future evolution and human legacy

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead -- for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. Six billion years from now, it will not be humans who watch the sun's demise. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae. -Martin Rees, cosmologist and astrophysicist (b. 1942)

Clear Thinking vs. Groupthink

Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. -Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (b. 1920)

Courage may be a sine qua non of clear thinking, but more ingredients are often required. It happens also that "there is strength in numbers" (a nice double entendre, and we don't mean lying with statistics, either).

Much to the irritation of Western individualists, it turns out that difficult problems are best solved by groups of individuals, and the best ideas come from groups, too.  What, designed by a committee and a product of groupthink?   Are you, a believer in the supreme power of the individual, shocked and aghast?  You should be, because the evidence is compelling.  See Chapter 26, "How Many Inventors Does It Take to Make a Lightbulb", in Evolution for Everyone, by David S. Wilson.

This annoying conclusion is the tip of a dangerous iceberg, that humans have a kind of group mind, where the whole is sometimes smarter than any individual.  Not always, but sometimes, and those times can be very important.  So we're playing coquette today, teasing you with truth, but not the whole truth, and returning later...

Humans are not biological, and they are not evolved.

A majority of Americans do not "believe" in the theory of evolution, and many people think humans are "above" biology and not part of nature.  In the words of former U.S. president G.W. Bush about evolution, "the jury's still out."  Well, the jury is not out, but the light bulb is. Dear reader, biologists can scarcely talk about biology nowadays without considering evolution. It's not even controversial, because the evidence is compelling, and because it explains things better than any other theory.  That's a fact.
Note: "theory" means that the facts support it.  The facts support Darwin's theory.

Now you don't have to believe us.  Even more surprising, it turns out that you can even have religion and appreciate the power of Darwin's theory of evolution.  Please see this wonderful book, Evolution for Everyone, by David Sloan Wilson:
http://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change/dp/0385340214
http://evolution-institute.org/foci/
http://scienceblogs.com/evolution/

One of the great surprises is how much evolution explains -- and this tsunami of understanding is only starting.  Evolution is a tide: you can swim in it, but you can't escape it.  Or, mangling more metaphors, it's the tip of an iceberg, easy to see a little, but if you look below, the implications are enormous.

You won't regret reading Wilson's book; we promise!