If evolution can create it, so can man. There is and will be intelligent design. It's only a matter of time.
We are in the midst of the last great battle of reason over evolution -- why is this happening now? Because evolution developed the first great singularity [1] about 300 thousand years ago. And it happened to our ancestors and they learned to talk somehow, really talk. Talking lets you pass information between generations at an exponentially faster speed than evolution does. Evolution is slow. We evolved complex language which let us talk about abstract concepts very quickly, in evolutionary terms. This happened a long time ago in human terms (in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.) This ability to know thyself and talk about it is the genesis of the tree of knowledge story. Not only did humans name all the animals, they could now talk about and reason about what an animal would do. [2] Darwinian evolution signed its own death warrant that day. In evolutionary time scales where it takes 6 million years to evolve a new species of ape, like the mountain gorillas, [3] this one small change to hook up thoughts to sounds (action, not just names) took forever, multiple species, millions of years. But once literacy was invented: language, previously limited to the evanescent sound waves can now be reproduced by sight on scratches that are permanent. Everything has changed again..
When did cultural evolution overtake evolution by natural descent?
When did this happen? When did humans take control of evolution? You can look at a chart of human development over time and a few things stand out. See Figure 1 below. Stone tools were created about 3.5 million years ago. These stone tools were flakes pounded off a larger stone. It took us about a million years to make stone tools by pounding off the flakes and using the rock that was left over as the tool. I'm pretty sure that really wasn't us, as in modern humans. Then another million years to make spears. Still don't think that's really us. I can teach a three year old to make these things in three hours. It took our ancestors two million years. Something was definitely different. Now things begin to speed up a bit. We've had fire for the last million and a half years, but we didn't get controlled daily fire until 350,000 years ago. Then technology starts to explode.
What else happens? Remember, the time period we're now talking about (abstract language to now) is one tenth the time it took to go from using stone flakes to making stone axes. All of human history has taken place in this short period and it's because of language. Language speeds up cultural evolution. And reading and writing speed up cultural evolution even more. Recorded human history has taken place in only the last 5000 years. We've had some humans that were literate less than one five hundredth of the time since we started making stone flakes. But we've invented almost everything since then. Something has changed. Cultural evolution has outstripped evolution by natural selection a million-fold. [6] And in the last five years, one millionth of the time since we started making stone tools, evolution is now coming completely under our control - with Crisper-9 [7] we can now change any sequence of DNA we want to. It's only a matter of time until the genes that have controlled evolution will be our slaves: they aren't conscious, they can't defend themselves, they can only survive; but when humans decide which genes survive, evolution happens, but it's no longer by natural selection. It's more like evolution by sexual selection: we get to decide who reproduces and what genes they reproduce. It's soon going to be evolution by intelligent design.
What happened next after clothing? Or probably simultaneously with the invention of clothing, just not much has survived since then: 50,000 years ago we have definite proof that we could draw and paint. Art happened. Do you think we did art before we could talk? Nope. We can name things and we wear animal skins for about 200,000 years, [8] language continues to get more abstract and complex and then we invent clothes and we invent art. Fifteen thousand years ago we started farming with domesticated animals and plants. 75,000 years ago we started writing down counting. The whole transition from naming things to abstract language includes the ability to count. 5000 years ago we started writing down language. Most people don't realize it but this evolutionary change was not rolled out across the world until about 50 years ago. Half the people in the world weren't literate in the 1950's. Today more than 80% of humans are literate. Literacy has just conquered the world. But it was so slow that all of cultural evolution, which it enabled, has blown by it.
It's not just language, although language is critical. It's the ability to record complicated language in a permanent way so it can be communicated to another person who is removed spatially and temporally from the author. Is it okay to just repeat the story orally through memory? It is. That allows cultural evolution to happen by telephone tag. But I would claim that it is a proto-version of cultural evolution, much slower than what happens today, too cumbersome to launch today's revolution in culture. When something changes by a factor of ten in the absolute amount we create (oral history to written history) it makes fundamental changes in what can happen. But this, learning to read and write, was the death knell of evolution. And it was the direct result of the first singularity: when evolution gave humans language.
One cannot be an author without language. When did this happen? The evolution of information complexity, transmission and storage goes through natural phases. There's a natural progression in the evolution of information transmission and storage and the speed of these changes speeds up exponentially over the aeons. And it's continuing today. You've heard of Moore's law? It's a fundamental law of the organization of data into information. Language has allowed us to create abstractions and abstractions allow us to exponentially create information from data by hiding the complications of the previous layer of information, it's called chunking, and once your brain learns to do it through language it can create new knowledge at an exponential rate. Once this process is out and in motion, it seems unstoppable.
Exactly when did evolution by natural descent invent language?
So what is our estimate of when humans made a 'language' more complicated than any other existing animal? I don't think you need language to create tools made of stone flakes. Especially when they don't change for a million years. Your ancestors could watch a fellow ancestor take two rocks and bash them together to create a stone flake with a sharp edge. These tools are found all over the world, unchanged for over a million years. Paleontologists can't tell any difference between the tools, no early tools, no late tools, that could help us date when they were made. I'm not even sure at this point we could name more than a few things besides ourselves and things we could eat and places we could be. If we'd have had more complicated language our tools would've changed much faster than the million years of stasis they present us with.
How long is a million years? Our acommon ancestors with the chimpanzees were alive six million years ago. Obviously no common language there (or chimpanzees would be talking to each other, not just screaming and swearing at each other.) That's about (6,000,000 yrs / 25 yrs / generation) 240,000 generations. That's a big number, but not that big. You can buy a nice house for $240,000. Maybe it's twice as many generations ago, but it isn't ten times as many. So there are 240,000 generations that separate us from the group of animals that spawned both us and the chimps. That single group of breeding animals split up and decided to stop screwing with each other. Our ancestors decided to live on the savannah and the chimp ancestors decided to stay in the trees. That's the time we decided to stop living together. It's not that we were chimps then and we evolved into humans. We were something else and we decided to move to a new environment whereas the chimps stayed in the same environment. Some of our tribe of monkeys continued in the old ways and some took off for a new environment (or the weaker ones were forced out, at least that's my guess) to live elsewhere. [9]
We eventually evolved to walking upright (even before we were homo sapiens.) That took about a million years or about 40,000 generations. We were selected to have genes that let us be born less developed (smaller) so we didn't kill our mothers when we were born, but could still grow huge brains that could host smart minds. This didn't happen to our ancestors that stayed in the forests. We still have plenty of things left over from our times in the trees: brachiating shoulders, for instance. You don't need a brachiating shoulder to walk around the savannah, but they weren't that much of a detriment. The shoulder design was neutral or positive in terms of survival.
We did lose our hair... any evolutionary advantage to that? Not one I know of, in fact it's a disadvantage. So how does this happen? We have to understand how evolution happens to make sense of this. On the surface this seems like a nonsensical change. It could happen in three ways: it could be entirely random, it could be sexual selection or it could be associated with some gene that gives us other benefits. Randomness is just that, unpredictable and undriven. Sexual selection is the same way we breed animals today, if there is some gene that makes a woman favor a less hairy person as a mate, then men will become less hairy. Plausible. Darwin thought so and argued it was the most likely reason. He argued that changes that seem nonsensical are usually driven by sexual selection. They may show that the mate is healthy: by being able to take on something that makes it harder to survive and surviving anyway, it shows fitness. Or it might make it easier to groom and check for parasites and be less likely to pick up parasites from the grass. Who knows?
