ICANNWiki:"Philosophy" essay by Marc Perkel: Difference between revisions
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Evolution was first expressed in terms of "survival of the fittest." envoking images of to males fighting to the death and the survivor gets the prize of mating with the female. Or the eagle with the better eyesight gets more mice to eat than the eagle more nearsighted. Genetic mutation causing random differences and those that provide a benefit become the dominate trait over long periods of time. | Evolution was first expressed in terms of "survival of the fittest." envoking images of to males fighting to the death and the survivor gets the prize of mating with the female. Or the eagle with the better eyesight gets more mice to eat than the eagle more nearsighted. Genetic mutation causing random differences and those that provide a benefit become the dominate trait over long periods of time. | ||
Humans evolved an ability that changed evolution. Unlike other species where most all knowledge learned by an individual dies with the individual, humans developed symbolic language which allowed knowledge to accumulate. Our ability to survive increased as the knowledge increased. As a result of the success of this new ability humans evolved around this new ability and our brains reconfigured to support verbal communication. This new ability forked a new evolutionary paradigm, the information was evolving too. As we invented new things our abilities increased without a corresponding improvement in the DNA based hardware. | |||
We then applied our abilities to affect the evolution of other species. Farmers employed selective breeding so that we could change plants and animals we used for food. We took and evolutionary process and sped it up by applying our own selection criteria rather than the long process of survival of the fittest. This created a form of controlled evolution. This is a new paradigm. | |||
With new technologies we can now engineer life at the genetic level and skip the whole breeding paradigm and go directly to what we want. This engineered paradigm of evolution is very new and we are very early in the development of custom life forms, but one has to assume that this will continue to expand in the future and will need to be incorporated into a new way of thinking about evolution. | |||
In addition to altering our genetics we are now interfacing technology and biology so that these two technologies work together and talk to each other. This is opening up yet another paradigm, cybernetic evolution. | |||
=== The Internet causes Humans to experience Hyper-Evolution === | === The Internet causes Humans to experience Hyper-Evolution === | ||