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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Living with Evolution

Evolution: The most complex subject !

By simply opening this topic I know I have entered into a very controversial matter, with supporters of equal passion for, and against the philosphy. I have looked down into the well of data and what I see is truly mind blowing, so I will not go there. I do not intend to get into any of the details of why I believe in evolution. In fact, I hope to reduce the mass of computations into a single word: change! Evolution is change, and change that is happening right in front of our eyes.

I was born in 1939, and for the first ten years of my life there did not appear to be any change. But change happens constantly, whether we can see or feel it. Just as the globe is constantly revolving, so is change happening. Example: for the person who suffers a coma for 50 years, the whole world will change around them, to the extent that before entering into the coma, the world that they knew would simply not exist when the awakening took place.

Charles Darwin's evolution challenges the Bible's version of the beginning of mankind. Adam and Eve versus today's mankind's beginning from the humble ape through to the brilliant things we are.

The reason I have chosen this subject at this time is because I found myself musing about the radical changes that have taken place in every aspect of our lives. There are lifestyle, morality, diet, physical makeup changes, especially as concerns the Southern Europeans and the Chinese, who have moved from being of short and squat stature to some being quite tall, such as the Spanish prince, and the Chinese government leader. There are also striking changes in industry; amazing changes in health care, to the extent that due to stem cell reasearch we are now being given the choice of living forever, or at least not having to die from simple old age.

Then, there is technology, and how that impacts on our ability to communicate with one another. From the beginning of the first computer and IBM the world took a quatum leap forward. There can be no turning back. To a child in his crib, he has entered a world that is manifestly much smaller than that of his parents. With a smartphone to play with a person on the other side of the world is the same as the one in the house next to his own. If the rate of change simply stayed the same in the computing world, by the time the baby of today reaches adulthood I shudder to try to imagine the power that person will hold in their hand.

Equality among humans has already advanced massively, and will continue to advance. For instance, there was a time that if you had a gripe that you wanted to get other people's opinions on, you were at the mercy of the controllers who had the printing press to give you the publicity. No longer! You simply use your own desktop to spread the message via twitter, and any of the other social sites, around the world in seconds.

Evolution/ Change is not always for the good, but it is like the ocean and the tides, and night and day. These things will happen and there is nothing that any human can do to stop them. True, we can, and probably will erase ourselves from the planet, but that will simply be the elimination of yet another species, like the dinosaurs, but the world will go on evolving, into the future.

Evolution, like it or leave it, believe in it or not. It  affects all aspects of human and animal life, and where humans have added to the evolutionary process by giving nature a helping hand that still counts as evolution.

Evolution. Change by another name.

Copyright (c) 2014   Eugene Carmichael