Or... the gene that controls our hair coverage could be bound to a gene that does something else that is more valuable. You have to remember that genes come in groups. Since genes are the units of heredity, it's the net benefit of a gene that counts. Genes code up sets of proteins as a groups, with some changes in the production rate due to the environment. So there might be some other protein that does something like help us walk upright, and the part that helps us lose our hair is just along for the ride. (This would be the same as when dogs, which are bred from wolves to be more docile also lose their small stiff ears and get big floppy ears. The coding for the proteins that cause these two traits are in one gene.)
This loss of hair and the ability to walk upright took about two million years to accomplish via evolution by natural selection, about 80,000 generations. How many hairs per birth on average do we have to lose? Not many. Our entire skin is about one or two square meters. Over about 100,000 generations you have to lose about one hundredth of a square cm of hair every generation. Since there are about 75 follicles in every square cm, that's about one hair on average for every birth. Not even noticeable. Whatever your favorite hairlessness story, it caused lots of early deaths or lack of reproduction to be changing this quickly. The pressure was relentless, apparently. Over millions of years.
So this hairless ape spread around the world. Yes, we've found these first type of stone tools practically everywhere in the old world (Asia, Africa, Europe), but nowhere in the new world (America.) Those creatures (our ancestors) didn't make it to the new world or to Australia a million years ago. Then another million years comes and goes and we see the new, second type of stone tools. In my opinion you don't need language for these tools eaither, it's much more like an evolutionary change by natural selection. Another million years, another 40,000 generations, to figure out you could use the flaked rock as a better, more well shaped tool, nothing like the progress we see today. At this point the tool making requries a plan with multiple strikes that is different for each tool. It requires real thought. Spatial - temporal thought. Hit this thing here at this angle with this hammer with this force and it will crack here. Do this twenty or thirty times and you have a very sharp hammer. It could be a very rhythmic and unconscious thing that may explain why we enjoy music and dancing as much as we do.
We are in the midst of the last great battle of reason over evolution -- why is this happening now? Because evolution developed the first great singularity [1] about 300 thousand years ago. And it happened to our ancestors and they learned to talk somehow, really talk. Talking lets you pass information between generations at an exponentially faster speed than evolution does. Evolution is slow. We evolved complex language which let us talk about abstract concepts very quickly, in evolutionary terms. This happened a long time ago in human terms (in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.) This ability to know thyself and talk about it is the genesis of the tree of knowledge story. Not only did humans name all the animals, they could now talk about and reason about what an animal would do. [2] Darwinian evolution signed its own death warrant that day. In evolutionary time scales where it takes 6 million years to evolve a new species of ape, like the mountain gorillas, [3] this one small change to hook up thoughts to sounds (action, not just names) took forever, multiple species, millions of years. But once literacy was invented: language, previously limited to the evanescent sound waves can now be reproduced by sight on scratches that are permanent. Everything has changed again..
When did cultural evolution overtake evolution by natural descent?
When did this happen? When did humans take control of evolution? You can look at a chart of human development over time and a few things stand out. See Figure 1 below. Stone tools were created about 3.5 million years ago. These stone tools were flakes pounded off a larger stone. It took us about a million years to make stone tools by pounding off the flakes and using the rock that was left over as the tool. I'm pretty sure that really wasn't us, as in modern humans. Then another million years to make spears. Still don't think that's really us. I can teach a three year old to make these things in three hours. It took our ancestors two million years. Something was definitely different. Now things begin to speed up a bit. We've had fire for the last million and a half years, but we didn't get controlled daily fire until 350,000 years ago. Then technology starts to explode.
Figure 1: Human Evolution as Seen by Our Tool Usage and Creation
Pottery, towns, burial [need dates], and the big one: Clothing. Humans invented clothing a hundred thousand years ago. [4] We can date this one very accurately because of the genome of lice. This is a big deal. We even know where we got the lice from: we inherited them from the Gorilla Species about three million years ago. [5] Yes, that probably means what you think it means. Men are animals. But we can date the invention of clothing because different species of lice live on our bodies than live on our clothes and these species had the same ancestor 100,000 years ago, then there were two species created because we started to wear clothes and the body lice and the clothes lice stopped breeding with each other. When we lived on the savannah in Africa, we didn't really need clothes, but as the ice age came on and we moved north, 70 to 100 thousand years ago, we needed clothes and poof, we got clothes. Clothes are complicated, of course they first started off as just animal skin blankets, but they quickly evolved. Very quickly. Do you think we could make clothes if we couldn't talk to each other? I don't. The complication of making clothes demands the ability of language. Do any other animals make clothes that change and evolve? Nope.What else happens? Remember, the time period we're now talking about (abstract language to now) is one tenth the time it took to go from using stone flakes to making stone axes. All of human history has taken place in this short period and it's because of language. Language speeds up cultural evolution. And reading and writing speed up cultural evolution even more. Recorded human history has taken place in only the last 5000 years. We've had some humans that were literate less than one five hundredth of the time since we started making stone flakes. But we've invented almost everything since then. Something has changed. Cultural evolution has outstripped evolution by natural selection a million-fold. [6] And in the last five years, one millionth of the time since we started making stone tools, evolution is now coming completely under our control - with Crisper-9 [7] we can now change any sequence of DNA we want to. It's only a matter of time until the genes that have controlled evolution will be our slaves: they aren't conscious, they can't defend themselves, they can only survive; but when humans decide which genes survive, evolution happens, but it's no longer by natural selection. It's more like evolution by sexual selection: we get to decide who reproduces and what genes they reproduce. It's soon going to be evolution by intelligent design.
What happened next after clothing? Or probably simultaneously with the invention of clothing, just not much has survived since then: 50,000 years ago we have definite proof that we could draw and paint. Art happened. Do you think we did art before we could talk? Nope. We can name things and we wear animal skins for about 200,000 years, [8] language continues to get more abstract and complex and then we invent clothes and we invent art. Fifteen thousand years ago we started farming with domesticated animals and plants. 75,000 years ago we started writing down counting. The whole transition from naming things to abstract language includes the ability to count. 5000 years ago we started writing down language. Most people don't realize it but this evolutionary change was not rolled out across the world until about 50 years ago. Half the people in the world weren't literate in the 1950's. Today more than 80% of humans are literate. Literacy has just conquered the world. But it was so slow that all of cultural evolution, which it enabled, has blown by it.
It's not just language, although language is critical. It's the ability to record complicated language in a permanent way so it can be communicated to another person who is removed spatially and temporally from the author. Is it okay to just repeat the story orally through memory? It is. That allows cultural evolution to happen by telephone tag. But I would claim that it is a proto-version of cultural evolution, much slower than what happens today, too cumbersome to launch today's revolution in culture. When something changes by a factor of ten in the absolute amount we create (oral history to written history) it makes fundamental changes in what can happen. But this, learning to read and write, was the death knell of evolution. And it was the direct result of the first singularity: when evolution gave humans language.
