I am writing this for anyone who can read it. I am writing it for humans who can decode these symbols into meaning, and also
for the multitude of bots that crawl the web parsing web pages looking for statistical occurrences of words in association with one another. The bots think a lot like you, e.g. if they see "hello world, I have this plain little web page viagra viagra viagra viagra that is about me" they know something suspicious is afoot.
I am not here to talk about web pages, but about us. By "us" I mean anyone that can read this web page.
Note what happened in the last two paragraphs. A filter was created ( a.k.a. a qualification ), and anything that passed through the filter was labeled. The processing, or rhetorical device, created a special class of cognitive beings. You are in this class, and there are many living things that are not.
This rhetorical device is one real instance of evolution. We "web page readers" are an exclusive class who can social network on the web, give each other paying jobs as a result ( and the pay buys food, water, and social prestige things that also function as evolutionary filters), or in very many instances mate and have offspring. That type of baby definitely came into being filtered through the first two paragraphs in my blog entry.
Human evolution is ...... I am not going to finish that statement. The statement makes a mistake of tense. "Is" should be "was".
Hopefully you have seen a puddle of water that recently melted from ice (there are some humans who haven't seen this).
You know it just melted, because some little bits of ice are still part of the spot of water. But you do not know the melting process exactly as it happened, including the original shape of the ice.
Like the ice changing its shape as it turns to water, we don't know the original shape of "human", nor the exact posture and way of being that was "human" along the way. The term is equifinality -there are many possible routes to our current configuration.
Human evolution has some of faster-legs-will-survive components to it. This is where we are like all in the biological realm.
The entities with the better functioning parts, resulting in better functioning whole self, exploiting a niche in the surrounding environment to secure energy sources for ourselves -those entities survive to the next second in the timeline.
In the last 5,000 years the faster-legs component has taken on far less of a role. As an example, Tamerlane was not able to walk, but was leader of thousands and conquered/exterminated huge cities. He was physiologically inferior to the millions he subjugated. When you ask how Tamerlane could be is when you start exploring evolution that happens as a result of culture.
Evolution through culture is an even harder past tense to discern than physiological evolution. Right now there are people mingling and mating as a result of being in microtribes that exist in virtual worlds online, recently there was a love-triangle
of NASA astronauts that got international press. My great-great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant raised with his brother in
an orphanage in New York City. He and his brother fled the orphanage, with my ancestor working on the railroads and marrying a Cherokee and the brother becoming a stock trader who had a mansion in New York and San Francisco.
Babies are coming out of these processes. Then those babies are going to mutate the culture even more (e.g. James Brown
and Henry Ford).
The trend in the last 5,000 years has been towards less adaptation in relation to nature, and more adaptation to the symbolic and cognitive. The gods have even changed their residence -once they inhabited every local tree and stone and now more likely are "sky gods". The sky gods are Allah and Yahweh, out away from all the daily mundane often leading their warriors on an abstract faith-based agenda on Earth. Lots of todays babies have come out of these warrior's progress, with whole portions of the planet having little or no people outside this class of family religion.
This process of filtering humanity's next generation based on symbolic and cognitive artifacts poses a dilemma for humanists.
Remember the ice to water melting process, and how if you encounter it at 5:00PM you do not know exactly what it looked like at 3:00PM? Humanists worship the sanctity of humans at 3:00PM, are calling the current status at 5:00PM an outcome of social injustice, and would ideally like 6:00PM to see us progressing to something like what 3:00PM was.
The humanists are just another particular filter imposed on the present, a meta-aware systems intervention or systems disruption. The filter has little ability to deliver on producing a less exclusive society, it is merely another construct of exclusion -a church of contempt for the process that is ever more prevalent.
That process is change, and it is has no leader or cruel demagogue. It will be more fair, democratic and brilliant than what you or I could have designed with our best intentions.
Hopefully, see you in that future.
Supporting and supplemental documents:
Industrial Evolution
By BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN
Does natural selection favor the rise of capitalist economies?
Out of Control
Chapter 18 THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
by Kevin Kelly
Searching for Similar Diagnosis Through DNA (new communities emerging from genetic mutations)
By AMY HARMON
Posts
