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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...
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.
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!
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
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
I think you're trying to make a useful argument here, and on the surface you're trying to challenge the idea of racial intelligence. But your post is horribly misguided. I can't decide if you're flaming on purpose, or just plain ignorant, so I'll bite.
You're assuming that everything that has value is somehow linked to science and technology. You completely dismiss differences in cultural values as being somehow 'less' than the output of the Europeans. The IQ test has, built into it, the cultural bias of the white, european, while completely disregarding other values. You can bet that if the IQ test included intelligence and observations on how nature behaves outside of the constraints of 'the scientific method' the Europeans would have their asses handed to them by the native americans, the australian aboriginals, or any other culture that couldn't give two pig shits about European science or technology.
Walk, don't run, to your nearest library and check out "Guns, Germs and Steel". The author successfully challenges and completely and systematically demolishes the idea of some sort of inherent racial intelligence difference.
I have no idea where morons like you come from. Sub-saharan Africa has the highest genetic diversity on the planet. Ponder that for a moment. It means that your notion of some sort of genetic "dumbness" is bunk.
But maybe that explains your own stupidity, fear and ignorance. I'd feel sorry for you, if you weren't such a loathesome pile of garbage. Now go find a rock, you useless piece of shit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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...
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.
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
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
So you're saying that the Scientific Method is bunk? Sorry, but you just lost me with your argument there. The Scientific Method is the reason we have advanced technology now, and aren't just sitting around in grass huts or caves and suffering with a life expectancy of 30. 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.
Of course, this has nothing to do with race, but as a typical liberal, you had to inject race into it. Cultures developed differently, in different places, because of external factors as noted in Guns, Germs and Steel: geography, suitability for agriculture, etc. 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. The IQ test isn't biased; it's just showing that people raised in poor conditions, with poor nutrition (especially in childhood), possibly in war-torn countries, tend to not grow up to be as smart as children that grew up in better conditions, where were able to spend their childhood exercising their brains learning math, science, language, etc. instead of dodging bullets or swatting flies.
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.
So you're saying that the Scientific Method is bunk?
No, that's not what he said at all.
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.
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.
(Disclaimer: I am a scientist, so this isn't anecdotal)
Mod my parent up. This is -precisely- true. The idea that we test a hypothesis and refine it based on experimental outcomes is utter BS. In all but the most -basic- of processes, there simply is no way to account for all possible results of testing a system; this is further compounded in my field, where an 'in vitro' experiment may yield different results than one 'in vivo'. To make matters worse, those 'in vitro' experiments may in fact yield different results in /different cell types/, given all other conditions being precisely the same.
Without going into too much detail, the real nature of science is that we already have a fairly good idea of what we -want- to happen before we begin testing. I may have a vague theory about the experiments will come out, but more often than not we end up writing the theory to fit the facts around the time the data is published, in such a way that it fits the data we've collected, even though that final theory may not have any relation to the initial expectations.
Some of this is also attributable to the funding system (at least in the US). Submission of a grant (money to do experiments) requires that you already have (preliminary) information, and a fairly tight and detailed set of theories to explain how what you propose to do will result in a conclusion, as well as what those conclusions will be. Essentially, you need to present some data in order to get funding to obtain data. Give too much preliminary research, and you won't have enough theory and interesting suggestions to get funding, but if you don't have enough research done (how you do this without money is a nice conundrum), you won't get funding.
In practice, this often means researchers with no active funding will dust off old unpublished work, and write theories around it, in order to talk the NIH into paying out money so real work can get done (since once you're funded, you can really do whatever research you want -- especially if we're not talking about a renewable grant).
So it's really a messed up system all around, but the scientific method as you know it has virtually no role in it either way.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
Wow, did you even read the post he was replying to? The original poster made an argument that Africans are stupider than every other race. The post you replied to, was explaining that race has nothing to do with intelligence. And then for some reason you accused him of bringing race into it, when he clearly did not.
Everyone, please try to understand the context of a post before replying to it. It will make the conversation go so much nicer.
Qxe4
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.
He said nothing of the sort, he said knowing math and science does not make you more intelligent, it makes you more knowledgeable, theres quite a bit of difference there.
The IQ test does not, NOT, measure pure intelligence, it assumes that you have working knowledge of language and math.
So, in short, intelligence has nothing to do with specific types of knowledge, it has to do with how well you can reason and think and observe.
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.
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
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?
Perhaps he's wrong to say that we'd still be sitting around in caves, but technology has still advanced tremedously in the last few hundred years since "the scientific method", so it's not true to say that all this progress happened "long before the scientific practice".
I'd argue that many of the scientific advances before then were still the scientific method in practice, it's just that the process wasn't formalised (this wasn't a sudden thing after all - the method was formalised over a period of hundreds of years and is very much a part of scientific progress itself - e.g., see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_method ).
The vast majority of our advances in Western society have been due to sheer intelligence - IE, observations
And? Using intelligence to form a hypothesis from observations is the first stage of the scientific method.
Einstein
Einstein fits perfectly with the scientific method. Both relativity and the photoelectric effect came from trying to solve known problems, based on observations that had been made. His theories were then tested (I suppose you could argue that in some sense, testing wasn't required, in that it was already proven from the observed data - I'm reminded of Einstein's reply of "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord", when asked what if the experiment failed to support relativity. But we cannot always be so sure).
Newton similarly followed the scientific method when he came up with laws of motion, and a theory of gravitation, to explain observed facts. The progress he made was a fundamental part of the scientific method. His dabbling on alchemy and the occult was not so scientific, however - yet would you suggest that these somehow contributed to science and technology?
Socrates was a philosopher - but he himself came up with the Socratic Method, which I would argue is the sort of rational approach that later lead to methods such as the scientific method.
I think you are misunderstanding what the scientific method is. It's not "let's tinker around randomly and hope we find something through trial and error" as you imply - it's precisely the application of intelligence to observation that you describe, followed up with testing to make sure we are right. Hypotheses are not randomly made up, they must still fit the observed data, and theories must provide a model to explain the observed data.
What method do you advocate in place of the scientific method?
No, what you've noticed is that some people, some times, exhibit that double standard in judgement. Then you just arbitrarily glossed a gigantic generalisation over some nebulous ill-defined boogeyman you've labelled "Liberals".
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
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?
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.