One cannot be an author without language. When did this happen? The evolution of information complexity, transmission and storage goes through natural phases. There's a natural progression in the evolution of information transmission and storage and the speed of these changes speeds up exponentially over the aeons. And it's continuing today. You've heard of Moore's law? It's a fundamental law of the organization of data into information. Language has allowed us to create abstractions and abstractions allow us to exponentially create information from data by hiding the complications of the previous layer of information, it's called chunking, and once your brain learns to do it through language it can create new knowledge at an exponential rate. Once this process is out and in motion, it seems unstoppable.
Exactly when did evolution by natural descent invent language?
So what is our estimate of when humans made a 'language' more complicated than any other existing animal? I don't think you need language to create tools made of stone flakes. Especially when they don't change for a million years. Your ancestors could watch a fellow ancestor take two rocks and bash them together to create a stone flake with a sharp edge. These tools are found all over the world, unchanged for over a million years. Paleontologists can't tell any difference between the tools, no early tools, no late tools, that could help us date when they were made. I'm not even sure at this point we could name more than a few things besides ourselves and things we could eat and places we could be. If we'd have had more complicated language our tools would've changed much faster than the million years of stasis they present us with.
How long is a million years? Our acommon ancestors with the chimpanzees were alive six million years ago. Obviously no common language there (or chimpanzees would be talking to each other, not just screaming and swearing at each other.) That's about (6,000,000 yrs / 25 yrs / generation) 240,000 generations. That's a big number, but not that big. You can buy a nice house for $240,000. Maybe it's twice as many generations ago, but it isn't ten times as many. So there are 240,000 generations that separate us from the group of animals that spawned both us and the chimps. That single group of breeding animals split up and decided to stop screwing with each other. Our ancestors decided to live on the savannah and the chimp ancestors decided to stay in the trees. That's the time we decided to stop living together. It's not that we were chimps then and we evolved into humans. We were something else and we decided to move to a new environment whereas the chimps stayed in the same environment. Some of our tribe of monkeys continued in the old ways and some took off for a new environment (or the weaker ones were forced out, at least that's my guess) to live elsewhere. [9]
We eventually evolved to walking upright (even before we were homo sapiens.) That took about a million years or about 40,000 generations. We were selected to have genes that let us be born less developed (smaller) so we didn't kill our mothers when we were born, but could still grow huge brains that could host smart minds. This didn't happen to our ancestors that stayed in the forests. We still have plenty of things left over from our times in the trees: brachiating shoulders, for instance. You don't need a brachiating shoulder to walk around the savannah, but they weren't that much of a detriment. The shoulder design was neutral or positive in terms of survival.
We did lose our hair... any evolutionary advantage to that? Not one I know of, in fact it's a disadvantage. So how does this happen? We have to understand how evolution happens to make sense of this. On the surface this seems like a nonsensical change. It could happen in three ways: it could be entirely random, it could be sexual selection or it could be associated with some gene that gives us other benefits. Randomness is just that, unpredictable and undriven. Sexual selection is the same way we breed animals today, if there is some gene that makes a woman favor a less hairy person as a mate, then men will become less hairy. Plausible. Darwin thought so and argued it was the most likely reason. He argued that changes that seem nonsensical are usually driven by sexual selection. They may show that the mate is healthy: by being able to take on something that makes it harder to survive and surviving anyway, it shows fitness. Or it might make it easier to groom and check for parasites and be less likely to pick up parasites from the grass. Who knows?
Or... the gene that controls our hair coverage could be bound to a gene that does something else that is more valuable. You have to remember that genes come in groups. Since genes are the units of heredity, it's the net benefit of a gene that counts. Genes code up sets of proteins as a groups, with some changes in the production rate due to the environment. So there might be some other protein that does something like help us walk upright, and the part that helps us lose our hair is just along for the ride. (This would be the same as when dogs, which are bred from wolves to be more docile also lose their small stiff ears and get big floppy ears. The coding for the proteins that cause these two traits are in one gene.)
This loss of hair and the ability to walk upright took about two million years to accomplish via evolution by natural selection, about 80,000 generations. How many hairs per birth on average do we have to lose? Not many. Our entire skin is about one or two square meters. Over about 100,000 generations you have to lose about one hundredth of a square cm of hair every generation. Since there are about 75 follicles in every square cm, that's about one hair on average for every birth. Not even noticeable. Whatever your favorite hairlessness story, it caused lots of early deaths or lack of reproduction to be changing this quickly. The pressure was relentless, apparently. Over millions of years.
So this hairless ape spread around the world. Yes, we've found these first type of stone tools practically everywhere in the old world (Asia, Africa, Europe), but nowhere in the new world (America.) Those creatures (our ancestors) didn't make it to the new world or to Australia a million years ago. Then another million years comes and goes and we see the new, second type of stone tools. In my opinion you don't need language for these tools eaither, it's much more like an evolutionary change by natural selection. Another million years, another 40,000 generations, to figure out you could use the flaked rock as a better, more well shaped tool, nothing like the progress we see today. At this point the tool making requries a plan with multiple strikes that is different for each tool. It requires real thought. Spatial - temporal thought. Hit this thing here at this angle with this hammer with this force and it will crack here. Do this twenty or thirty times and you have a very sharp hammer. It could be a very rhythmic and unconscious thing that may explain why we enjoy music and dancing as much as we do.
We weren't even the top of the food chain at the time, we were in the middle of the food chain. We managed to improve our stone tools about a trillionth as fast as a typical four year old could have done. I am fairly sure that no significant language existed at this time. Things are still changing at evolutionary speed. So from chimps to fire it's about five million years, then one million more years and we get controlled daily fire (three hundred and fifty thousand years ago.) Oh, and language shows up about then. And then things begin to change.
At about this time we can start to date sites by which tools they have. The stone tools change reliably every few thousand years. Pottery comes into common usage. Something has definitely changed. This is about 350,000 years ago. Things start to change faster than evolution can possibly cause it to happen Evolution has just taken a second fiddle in controlling the human race. About this time we start to be humans. When you don't have kids your set of genes decrease in the gene pool, when you do have kids, your set of genes increases in the gene pool (more people have genes similar to yours.) It's not that genes want to survive, they just do or they don't. And because they are not copied perfectly, they change what animals are, what species are, slowly but surely.
Dinosaurs lived 100s of millions of years ago and they never developed complex language (certianly not hieroglyphs or alphabets as far as we know.) You can kind of discern this by noticing that an asteroid wiped them out. It wasn't lack of widsom, like a nuclear war, it was lack of intelligence. They apparently didn't build telescopes and rockets so they were sitting ducks, as the saying goes. But this shows that intelligence is not inevitable. Evolution works by addition and adoption of existing things that had their own reasons for coming into existence. Dinosaurs only had lizard brains, the brainstem, which gave them some basic emotions (eat, mate, breath... that's about it) and instincts and reactions... and probably consciousness. If you want to look for the seat of consciousness, look way down there in the brainstem and the lizard brain, that's where you'll find it. [10]
What brain structure was evolving at the time that this explosion of creativity occurred? It was the pre-frontal cortex, the ability to plan and imagine. You need language for this. So this hairless ape was evolving stone tools, they are controlling fire, making clay pots. Pottery is the ultimate stone tool. From digging up clay, shaping the clay, designing the pot, firing it up to make it useful; it takes way more smarts to make a pot than it does to tie a stone flake to a branch to make a spear. But do you need to have language? I think you do. Rudimentary language is required. Beyond just naming things you need to understand a plan. Maybe not with controlled daily fire, but definitely with pottery. First you dig, then transport, then shape, then fire and dry. You don't need sophisticated language, but you need some kind of language.
xxxxx
At this point it's before the ice age and you don't really need clothes, you can just use blankets. Making blankets takes more sophistication than pottery in my opinion. Language is around at this time and it's getting more sophisticated. At this point it probably can't explain many abstract ideas, but it can let humans plan and remember. But as we discussed previously, clothes are really the turning point. And clothes happen at about 100,000 years ago when the human lice species split into head lice and body lice. Clothes mean full time coverage (the only way lice can live.) This is the critical junction in my eyes. It's a very complicated process to make clothes and to wear them every day. Clothes are designed, the sizes change, the temperature protection is different, you have different types of clothes for different times of year. Language obviously becomes more sophisticated at this time. Language goes from the crude information passing needed to make clay pots to the more sophisticated information passing needed to make clothes. Some kind of language is definitely going on here.
