Other genes for all manner of qualities exist in other populations, refined to a certain degree by their respective environments in a like manner.
The information bunker that Hawking talks about is important; it is in part the agent through which organisms recognise desirable traits such as intellect in one another. Defining intellectualism as phenotype and genotype is so complex that such defies current analysis, but this does not mean to say that such doesn't exist. Because of our global nature, these genes spread and form more elite pockets, like a benevolent cancer metastasising...
There are isolated areas where this hasn't happened to as great a degree, Ocean islands with little variation or subsistence areas with poor or uncertain climates and disease. This argument has unfortunate political ramifications. If you buy in to the socialist dystopian myth that we are all born the same, then you will be reluctant to even consider these questions. They are illegal.
hawking he should stick to dimensions
nick keesing
They were the first to undertake long migrations
They were the first to produce art as we understand it today (paintings in South African caves dating back tens of thousands of years).
Africans produced, er, humanity.
This is not a figure of speech. If was Africans, more likely not too different from the ones living there today, who first ventured out of the African continent in order to spread the human race all around the globe.
As for Africans having done "nothing" check your Encyclopaedia and find Egypt, also look at some of their art: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SFEC_EGYPT_ABUSIMBEL_2006-003.JPG so you can recognize the people who made that possible.
As for IQ tests, you unhelpfully did not provide pointers to support your claims, which is strange since typing "validity of IQ tests" in Google brings a plethora of information, many of them pointing out to the flaws of using IQ to measure intelligence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Have you seen San people track animals?
They can tell you all about an animal they have never seen by looking only at the tracks they leave in the sand.
This is not the only useful knowledge they have, they are very knowledgeable about the foods available, the seasons, how to find water and all manner of skills to help them survive the harsh environment where they live.
Seeing them in action the last thing you would think about any of them is to consider them stupid. But most likely they would do badly in an IQ test. This is unsurprising if you consider that geometry, set theory and mathematics has never been a major cultural concern for them. There are many tribes around the world famed for their inability to count, nevertheless they have thrived in their environments for hundreds, or perhaps thousands of years.
Putting it another way, most modern westernised urbanized people would be completely hopeless in the environment of the San people, most likely they would consider such a person close to mentally retarded, which would be equally unfair.
Intelligence is not an absolute thing that can be measured. It is a capability to adapt to different circumstances aided by a social context that is familiar. Measuring human intelligence is an exercise of futility knowing that, fundamentally, we all have the same capabilities.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
One tends to listen to people that have proven that they can contribute something useful to our science and culture.
One has to listen sceptically (always) , but appeals to authority are the last refuge of the person without a point.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The only way to stop evolution would be to find a way that everybody had exactly the same genes, and enforce this thoroughly.
We could, for example, stop sexual reproduction, favour cloning and then little by little, prune the clones allowed to carry on, until we would have a species with so little genetic variation as to consider evolution has stopped for them.
But even then ,mutations would be possible due to external factors, and the clones would not be perfect copies, unless you could refer always to a primordial genetic map with somehow could always be re implanted in any new human being.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Many people related to genetics and evolutionary theory had nothing to do with the field when they arrived to it. Not even Darwin himself.
But keep your mind closed, it is really useful ....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Really? I'm as good a programmer as Linus Torvalds, as brilliant a businessman as Bill Gates and as phenomenal at physics as Stephen Hawking? Awesome!!!
Parent needs a "-1 Kumbayaa" mod.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Here is what I appreciate in Stephen Hawking's confessions. Our DNA code was mutating by 1 bit a year but 1 bit of mutation could eliminate many homos ...
Now the world publishes 50,000 books a year
and in a way it can select some of us, !
"hundred billion bits of information in books
are garbage" and will select some of us.
Maybe Hawking wants our children to begin DNA engineering, eugenism, and to resolve the schoolbooks selection
and agressive instinct problems too.
In the posts, the meme polemic
is a holism polemic, the necessary egg about our future.
As we feel the present time and the future
there is a necessary embodiement of physics
that cannot simply fade along the centuries to come.
The sense of facts are our axioms.
The reciprocity shows the same idea,
if our current advances nullify the natural selection
then they will become physically weak in average
so it is a good thing to cure ou DNA from weaknesses
to be embodied heathly. ... memes have no force by themselves.
The sympathetic effect of the Darwinism window,
from XIX to XX, has set a revolution in creationism,
it is located in the future not in the past.
In our spirit we have to move in time now
to preserve what the 19th lay men knew.
(because the were gentlemen
like captain Jenaway's holo boyfriend)
I really think that Stephen Hawking
has to deal seriously whith these questions
for his work on the details of the big bang.
Is it a 2000 years old embodiement open problem ?
Sorry for being or putting in the details.
We are past natural selection, and soon will be mucking with our own genetic code, which will be our [possibly] final stage of evolution. Thus, I came up with the Darwin-ClintJCL Universal Evolution Theory, which applies to all sentient species that reach technological maturity.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com