Peace, Love, & Light

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The Peaceful Place: http://www.agedhippy.plus.com/

"An object is perceived, or not perceived, according as the mind is, or is not, tinged with the colour of the object. "
Patanjali - Sutra 4:17

He'll want to start another thread explaining, at far greater length and much more detail than I care to read, why it isn't so. I just don;t have the time to read any more of his threads, right now...keepin up with the ones he has started is enough!!!

santa1

"Be seeing you..."

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Grassaf, Eolas

My guess is that human evolution is not speeding up but slowing down. What is speeding up is human involution or devolution because of the lessening of conscious influences due to man made planetary conditions.

One thing that seems quite possibly missing in their formulations (I certainly don't know this with any certainty since I have not obviously read the entire documentation), is that evolution tends to produce more rapid changes in smaller societies. Here's briefly why:

If there's a population of 100 in a gene pool (a group that reproduces mostly only within itself), if there's one mutation, the potential change (assuming reproduction) is 1/100. On the other hand, if there's one mutation in a population of 1 million, the potential change is only 1/1,000,000. Obviously 1/100 is much larger than 1/1,000,000.

Since our societies tend to be very large today and intermarriage is very widespread among most groups, the end result probably is a substantial slowing down of the evolutionary process. However, a major catastrophe that wipes out most of the human population (heaven forbid!), could very quickly change that.

Shalom,
Vern

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Thanks aged hippy. A very interesting subject. It also ties in with the idea that time itself is speeding up, which is talked about in some of the new spirituality books and channeled material.

Not too long ago, I ran into this little paper on the internet that talks about the exponetial rate of evolution as being indicative of a "force" (because random evolution would simply continue at a steady pace without acceleration. I think it's extremely interesting. It's an easy read, too.

Discussion Page - Creative Force

If I may butt in.

There's some real problems with the assumptions made by the author in the article. For example, he writes: "The Ultimate Theory of Everything predicts that a creative force is an inherent primary property of the universe and has been present from the very beginning of the expansionary process."

Physicists and mathematicians have not drawn such a conclusion as there being an outside "force" that explains the Theory of Everything. Matter of fact, since there has not been any confirmed formulation that explains the ToE, how could one possibly jump to the conclusion that there must be such a "force"?

Secondly, the expansion of organisms in regards to what we see in the fossil record by no means indicates an outside "force". There's an old rule in economics that can be applied here: the more tools you have, the more tools you can have. IOW, a thousand organisms evolving will tend to produce more variability that a hundred organisms also evolving. We see this being played out in the Cambrian Explosion, for example, whereas we see multi-celled organisms producing myriads of new species, which is quite logical since multi-celled organisms have much more variability due to the fact that these multiple cells can be arranged in various ways.

There's other problems with the article as well, but I'll stop here for now. BTW, I have numerous books written by research physicists, mathematicians, and cosmologists, and if anyone needs any recommendations, I be happy to give you a list and which ones I'd especially recommend.

Shalom,
Vern

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein

Metis, keep in mind the amount of time we are talking. Yes, 5000 years is relatively short, but societies (i.e. what has become h. sapiens enviroment) has changed very rapidly. With rapid enviromental change comes rapid evolution. So from a purely logical perspective, rapid evolution should be expected.

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"We cannot make, nor alter, nor even imitate so much as one blade of grass that He has made, and yet we can make or alter words of God as easily as words of man."
"We cannot serve God in the manner we serve those who cannot do without such service; and, therefore, the only idea we can have of serving God is that of contributing to the happiness of the living creation that God has made." -Thomas Paine

I can see from reading these responses that I appreciate both evolution and human evolution much differently. To help in my understanding, is there someone willing to describe how you've determined that humanity is evolving and how you differentiate human evolution from human adaptation?

I'm not sure how to respond since I'm not sure how human evolution and human adaptation differ.

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"We cannot make, nor alter, nor even imitate so much as one blade of grass that He has made, and yet we can make or alter words of God as easily as words of man."
"We cannot serve God in the manner we serve those who cannot do without such service; and, therefore, the only idea we can have of serving God is that of contributing to the happiness of the living creation that God has made." -Thomas Paine

Rapid environmental change would only cause more rapid evolution by itself if the effect was to sharply reduce the population numbers in most cases. Environmental change does not effect mutations (much higher radiation levels and higher levels of chemicals that might affect chromosomes would be the exceptions, and the latter has probably occurred to a certain extent) or random genetic drift, thus leaving natural selection as the only apparent significant variable at this time. But since natural selection works only on the basis of survivability leading to reproduction, the numbers people in this tremendously huge gene pool are simply too large to expect rapid change for reasons previously given.

Shalom,
Vern

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"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."-- Einstein