Rambi. You have got me going. The human skull has only been a human skull for 100,000 years: jove.geol.niu.edu
So the contents of it were formed only in the last 100,000 years, and the filtering, recombining and mutation of those contents are quite new.
More people have been alive since 1900 than have ever lived before them. [Okay, that's a bald assertion and I hope you don't ask me to prove it].
Bingo. It took a few minutes but here's a reliable-looking graph of human population over the past 100,000 years. faculty.plattsburgh.edu
As you can see, it's only in the past 2000 years that things have really got cooking. Before that there were geographically-separated barbarians with a few centres of civilisation. It's only in the last century that there have been billions of us. It's only in the last 10 years that swarms of us have been clicking away to each other, copying/pasting and cyberspacing away like millions of neurons joining up according to common interest.
The IQ140 genes have been slowly gaining ground. Mostly it's still the IQ100 muddlers and plenty of the IQ80 strugglers are still around. But as I mentioned, the Flynn Effect shows intelligence is increasing fairly rapidly [even over decades].
I can see up close and very personal that there's plenty of scope for further filtering, recombining and general improvement. My hairy gibbon-like arms and forgetful, bewildered brain suggest the filtration process is far from complete. I would like some genetic engineering.
Meanwhile, we are building It, the global cyberspace brain which will make the industrial revolution, which replaced our muscles, look trivial. This is the biggest transition ever. Including the invention of writing, the wheel, fire, and the shift from chimps to humans. This is bigger than all that combined, including the industrial revolution. The invention of DNA is maybe comparable if combined with all that flowed from that. Even genetic engineering thrown in is only a bit of biological accelerant.
And, it's happening right now. What's weird is that such a thing can happen over a decade or three and people are quite blase about it. Ted Kaczynski wasn't but he was soon moved out of the way. His manifesto: thecourier.com
Mqurice
PS: I haven't added up all those who died before 1900, but those alive since looks like more. So you can see when human evolution has taken place. It's right now! |
