The Six Great Stages of Evolution on Earth -Is There a Seventh?

[n2doc]

Milan Ćirković of the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, and one of the world's leading authorities on astrobiology and the evolution of galaxies and baryonic dark matter, has outlined along with philosopher Robert Bradbury the six great mega-trajectories of the biological evolution on Earth:
1. From the origin of life to the ”Last Common Ancestor"
2. Prokaryote diversification
3. Unicellular eukaryote diversification
4. Multicellularity
5. Invasion of the land
6. Appearance of intelligence and technology.
The authors suggest a "postbiological" seventh mega-trajectory triggered by the emergence of artificial intelligence "at least equivalent to the biologically-evolved one. (Bradbury is the inventor of the matrioshka brain -a hypothetical megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity).
In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a recent study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.

The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival.

more:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/11/the-six-great-s.html

[glitch]

1. My theory: we shifted from biological to ideological evolution when we went to agriculture

Of course my theory may be based on actual theories I've read and forgotten that I read them. :)
But once we went from biological to ideological our evolutionary ability increased it's speed and flexibility exponentially (this ties in with lore, biblical: noting when we "ate the apple from the tree of knowledge" THAT was our shift from biological to ideological).
So I like articles like this, thanks for posting.

[Lint Head]

2. This is nothing new. There are many books about this.

I have studied this very concept and concluded that is is an obvious transition. It is too far in the future to understand the totality but anyone contemplating this eventually would reach the same conclusion. If the planet survives we will evolve into part 'human animal' part 'machine' eventually evolving into something similar to an electric charge or free floating energy. Transference of all frequencies and biological electrical brain components is just around the corner. Capturing these electrical impulses is the first step and automation of the transference to a host is the second. It will replicate from there without the need of human intervention. Substitution of something other than the body as a host is another puzzle.
You will not need hands or feet or a stomach. It's a matter of feeding the electrical energy to cause it to regenerate.
This energy is conscience awareness of existence itself.

[Indenturedebtor]

3. Since we're all energy by way of E=MC2 I think that it's not much of a distinction

to say that we're going to "become" energy.

However without great advances in quantum physics we could never transfer consciousness as an exact replica from one second to the next... and then again would we want to? Wouldn't it be better to simple regenerate the brain with stem cells, etc?

Personally I don't believe that a higher state of being naturally flows from removing ourselves from our bodies. There is wisdom in skin and pinky toes too ya know :D

[hunter]

5. E=MC^2 how about if C=1 ?

It clears away a lot of the nonsense if everything is energy humming along at the speed of light. Howdy neighbor of this face of the wave front.

That's right, c² = 1² = 1 ; no running off into imaginary places right from the start of your calculations.

Working backward can be a nuisance, however. A good human base ten measurement of distance is the nanosecond; that is the distance light travels in a nanosecond, very roughly a foot. You can call it a nano. And then you can knock yourself out figuring out the equivalents of _nwatts, _njoules etc., all the time remembering that c=1, so _nE=_nmc.

I have a lot more fun playing around with stuff like that. There are no "stages of evolution" and our current relationship with the biosphere is not sustainable. It's possible we will be remembered only for the remarkable amount of trash we produced and the environmental havoc we caused. To this old earth we are like some big stupid rock that fell out of the sky. The scars we are leaving on the biosphere will take a long time to heal, but there's been worse.

The only meaning technology has is the meaning we choose to give it. The universe doesn't care in the slightest. When we are gone, the meaning of our technology will be gone, but life in some form and some place will keep poking along and evolving as it always has.

[Posteritatis]

4. Evolution is neither constant nor progressive

If a species doesn't need to change, it doesn't; if their environment changes they can adapt surprisingly quickly, but if they found a good niche they can remain where they are for tens or of millions of years or more. There's a reason alligators and related species, or sharks and related species, haven't really changed in over a hundred million years.

Viewing evolution as a progressive march from the primordial soup to homo sapiens is something of a broken, not to say discredited, approach. There is no such thing as "more" or "less" evolved. E. coli has had exactly as much time to evolve as we have, but I don't see many people claiming that the history of life on Earth is a march towards their existence.

The implication that there's a "next stage of evolution" is kind of silly, barring ones which involve conscious decisions on our part, which kind of blur the concept of evolution in the first place. We will end up changing - or dying - sooner or later, assuming things change on Earth or we leave it, but there's no pre-determined form sitting out there for us to move into, and certainly none of that "pure energy" stuff that floats around science fiction and the wackier parts of the wooösphere.