And language is a powerful survival tool. The push to get better at language is very, very powerful. When you can tell your kids what to do it's immensely valuable. And it shows. All of a sudden humans are at the top of the food chain. Large mammals start disappearing in Africa. They do the same in Australia and America when humans appear (not the entire story, but obviously a huge factor.) Language is the first Singularity. All of a sudden cultural evolution is happening faster than evolution by natural selection. Way faster. It's changing within a single lifetime. Humans get new capabilities without having to accidentally evolve over generations.
At this point our human ancestors had already spread all over the world. Those old ancestors just 'disappear' and are replaced by these new humans. This change happened in one place and spreads like wildfire across the world. This is what separates the human animal from the rest of the animals. Not only do we have language, we also appear to have a fear of the outgroup so bad that we've killed off all the similar competing species, our 'Original Sin' so to speak. Language gives us the ability to plan and communicate that plan to others, to work together. To work together is so powerful that it was almost inevitable that we'd take over the world. We didn't just talk, we could talk about abstract concepts, imaginary stories, fairy tales, ogres, monsters (neandertals?) All existing humans have the capability of language. It didn't develop after the aborigines got to Australia, so it's got to be more than 40,000 years old. Those ancient languages, evolving separately, appear to be as sophisticated as any other language. So sophisticated language is older than that. [ref latest theories on phonemes which agree]
Were these people integrated into individuals like we are today? I don't think so. I tend to be a fan of the Jaynes 'Theory of the Bicameral Brain' [11]. They probably all heard voices. Was that me or was that a god? Their emotions wracked their thinking. The two halves of the brain were no longer equal partners as one can speak and the other one can't (Talk about your evolutionary hacks...) We can see changes in style and substance of what was common in forms of writing up to a few thousand years ago. Hearing voices was common in the past. Now we call that psychotic. It's not a sign from god; it a sign that you are crazy. And it's still changing. A large portion of the human race still thinks it's a good idea to take things on faith, and ignoring facts to do so. It's a similar psychological problem. If you don't know the difference between reality and fairy tales, we call that psychotic... unless it's blessed by a religion. You do need faith, but when that faith comes at the expense of the truth, it's a problem. A psychological problem that doesn't need an explicit call out in the bible of psychoses. [12]
We are on a path to speciate. The old conservative rural way of life that came up when we learned to farm is about to pass into obsolescence by the inventiveness and accomplishments of the humans in cities. We are past the time when a few humans could compete with a large organization of humans. [13] But we'll get back to that later. Let's get back to our story of the evolution of language.
The next thing we see are domesticated plants and animals, permanent towns where ownership has to be established and where things need to be labelled and measured and regulated so everyone can trust everyone else. You have to have some type of writing to live in a permanent settlement, it can be crude scratches to count how many sheep you have or some type of branding to make sure the sheep are yours. As soon as settlements got beyond a few hundred people you have to have some shared fate, a common place to store grain for the winter, possibly even taxes. A farmer has to figure out how large a field he has to plant to grow enough food to live through the winter with his animals and family. If you can't do this you can't permanently settle any where, the town will eventually die out. Miscalculate how much food you need over the winter and you die. You need real, sophisticated language to manage a city. For a large city you need to manage IOUs and infrastructure. You need laws. When you live in a place big enough that you can't know everyone you need a sophisticated language.
You need to remember things. And the best way to remember things is to write them down. Those chicken scratches to count things slowly evolve into a language as cities get larger. The drive for written language is strong when permanent settlements start appearing. However, we can date this too by looking at Australia and America. Someof these settlers had a sophisticated written language (Olmecs and Mayans) So the idea of a written language was spread around the world at that time. It must be older than when the last of those migrations occurred, about thirty thousand years ago. [14] It must have just been invented at the time.
At this point information storage takes an order of magnitude increase in availability and innovation also takes a leap. Related? Of course. This latest change which occurred about five to ten thousand years ago has finally spread around the world. Fifty years ago less than half the globe was literate, today it's over 80%... we've entered the literate age. This took a long time compared to how fast technological innovations spread today, but in evolutionary time this is like a blink of an eye. Culture causes changes much faster than evolution by natural selection can cause changes. Trillions of times faster.
Evolution continues to occur, but we've changed the natural selection part by making the ultimate sexual selection of language which leads us to understand how evolution really works (that was only 150 years ago! The revolution has just started!) We can do way more with our minds to protect us from disease than evolution ever could. Now all the genetic mutations that occur are not being selected against (unless they are super fatal.) Evolution by natural selection has just moved into hyperspace. More and more minor mutations, that used to be fatal, are survivable. We will soon be able to cure any genetic disease and make evolution moot.
At about this time we can start to date sites by which tools they have. The stone tools change reliably every few thousand years. Pottery comes into common usage. Something has definitely changed. This is about 350,000 years ago. Things start to change faster than evolution can possibly cause it to happen Evolution has just taken a second fiddle in controlling the human race. About this time we start to be humans. When you don't have kids your set of genes decrease in the gene pool, when you do have kids, your set of genes increases in the gene pool (more people have genes similar to yours.) It's not that genes want to survive, they just do or they don't. And because they are not copied perfectly, they change what animals are, what species are, slowly but surely.
