Saturday, January 14, 2006
Evolution
Natural Selection is still acting upon us. The human species, a species of great ape, is still evolving. A medical database in Iceland is telling us that certain women with a particular section of one chromosome are more fertile than most human females. I will not comment about the positive uses or negative consequences of genetic screening. Shortly, we may have the ability to make site-specific changes within the DNA chromosomes at the one or two cell stage of an embryo. If so, than doctors could fix an embryo rather than just kill it, but it would really need to be at the 1-6 cell stage of the blastocyte.
We are evolving physically and mentally. On Charlie Rose, James Watson pointed out that humanity is becoming less violent. So, one could say spiritually, we are caterpillars trying to change into butterflies. I think a more accurate analogy is that humanity is like a theropod dinosaur evolving into a bird. The leap from Homo sapiens to Homo spiritus or Homo deus is a mental one. I feel like a dinosaur trying to fly! (grin)
We are evolving physically and mentally. On Charlie Rose, James Watson pointed out that humanity is becoming less violent. So, one could say spiritually, we are caterpillars trying to change into butterflies. I think a more accurate analogy is that humanity is like a theropod dinosaur evolving into a bird. The leap from Homo sapiens to Homo spiritus or Homo deus is a mental one. I feel like a dinosaur trying to fly! (grin)
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Interesting! I think some (many?) problems we experience today are due to our living in ways that are in conflict with our current point in evoution. It seems to me that our personal worlds, technologies and environments are changing faster than we can adapt.
I hope we are becoming less violent. Do you have any supporting references that you recommend I read?
I hope we are becoming less violent. Do you have any supporting references that you recommend I read?
Not sure. You can go to www.charlierose.com and order the transcript for An Hour on Darwin
Dec. 14 2005. You may wish to browse E.O. Wilson's texts and see if he has a similar viewpoint. However, nuclear weapons have made major organized violence such as World Wars obsolete. Whether human psychology has changed because of that fact is unknown. Eckhart Tolle calls stockpiling of nuclear weapons intelligent stupidity. I agree. The plutonium could be put to use in reactors and used for fuel instead of death. It doesn't make sense to just bury it as waste without extracting its energy first.
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Dec. 14 2005. You may wish to browse E.O. Wilson's texts and see if he has a similar viewpoint. However, nuclear weapons have made major organized violence such as World Wars obsolete. Whether human psychology has changed because of that fact is unknown. Eckhart Tolle calls stockpiling of nuclear weapons intelligent stupidity. I agree. The plutonium could be put to use in reactors and used for fuel instead of death. It doesn't make sense to just bury it as waste without extracting its energy first.
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