Telescopic Evolution: The Biological, Anthropological and Cultural rEvolutionary Paradigm:

If you’re looking at the highlights of human development, you have to look at the evolution of the organism, and then add the development of the interaction with its environment.

Evolution of the organism will begin with the evolution of life, proceeding through the hominid, coming to the evolution of mankind: neanderthal, cro-magnon man. Now, interestingly, what you’re looking at here are three strains: biological, anthropological (development of cities, cultures), and cultural (which is human expression). Now, what you’ve seen here is the evolution of populations, not so much the evolution of individuals. And in addition, if you look at the time-scale that’s involved here: two billion years for life, six million years for the hominid, a hundred-thousand years for mankind as we know it, you’re beginning to see the telescoping nature of the evolutionary paradigm. And then, when you get to agriculture, when you get to the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution, you’re looking at ten thousand years, four hundred years, a hundred and fifty years. You’re seeing a further telescoping of this evolutionary time.

What that means is that as we go through the new evolution, it’s going to telescope to the point that we should see it manifest itself within our lifetimes, within a generation. The new evolution stems from information, and it stems from two types of information: digital and analog. The digital is artificial intelligence; The analog results from molecular biology, the cloning of the organism, and you knit the two together with neurobiology. Before, under the old evolutionary paradigm, one would die and the other would grow and dominate. But, under the new paradigm, they would exist as a mutually supportive, non-competitive grouping independent from the external. Now what is interesting here is that evolution now becomes an individually-centered process eminating from the needs and desires of the individual, and not an external process, a passive process, where the individual is just at the whim of the collective.

So, you produce a neo-human with a new individuality, a new consciousness. But, that’s only the beginning of the evolutionary cycle because as the next cycle proceeds, the input is now this new intelligence. As intelligence piles on intelligence, as abilty piles on ability, the speed changes. Until what? Until you reach a crescendo. In a way, it could be imagined as an almost instantaneous fulfillment of human, human and neo-human, potential. It could be something totally different. It could be the amplification of the individual – the multiplication of individual existences, parallel existences, now with the individual no longer restricted by time and space. And the manifestations of this neo-human type evolution could be dramatically counter-intuitive; That’s the interesting part. The old evolution is cold, it’s sterile, it’s efficient. And, it’s manifestations are those social adaptations. We’re talking about parasitism, dominance, morality, war, predation. These will be subject to de-emphasis. These will be subject to de-evolution.

The new evolutionary paradigm will give us the human traits of truth, of loyalty, of justice, of freedom. These will be the manifestations of the new evolution, and that is what we would hope to see from this, that would be nice.

Eamonn Healy, Professor of Chemistry at St. Edward’s University, Texas