Dinosaurs lived 100s of millions of years ago and they never developed complex language (certianly not hieroglyphs or alphabets as far as we know.) You can kind of discern this by noticing that an asteroid wiped them out. It wasn't lack of widsom, like a nuclear war, it was lack of intelligence. They apparently didn't build telescopes and rockets so they were sitting ducks, as the saying goes. But this shows that intelligence is not inevitable. Evolution works by addition and adoption of existing things that had their own reasons for coming into existence. Dinosaurs only had lizard brains, the brainstem, which gave them some basic emotions (eat, mate, breath... that's about it) and instincts and reactions... and probably consciousness. If you want to look for the seat of consciousness, look way down there in the brainstem and the lizard brain, that's where you'll find it. [10]
What brain structure was evolving at the time that this explosion of creativity occurred? It was the pre-frontal cortex, the ability to plan and imagine. You need language for this. So this hairless ape was evolving stone tools, they are controlling fire, making clay pots. Pottery is the ultimate stone tool. From digging up clay, shaping the clay, designing the pot, firing it up to make it useful; it takes way more smarts to make a pot than it does to tie a stone flake to a branch to make a spear. But do you need to have language? I think you do. Rudimentary language is required. Beyond just naming things you need to understand a plan. Maybe not with controlled daily fire, but definitely with pottery. First you dig, then transport, then shape, then fire and dry. You don't need sophisticated language, but you need some kind of language.
xxxxx
At this point it's before the ice age and you don't really need clothes, you can just use blankets. Making blankets takes more sophistication than pottery in my opinion. Language is around at this time and it's getting more sophisticated. At this point it probably can't explain many abstract ideas, but it can let humans plan and remember. But as we discussed previously, clothes are really the turning point. And clothes happen at about 100,000 years ago when the human lice species split into head lice and body lice. Clothes mean full time coverage (the only way lice can live.) This is the critical junction in my eyes. It's a very complicated process to make clothes and to wear them every day. Clothes are designed, the sizes change, the temperature protection is different, you have different types of clothes for different times of year. Language obviously becomes more sophisticated at this time. Language goes from the crude information passing needed to make clay pots to the more sophisticated information passing needed to make clothes. Some kind of language is definitely going on here.
And language is a powerful survival tool. The push to get better at language is very, very powerful. When you can tell your kids what to do it's immensely valuable. And it shows. All of a sudden humans are at the top of the food chain. Large mammals start disappearing in Africa. They do the same in Australia and America when humans appear (not the entire story, but obviously a huge factor.) Language is the first Singularity. All of a sudden cultural evolution is happening faster than evolution by natural selection. Way faster. It's changing within a single lifetime. Humans get new capabilities without having to accidentally evolve over generations.
At this point our human ancestors had already spread all over the world. Those old ancestors just 'disappear' and are replaced by these new humans. This change happened in one place and spreads like wildfire across the world. This is what separates the human animal from the rest of the animals. Not only do we have language, we also appear to have a fear of the outgroup so bad that we've killed off all the similar competing species, our 'Original Sin' so to speak. Language gives us the ability to plan and communicate that plan to others, to work together. To work together is so powerful that it was almost inevitable that we'd take over the world. We didn't just talk, we could talk about abstract concepts, imaginary stories, fairy tales, ogres, monsters (neandertals?) All existing humans have the capability of language. It didn't develop after the aborigines got to Australia, so it's got to be more than 40,000 years old. Those ancient languages, evolving separately, appear to be as sophisticated as any other language. So sophisticated language is older than that. [ref latest theories on phonemes which agree]
Were these people integrated into individuals like we are today? I don't think so. I tend to be a fan of the Jaynes 'Theory of the Bicameral Brain' [11]. They probably all heard voices. Was that me or was that a god? Their emotions wracked their thinking. The two halves of the brain were no longer equal partners as one can speak and the other one can't (Talk about your evolutionary hacks...) We can see changes in style and substance of what was common in forms of writing up to a few thousand years ago. Hearing voices was common in the past. Now we call that psychotic. It's not a sign from god; it a sign that you are crazy. And it's still changing. A large portion of the human race still thinks it's a good idea to take things on faith, and ignoring facts to do so. It's a similar psychological problem. If you don't know the difference between reality and fairy tales, we call that psychotic... unless it's blessed by a religion. You do need faith, but when that faith comes at the expense of the truth, it's a problem. A psychological problem that doesn't need an explicit call out in the bible of psychoses. [12]
We are on a path to speciate. The old conservative rural way of life that came up when we learned to farm is about to pass into obsolescence by the inventiveness and accomplishments of the humans in cities. We are past the time when a few humans could compete with a large organization of humans. [13] But we'll get back to that later. Let's get back to our story of the evolution of language.
The next thing we see are domesticated plants and animals, permanent towns where ownership has to be established and where things need to be labelled and measured and regulated so everyone can trust everyone else. You have to have some type of writing to live in a permanent settlement, it can be crude scratches to count how many sheep you have or some type of branding to make sure the sheep are yours. As soon as settlements got beyond a few hundred people you have to have some shared fate, a common place to store grain for the winter, possibly even taxes. A farmer has to figure out how large a field he has to plant to grow enough food to live through the winter with his animals and family. If you can't do this you can't permanently settle any where, the town will eventually die out. Miscalculate how much food you need over the winter and you die. You need real, sophisticated language to manage a city. For a large city you need to manage IOUs and infrastructure. You need laws. When you live in a place big enough that you can't know everyone you need a sophisticated language.
You need to remember things. And the best way to remember things is to write them down. Those chicken scratches to count things slowly evolve into a language as cities get larger. The drive for written language is strong when permanent settlements start appearing. However, we can date this too by looking at Australia and America. Someof these settlers had a sophisticated written language (Olmecs and Mayans) So the idea of a written language was spread around the world at that time. It must be older than when the last of those migrations occurred, about thirty thousand years ago. [14] It must have just been invented at the time.
At this point information storage takes an order of magnitude increase in availability and innovation also takes a leap. Related? Of course. This latest change which occurred about five to ten thousand years ago has finally spread around the world. Fifty years ago less than half the globe was literate, today it's over 80%... we've entered the literate age. This took a long time compared to how fast technological innovations spread today, but in evolutionary time this is like a blink of an eye. Culture causes changes much faster than evolution by natural selection can cause changes. Trillions of times faster.
Evolution continues to occur, but we've changed the natural selection part by making the ultimate sexual selection of language which leads us to understand how evolution really works (that was only 150 years ago! The revolution has just started!) We can do way more with our minds to protect us from disease than evolution ever could. Now all the genetic mutations that occur are not being selected against (unless they are super fatal.) Evolution by natural selection has just moved into hyperspace. More and more minor mutations, that used to be fatal, are survivable. We will soon be able to cure any genetic disease and make evolution moot.
The mechanism of evolution is different for animals than it is for humans. [15] The singularity we call language changed everything. That's why we call it a singularity. And the second coming is upon us: Genes are becoming irrelevant. They've been struggling to keep up, but they just can't. But they keep trying, the selection pressures are increasingly different than they were in the past. They're still there, but the changes are coming so fast that natural selection just can't keep up. Death rates are so low these days compared to pre-history that the scalpel that natural selection had used to rend our evolution in the past is now a butter knife, ignored and left on the table.
It's all about thriving in ambiguity. The information coded up in our genes is immense. Until we invented written language, the amount of information in the genome was more than all the information in all the stories memorized by the human race. It was more information than one person could transmit by language in their entire lifetime. [16] But one library of books dwarfs the amount of information carried in your genome. The genetic code is cracked. We can understand it, we can read it, we can write it and we're already learning how to program it and debug it. We can control our genes.
Genes have lost the battle of evolution to their vessels. Evolution is no longer going to be random. Those humans that refuse to use this technology will eventually be a far distant branch of humanity, as the chimpanzees are a far distant branch to us today. This speciation is happening now, which side of the speciation event will you be on?
What are the consequences on evolution now that we know how it works? It's a whole new ballgame. How long after the first singularity (language) did we understand how genes were controlling our destiny? A few hundred thousand years. How soon after humanity could store more information than our genes could store (literacy) did we understand what they were doing? Five thousand years. How long after we understood what genes were doing (Darwin's theory of evolution) will they become irrelevant? Probably 250 years (not quite finished, but well on the way.) Look at that rate of change: it gets faster by a factor of 20 every time we have a quantitative change in the way we can process information. The change is faster, old processes become irrelevant and then controlled.
