Regarding humans, I wonder if it is possible that this process is happening to us, if true? Africans and Asians suffer greatly from parasites, much more than we in the west do, & it may be possible that this is causing them to speciate very gradually.
This is, to be blunt, a silly notion. Who exactly are these "Africans" and "Asians" you speak of, anyway? By Asian, for instance, do you mean Austronesians, Han Chinese, the Hmong of Vietnam, India's Dravidian speakers, or the non-Ainu Japanese? Or some other group altogether? Last I looked, there was precious little anyone could say about common living conditions even amongst the handful of peoples I mentioned.
You seem to suppose that the Asian and African continents constitute one large, amorphous mass of starving, benighted, indigent illiterates, which is very far from true. Asia is an extremely large place, with a tremendous variety of cultures and standards of living; even making generalizations about Indian living standards is hard to do. And if Asia is a confusingly diverse place, it seems utterly homogenous in comparison with Africa, where you can easily find near-Western standards of living abutting scenes that look straight out of hell.
To illustrate, the sort of famine with with most Westerners associate "Africa" occurs only in the horn of Africa, where Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are situated. Mass famine is unknown in West Africa, where the largest number of Africans actually live, and it would probably not occur in Ethiopia and its neighbors, were it not for the strife that has marked that region for the last 60 years.
Turning now to your suggestion, one reason why it is unlikely ever to occur is that, even in the very poorest African countries, not everyone will be living at a subsistence level. There are always local elites, many of whom will enjoy a standard of living and health care that even middle-class Americans can only dream about - including access to top-flight, private, medical treatment in Europe and the United States. If any new parasite-initiated speciation event were to occur in our species, it would not occur along "racial" lines, but along economic lines instead (I use the term "racial" in quotes because it isn't really clear what that term means, anyway; in the eyes of many an African, Colin Powell seems much closer to "white" than "black," and Powell isn't uncommon in this respect.)
A much more interesting take on this announcement would be to ponder what role it might have played in the split that occurred between human and chimpanzee ancestors some 5 million years ago...
The single greatest invention in the history of mankind was agriculture.
This is absolutely correct. Before the dawn of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, all human societies consisted of small bands of hunter-gatherers, typically numbering around 25 men, women and children per group; there were no such things as "societies" - as we currently understand the term - to speak of, no permanent settlements people could call their "homelands," no nations, not even cities.
Only with the transition from a life of hunting, gathering and scavenging (yes, that too!) did the rudiments of "civilization" begin to emerge. Annual crops like wheat and barley needed long-term tending, necessitating fixed settlement. The carrying capacity of given areas of land exploded, making possible first villages, then small towns and later the first cities. The larger settlements made possible a division of labor without precedent in human history - farmers, merchants, artisans, soldiers, administrators and the like.
Vast hierarchies emerged, of a sort men had never before seen. Divine kings and high-priests replaced the chief-hunter or shaman of yesteryear. Slavery and state-building, in the form of monuments like ziggurats and pyramids, came into being. States were born of the ambitions of rival rulers, and with these new states, vast wars, permanent standing armies, and notions of nationalism and ethnic rivalry.
The complex new social structures gave impetus to the drive to record all sorts of information that was necessary for administrative efficiency - the quantity of taxes levied and paid, the amount of grain harvested, the number of adult males available for military service - and from this sprang the second most important invention of all time - writing. (It is interesting to note that the first attested usage of writing, by the Sumerians, was for the recording of contracts by administrators and tax collectors.)
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This is, to be blunt, a silly notion. Who exactly are these "Africans" and "Asians" you speak of, anyway? By Asian, for instance, do you mean Austronesians, Han Chinese, the Hmong of Vietnam, India's Dravidian speakers, or the non-Ainu Japanese? Or some other group altogether? Last I looked, there was precious little anyone could say about common living conditions even amongst the handful of peoples I mentioned.
You seem to suppose that the Asian and African continents constitute one large, amorphous mass of starving, benighted, indigent illiterates, which is very far from true. Asia is an extremely large place, with a tremendous variety of cultures and standards of living; even making generalizations about Indian living standards is hard to do. And if Asia is a confusingly diverse place, it seems utterly homogenous in comparison with Africa, where you can easily find near-Western standards of living abutting scenes that look straight out of hell.
To illustrate, the sort of famine with with most Westerners associate "Africa" occurs only in the horn of Africa, where Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia are situated. Mass famine is unknown in West Africa, where the largest number of Africans actually live, and it would probably not occur in Ethiopia and its neighbors, were it not for the strife that has marked that region for the last 60 years.
Turning now to your suggestion, one reason why it is unlikely ever to occur is that, even in the very poorest African countries, not everyone will be living at a subsistence level. There are always local elites, many of whom will enjoy a standard of living and health care that even middle-class Americans can only dream about - including access to top-flight, private, medical treatment in Europe and the United States. If any new parasite-initiated speciation event were to occur in our species, it would not occur along "racial" lines, but along economic lines instead (I use the term "racial" in quotes because it isn't really clear what that term means, anyway; in the eyes of many an African, Colin Powell seems much closer to "white" than "black," and Powell isn't uncommon in this respect.)
A much more interesting take on this announcement would be to ponder what role it might have played in the split that occurred between human and chimpanzee ancestors some 5 million years ago ...
Only with the transition from a life of hunting, gathering and scavenging (yes, that too!) did the rudiments of "civilization" begin to emerge. Annual crops like wheat and barley needed long-term tending, necessitating fixed settlement. The carrying capacity of given areas of land exploded, making possible first villages, then small towns and later the first cities. The larger settlements made possible a division of labor without precedent in human history - farmers, merchants, artisans, soldiers, administrators and the like.
Vast hierarchies emerged, of a sort men had never before seen. Divine kings and high-priests replaced the chief-hunter or shaman of yesteryear. Slavery and state-building, in the form of monuments like ziggurats and pyramids, came into being. States were born of the ambitions of rival rulers, and with these new states, vast wars, permanent standing armies, and notions of nationalism and ethnic rivalry.
The complex new social structures gave impetus to the drive to record all sorts of information that was necessary for administrative efficiency - the quantity of taxes levied and paid, the amount of grain harvested, the number of adult males available for military service - and from this sprang the second most important invention of all time - writing. (It is interesting to note that the first attested usage of writing, by the Sumerians, was for the recording of contracts by administrators and tax collectors.)
Uh ... for some reason, the following phrase seems to be in contradiction with itself ...
>They say they have come close to the limit of
>modern technology but also still have plenty of
>innovation left for the future.