"Rapid acceleration in human evolution described" - Reuters 12/10/07
By Will Dunham
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Human evolution has been moving at breakneck speed in the past several thousand years, far from plodding along as some scientists had thought, researchers said on Monday.
"In fact, people today are genetically more different from people living 5,000 years ago than those humans were different from the Neanderthals who vanished 30,000 years ago, according to anthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin.
(SNIP)
"Many of the recent genetic changes reflect differences in the human diet brought on by agriculture, as well as resistance to epidemic diseases....
"For example, Africans have new genes providing resistance to malaria. In Europeans, there is a gene that makes them better able to digest milk as adults....
"The changes have been driven by the colossal growth in the human population -- from a few million to 6.5 billion in the past 10,000 years -- with people moving into new environments to which they needed to adapt....
"'The central finding is that human evolution is happening very fast -- faster than any of us thought'...."
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http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1043228620071210---------------------------------------
Scientists of human evolution seem to be always SO CAREFUL to limit their findings to physical evidence--understandable, I guess, since that is the most concrete evidence and safest ground. But the evolution of the human psyche is equally fascinating--and to me, far more so, because all animals eat, many animals use tools and even do some husbandry, all animals are driven to procreate, most care for their young in some kind of family unit; they all have bones, limbs, wings, physical elements that have adapted to environmental change--but none of them, so far as we know, have gods, and fantastical tales of adventure, some of them writ upon the stars (as the constellations); none of them have the Hubble telescope; none of them have walked on the moon; none of them have written a "Hamlet"; none of them have conceived and executed a statue of a saint in ecstasy from the wound of an angel's spear; none of them punish themselves with guilt as we do; none of them have conceived of themselves as the animals chosen by God to have dominion over the earth; none of them have thought of giving all they have to poor and following Jesus; none have burned witches at the stake; none know the circumference of the earth, or have any interest, so far as we know, in recent discoveries of other planets around other suns; and on and on and on.
There is evidence of some sentient characteristics in whales, dolphins, elephants, chimpanzees and a few other species, and we cannot rule out that they ARE sentient, and that we are just too stupid and arrogant to recognize it when we see it (or hear it), but they have not manifested sentience in building atom-smashers, designing elegant Italian shoes and shipping them to the ends of the earth, or drawing a picture of mommy, daddy and kid and taping it to a wall.
OUR manifestations of sentience are so numerous, so concrete, so complex and so seemingly unique, that the study of our minds and how they work, and what they produce, and how they interact with each other, is, to me, the most important thing of all in evolution. WHY do we study evolution? HOW did we ever conceive of evolution? What use is it to us? WHY would we notice old bones, and odd geological formations, and old artifacts, and start connecting the dots? What drives us to do that? Why are all stories prior to the 20th century written about the PAST--often the deep past, events long ago ("once upon a time")--and suddenly, just before and at the turn of the 20th century, SOME stories (science fiction) began to place their narrative in the FUTURE?
So...we are evolving at an extremely fast pace, way beyond that of our ancestors. How is this manifesting in human consciousness? How are our minds, and our psyches, evolving?
Is this the heart of the problem we are having with the "Christian right" and with some Islamic cultures (or elements within them)? Is it that some of us are moving along very quickly in mental and psychological evolutionary change, and others are scared, bewildered, seemingly "stuck in the past"--trying either to drag us all back there, or to warn us of too rapid change (alienation, dislocation)? Is this in some way connected to the explosion of social revolutions in the 1960s, in our own culture here--American culture--in which the young seemed to chuck out everything notion from the past, all at once? Is it connected to the "Red Guard" phenomenon in China? To the various communist revolutions of the last century? WHAT is the impact of fast-paced evolutionary change on the human mind and its vast creative abilities, and its abilities to cope, and on society as a whole?
And--a very important question to me--what impact is fear of losing the planet, our only home--which is also the consequence, or cumulative effect, of rapid human population growth combined with conscienceless global corporate predation--having on us, as individuals, and on our behavior as to accelerating the crisis? (Are the rich panicked, on some deep level? Is that why they behave as irresponsibly and as murderously as they do? Is our consumerism a sort of reverse psychological reaction to loss of resources, and impending doom? WHY are we not conserving our resources? Why do we seem so insanely profligate?)
Well, scientists have become so conservative in many ways that maybe we can't rely on them to address the biggest question of all--is the human race suicidal, and, if so, how do we remedy that, or can we? WHERE is our rapid evolution GOING?
We need to understand this. We need theories and guidelines. We need some bold speculation. This is the first time that I have seen it noticed or acknowledged that we have, in fact, sped up time, in our evolutionary development. There have been a lot of futuristic sociological writings, and a lot of writings in what used to be called "the human potential movement." Perhaps we need to consult all of those writings again, and try some new speculations. With Bushism inflicted upon us, I think a lot of people are feeling quite negative about the future--at least in this country. They don't feel this way in South America, where they are DOING something about their problems, with a new and rather amazing, peaceful, democratic, region-wide revolution--while we moulder in war and massive debt, and let traitors, torturers and mass murderers rip up our Constitution, at the behest of the futurists at Exxon-Mobile.
What do we need to do to start consciously directing our mental and psychological evolution to better ends?
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