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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.
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.
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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
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
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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
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
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