It's all about thriving in ambiguity. The information coded up in our genes is immense. Until we invented written language, the amount of information in the genome was more than all the information in all the stories memorized by the human race. It was more information than one person could transmit by language in their entire lifetime. [16] But one library of books dwarfs the amount of information carried in your genome. The genetic code is cracked. We can understand it, we can read it, we can write it and we're already learning how to program it and debug it. We can control our genes.
Genes have lost the battle of evolution to their vessels. Evolution is no longer going to be random. Those humans that refuse to use this technology will eventually be a far distant branch of humanity, as the chimpanzees are a far distant branch to us today. This speciation is happening now, which side of the speciation event will you be on?
What are the consequences on evolution now that we know how it works? It's a whole new ballgame. How long after the first singularity (language) did we understand how genes were controlling our destiny? A few hundred thousand years. How soon after humanity could store more information than our genes could store (literacy) did we understand what they were doing? Five thousand years. How long after we understood what genes were doing (Darwin's theory of evolution) will they become irrelevant? Probably 250 years (not quite finished, but well on the way.) Look at that rate of change: it gets faster by a factor of 20 every time we have a quantitative change in the way we can process information. The change is faster, old processes become irrelevant and then controlled.
This speedup in technology, how much information we can store and recall, is continuing at an amazing pace. In the last 70 years we've industrialized the collection of information and its use. We started first on the transactions that replace paper money. Then on banking, loans and investments. Then on advertising and finally on information itself. We industrialized the ability to speak like an average human. The imitation game seems to have a great effect on the hyperbolic promotion of Artificial Intelligence. The reality, of course, is much different. Current LLMs (Large Language Models) are just hallucinating surfers on the mountains of bullshit humans have spewed on the Internet. They have no reasoning ability, they can commit random thoughts to paper, they can imitate a set of writings and sound like someone else... Great. Just what humanity needs: an editor to correct your grammar and rewrite your paragraphs to sound like eveyrone else. We really haven't figured out the best way to use this ability yet and we need at least 5 singularity level breakthroughs before we create an AGI. [17]
I predict that humanity will be free of the tyranny of their genetic ancestry in less than one hundred years. You can see it happening. The second coming is already underway. It's a slow process by human standards. Data is processed into information at an ever faster pace. Emotions or gut feelings are turned into algorithms and can be emulated outside of the mind with many more inputs and faster results. The slow part of thinking (logic, language, math) is being replaced by computers that can reason orders of magnitude faster than our minds can. We've been making ourselves smarter and smarter over time [18] and will continue to do so. Eventually we'll figure out how to make conscious machines. I'm not sure we'll want to.
But enough of that glorious future where we control our own destinies and don't rely on ancient texts to tell us what to do. How do we get there from where we are today? And now that we understand how evolution works, how do we take control of it and increase the well-being of the entire human race?
First we should look at what evolution has given us and decide if that's what we want. We no longer need to accept our fate or our lot handed to us by billions of years of evolution by natural selection or luck, as any rational person would call it. We can pick and choose what we want to be. We don't have to listen to our evolved morals, which are really only about survival. We don't have to listen to people who had no idea they were shaped by evolution. We can design our own morals. We can have morals intelligently designed by us.
Morals by intelligent design has been tried a few times and most of the time it's been a disaster. Religions have tried to design morals for thousands of years. Philosophers for hundreds of years. They gave us liberalism - the ultimate judge of morals were people. What they felt inside. But we now know those morals are just due to evolution by natural selection. They are for survival, not for ethical behavior. Realizing this one fact and the reality that surrounds it demands that we design a new system of morals based on axiomatic principles and logical deductions. Now that we know that evolution has shaped our morals we can redesign them for the benefit of all human kind. They don't need to be divinely inspired to be legitimate, in fact, they can be derived from first principles. The derivations will suffer from the same issues that Hilbert [ref] found out about integer mathematics and simple postulate systems; they'll need higher mathematics to prove their correctness [see issues with moral codes from sam harris] but these problems are addressable.
There have been several attempts at this in the last few hundred years. Some have turned out very badly, some have turned out better. I will argue that the basis of a decent moral code has already been invented. With some small extensions we can devise a set of ethics and a moral code that will benefit the entire human race. The question becomes how does one judge a moral code? Are there any universal declarations that can be made that are true for the human species? (Not to mention all conscious species... but that's something I don't think most of us are ready for.) But here goes.
First: I have no control over who I am. [I could have been born as anyone. So the moral code must treat me the same no matter who I am.]
Second: I think, therefore I am. [I am not a simulation]
Thirdly: I am, so I can suffer. [And I want to reduce suffering and increase well-being]
Fourthly: All men [and these rights were just passed to all races last century and just passed to women this century. Wow! We have we let genes run our lives for a long time...] are created equal with fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Finally: I must live in the real world, not in a supernatural fantasyland.
What is the purpose of a moral code and a set of ethics: to improve the well-being of the entire human race. [...consciousness?]
This is one of the key ideas of intelligently designed morals: everyone must benefit as much as they can. And its corollary: the moral code should encourage this, not only by increasing the well-being of everyone alive, but by increasing the sheer amount of happy people. With these postulates it now becomes an engineering project to improve humanity.
I predict that humanity will be free of the tyranny of their genetic ancestry in less than one hundred years. You can see it happening. The second coming is already underway. It's a slow process by human standards. Data is processed into information at an ever faster pace. Emotions or gut feelings are turned into algorithms and can be emulated outside of the mind with many more inputs and faster results. The slow part of thinking (logic, language, math) is being replaced by computers that can reason orders of magnitude faster than our minds can. We've been making ourselves smarter and smarter over time [18] and will continue to do so. Eventually we'll figure out how to make conscious machines. I'm not sure we'll want to.
But enough of that glorious future where we control our own destinies and don't rely on ancient texts to tell us what to do. How do we get there from where we are today? And now that we understand how evolution works, how do we take control of it and increase the well-being of the entire human race?
First we should look at what evolution has given us and decide if that's what we want. We no longer need to accept our fate or our lot handed to us by billions of years of evolution by natural selection or luck, as any rational person would call it. We can pick and choose what we want to be. We don't have to listen to our evolved morals, which are really only about survival. We don't have to listen to people who had no idea they were shaped by evolution. We can design our own morals. We can have morals intelligently designed by us.
Morals by intelligent design has been tried a few times and most of the time it's been a disaster. Religions have tried to design morals for thousands of years. Philosophers for hundreds of years. They gave us liberalism - the ultimate judge of morals were people. What they felt inside. But we now know those morals are just due to evolution by natural selection. They are for survival, not for ethical behavior. Realizing this one fact and the reality that surrounds it demands that we design a new system of morals based on axiomatic principles and logical deductions. Now that we know that evolution has shaped our morals we can redesign them for the benefit of all human kind. They don't need to be divinely inspired to be legitimate, in fact, they can be derived from first principles. The derivations will suffer from the same issues that Hilbert [ref] found out about integer mathematics and simple postulate systems; they'll need higher mathematics to prove their correctness [see issues with moral codes from sam harris] but these problems are addressable.
There have been several attempts at this in the last few hundred years. Some have turned out very badly, some have turned out better. I will argue that the basis of a decent moral code has already been invented. With some small extensions we can devise a set of ethics and a moral code that will benefit the entire human race. The question becomes how does one judge a moral code? Are there any universal declarations that can be made that are true for the human species? (Not to mention all conscious species... but that's something I don't think most of us are ready for.) But here goes.
First: I have no control over who I am. [I could have been born as anyone. So the moral code must treat me the same no matter who I am.]
Second: I think, therefore I am. [I am not a simulation]
Thirdly: I am, so I can suffer. [And I want to reduce suffering and increase well-being]
Fourthly: All men [and these rights were just passed to all races last century and just passed to women this century. Wow! We have we let genes run our lives for a long time...] are created equal with fundamental rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Finally: I must live in the real world, not in a supernatural fantasyland.
What is the purpose of a moral code and a set of ethics: to improve the well-being of the entire human race. [...consciousness?]
This is one of the key ideas of intelligently designed morals: everyone must benefit as much as they can. And its corollary: the moral code should encourage this, not only by increasing the well-being of everyone alive, but by increasing the sheer amount of happy people. With these postulates it now becomes an engineering project to improve humanity.
Since the Final Great Awakening of humanity where we realized we are in control of our own fate, we have settled on Utilitarianism, the application of economics, for the betterment of mankind. There is one final postulate of ethics that slashes through the the paradoxes of population: the gains must not be made for one's advantage at the expense of others. Selfishness is a cardinal secular sin. The Original secular sin is racism, ridding the world of all or our companion species.
We can make some observations about what moral codes are reasonable and what ones are unreasonable. Any religion that depends upon a written moral code and doesn't allow changes in the light of new information [I must live in the real world...] is unacceptable. It's too rigid. If it can't allow heresy, it can't be a reasonable moral code. Those that insist on treating some humans differently than others [All men are created equal...] are unacceptable. Those that depend upon 'looking inside yourself for the answer' are just slaves to evolution by natural selection and are unacceptable. Only carefully reasoned systems of ethics can possibly have a chance to be moral.
Like the first system of logic invented three thousand years ago in ancient Greece, postulates and logical derivation are the only way to know that what you derive from your postulates are true (if the postulates are true.) Otherwise you are just guessing or relying on faith. Not a good thing to bet your life on. No matter how hard they try to sell it to you. If the postulates are wrong, all the derivations are nonsense. If the postulates are correct, everything that can be derived from the postulates will also be correct.
If you understand geometry, you know that there are many types of geometry depending upon the last postulate you deem to be be fundamental and true, Morals are the same as this. Depending on what you assume for the postulates you can get different types of morals. How you can decide which set of morals you want to follow is up to you. It's better if humans can decide on one set of morals. Insisting that the morals reside in the real world (not an imaginary one) tends to narrow down the moral codes to only one acceptable set of postulates. The stance that whatever a supernatural being declares is moral makes it so is a non-sensical belief. It would make more sense to read the future in the alignments of the stars when you were born.
Now that we've seen how to end the gene's control of our moral code, what other raw deals has evolution by natural selection given us that we should get rid of? Crappy bodies that only last decades? Yes, that has to be fixed. What else? We're stuck on this single planet. Yes, that has to be fixed, too. It's not safe and if we don't want to end up like the dinosaurs, we need to defend our earth from asteroid collisions and invasion of killer robots or aliens as well.
We die. We need to stop that shit. We need to be able to copy our minds into other forms of storage and hopefully put it back. No reason to be limited by physical problems at all. That's the Nerd Rapture. And unlike the religious rapture, we have a plan to make it come true. It needs a lot of work, there's a lot of holes in the plan that need filled, we don't even know if it can really be done, but compared to any religion's idea of a supernatural rapture, it has a significant chance of becoming true. It's based in the real world, not the supernatural. And since it's based in the real world we can take concrete steps to make it happen. We don't have to wait as slaves to a god that supposedly created us. We can take responsibility for ourselves and our future. We must take control of the future of the human race.
The gene's control of our inherited capabilities has got to end. The ability to control our descendants' genes must not be left to chance. It's too important. Humans have been taking control over evolution for a long time, we've become more and more sophisticated in what we can do and we continue to make it easier to control, correct and improve our lot. And we'll continue to do so. The key question is how do we make it happen faster? That's the real point. We know where we want to go. How do we get there faster?
Thanks for reading,
-Dr. Mike Ritter
Written 28th of September in the year 2017
The mass migration for most indiginous natives was 15 - 20,000 years ago, since the Mayans had hieroglyphs, syllabary and alphabets, the idea must have been in the meme land by then.
We can make some observations about what moral codes are reasonable and what ones are unreasonable. Any religion that depends upon a written moral code and doesn't allow changes in the light of new information [I must live in the real world...] is unacceptable. It's too rigid. If it can't allow heresy, it can't be a reasonable moral code. Those that insist on treating some humans differently than others [All men are created equal...] are unacceptable. Those that depend upon 'looking inside yourself for the answer' are just slaves to evolution by natural selection and are unacceptable. Only carefully reasoned systems of ethics can possibly have a chance to be moral.
Like the first system of logic invented three thousand years ago in ancient Greece, postulates and logical derivation are the only way to know that what you derive from your postulates are true (if the postulates are true.) Otherwise you are just guessing or relying on faith. Not a good thing to bet your life on. No matter how hard they try to sell it to you. If the postulates are wrong, all the derivations are nonsense. If the postulates are correct, everything that can be derived from the postulates will also be correct.
If you understand geometry, you know that there are many types of geometry depending upon the last postulate you deem to be be fundamental and true, Morals are the same as this. Depending on what you assume for the postulates you can get different types of morals. How you can decide which set of morals you want to follow is up to you. It's better if humans can decide on one set of morals. Insisting that the morals reside in the real world (not an imaginary one) tends to narrow down the moral codes to only one acceptable set of postulates. The stance that whatever a supernatural being declares is moral makes it so is a non-sensical belief. It would make more sense to read the future in the alignments of the stars when you were born.
Now that we've seen how to end the gene's control of our moral code, what other raw deals has evolution by natural selection given us that we should get rid of? Crappy bodies that only last decades? Yes, that has to be fixed. What else? We're stuck on this single planet. Yes, that has to be fixed, too. It's not safe and if we don't want to end up like the dinosaurs, we need to defend our earth from asteroid collisions and invasion of killer robots or aliens as well.
We die. We need to stop that shit. We need to be able to copy our minds into other forms of storage and hopefully put it back. No reason to be limited by physical problems at all. That's the Nerd Rapture. And unlike the religious rapture, we have a plan to make it come true. It needs a lot of work, there's a lot of holes in the plan that need filled, we don't even know if it can really be done, but compared to any religion's idea of a supernatural rapture, it has a significant chance of becoming true. It's based in the real world, not the supernatural. And since it's based in the real world we can take concrete steps to make it happen. We don't have to wait as slaves to a god that supposedly created us. We can take responsibility for ourselves and our future. We must take control of the future of the human race.
The gene's control of our inherited capabilities has got to end. The ability to control our descendants' genes must not be left to chance. It's too important. Humans have been taking control over evolution for a long time, we've become more and more sophisticated in what we can do and we continue to make it easier to control, correct and improve our lot. And we'll continue to do so. The key question is how do we make it happen faster? That's the real point. We know where we want to go. How do we get there faster?
Thanks for reading,
-Dr. Mike Ritter
Written 28th of September in the year 2017
Revised and published Dec 22nd, 2024
Future of religion
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-retreat-from-religion-is.html?m=1
=======================================================================
[1] Arguably the first great singularity was the big bang. The second great singularity was life. So language is the third great singularity. And the fourth great singularity will be artificial intelligence. We already did the artificial life thing, it's not very useful yet, but we've been gmo'ing and otherwise directing evolution for hundreds of thousands of years.
[2] With the ability to reason and predict we now have to take responsibility for our actions. We now have to have morals or we will be unethical. We see all the things we do that cause harm. We are ashamed that we have to kill other animals to survive. But we do anyways.
[3] Current prediction of how far away in time from today the common ancestor of the gorilla and our our ancestors were the same animals.
[4] How many generations is 100,000 years? How many years is one generation? A generation can be defined as the average age of a parent when any of their kids are born. This turns out to be fairly steady over time: the answer is 28 years. That makes 100,000 years into 3571 generations. Doesn't seem so long ago, does it? Your great-great-great-to the 3751-grand parent didn't know how to make clothes. We've come a long way, baby.
[5] Reference of where we got lice from Gorillas.
[6] Rate of change of speed of evolution by natural descent vx. cultural evolution. How to measure?
[7] Refernce on what Crispr-9 is and what it can do. Public Trials.
[8] Measuring phonemes in languages that have evolved from each other gives a date of around 250,000 years ago when we had a complicated abstract language with 10-12 phonemes in it. Obviously at that point these phonemes can produce 7 (how many things we can easily remember) to the 10th different things (700 million things.) This make sense, birds, other mammals all can make different sounds to designate different things, but they didn't evolve abstract language, just naming. the singularity was hooking all those names together and placing them somewhere in time and space using the language. [Ref]
[9] And this migration has just stopped. We went to China, Europe, Asia, Australia, Oceania, Arctic circle, North and South America from the west and now most recently from the east. So we've finally met on our voyage around the world. It wasn't pretty, either.
[10] In fact you'll find two systems of consciousness as shown in many studies where the surgeon cuts the corpus collusm that communications between the two sides of the brain. Evolution likes to make things that can survive: two lungs, two legs, two kidneys, two brains. These two seats of consciousness can't talk to each other, except through the copus collusm. When that's cut, they think different things. Since one side of your brain can't talk, when you make that cut, one of your brains is in there, but can't talk, but it can hear, it can't see what's out of it's eye's field of vision. That second seat of consciousness is in everyone's head. Usually you don't notice it. If it does begin to talk, well, that's when some people have issues when they don't realize what it is.
Future of religion
https://allendowney.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-retreat-from-religion-is.html?m=1
=======================================================================
[1] Arguably the first great singularity was the big bang. The second great singularity was life. So language is the third great singularity. And the fourth great singularity will be artificial intelligence. We already did the artificial life thing, it's not very useful yet, but we've been gmo'ing and otherwise directing evolution for hundreds of thousands of years.
[2] With the ability to reason and predict we now have to take responsibility for our actions. We now have to have morals or we will be unethical. We see all the things we do that cause harm. We are ashamed that we have to kill other animals to survive. But we do anyways.
[3] Current prediction of how far away in time from today the common ancestor of the gorilla and our our ancestors were the same animals.
[4] How many generations is 100,000 years? How many years is one generation? A generation can be defined as the average age of a parent when any of their kids are born. This turns out to be fairly steady over time: the answer is 28 years. That makes 100,000 years into 3571 generations. Doesn't seem so long ago, does it? Your great-great-great-to the 3751-grand parent didn't know how to make clothes. We've come a long way, baby.
[5] Reference of where we got lice from Gorillas.
[6] Rate of change of speed of evolution by natural descent vx. cultural evolution. How to measure?
[7] Refernce on what Crispr-9 is and what it can do. Public Trials.
[8] Measuring phonemes in languages that have evolved from each other gives a date of around 250,000 years ago when we had a complicated abstract language with 10-12 phonemes in it. Obviously at that point these phonemes can produce 7 (how many things we can easily remember) to the 10th different things (700 million things.) This make sense, birds, other mammals all can make different sounds to designate different things, but they didn't evolve abstract language, just naming. the singularity was hooking all those names together and placing them somewhere in time and space using the language. [Ref]
[9] And this migration has just stopped. We went to China, Europe, Asia, Australia, Oceania, Arctic circle, North and South America from the west and now most recently from the east. So we've finally met on our voyage around the world. It wasn't pretty, either.
[10] In fact you'll find two systems of consciousness as shown in many studies where the surgeon cuts the corpus collusm that communications between the two sides of the brain. Evolution likes to make things that can survive: two lungs, two legs, two kidneys, two brains. These two seats of consciousness can't talk to each other, except through the copus collusm. When that's cut, they think different things. Since one side of your brain can't talk, when you make that cut, one of your brains is in there, but can't talk, but it can hear, it can't see what's out of it's eye's field of vision. That second seat of consciousness is in everyone's head. Usually you don't notice it. If it does begin to talk, well, that's when some people have issues when they don't realize what it is.
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is a 1976 book by the Princeton psychologist, psychohistorian[a] and consciousness theorist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997). It explores the nature of consciousness – particularly "the ability to introspect" – and its evolution in ancient human history. Jaynes proposes that consciousness is a learned behavior rooted in language and culture rather than being innate. He distinguishes consciousness from sensory awareness and cognition. Jaynes introduces the concept of the "bicameral mind", a non-conscious mentality prevalent in early humans that relied on auditory hallucinations.
[12] The current DSM does not call out hallucinations or delusions as problems if they are associated with a religion, a major failing in my estimation.
[13] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019739752100179X
The impacts of urban vitality and urban density on innovation: Evidence from China's Greater Bay AreaWe find this everywhere we look. More people, closer together means more innovation and more opportunities and more economic activity.
[14] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-22-earliest-americans-arrived-new-world-30000-years-ago
The earliest Americans arrived in the New World 30,000 years agoThe mass migration for most indiginous natives was 15 - 20,000 years ago, since the Mayans had hieroglyphs, syllabary and alphabets, the idea must have been in the meme land by then.
[15] Although a good argument could be made that humans are subject to the saem, if not more pressure on their genetics, than we use to domestic animals and plants... The domesitcation of human beings has a long and sordid history.
[16] https://waitbutwhy.com/ The blog waitbutwhy has gone into this in great detail. Our genome has around a Gigabyte of information in it. A person lived 40 years or 1.2 * 10 ^10 seconds. Someone would just be able to read out their entire genome during their lifetime...
[17] See my previous post: "Is Artificial Intelligence an existential threat?" https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/7388651792460625188/5448877306308504353
Conclusion, not really, but Machine Learning is here now and it's slowly eating the world. Can't you hear it's slow munching as expertise disappears?
[18] ref intelligence test improvements in abstract reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
We've been getting smarter on IQ tests at the rate of one standard deviation (15 points) in 60 years. Or one point every four years, at different rates in different types of tests, but almost all positive and steady. Maybe it's the spread of education and literacy?
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