Life is an ambiguous term and can mean many different things depending on its context. For the purpose of this thread, Life with a capital L should be taken to mean the collective whole...also here referred to as the living continuum.

Arousing self-awareness, comparable to infant self-awareness, is dim. As self-awareness grows, so too do sentience and sapience. Sentience carries the ability of the mind to perceive outwardly and to react emotionally (the ability to suffer, desire, love, hate, etc). Conversely, sapience carries the intelligence and the ability of apperception (apprehension or introspection).

Whether at its inception or sometime in between, the continuum became self-aware. Self-awareness and self-consciousness (identity of self) of the continuum, however, is limited only to survival of the self. All of the continuum's parts are interdependent. It plays its symbiotic parts like the notes of a composition known only to the hidden mind of the Composer. Survival is the goal of the continuum and each symbiotic part follows the will of the continuum to survive. Intelligence, then, can be no mistake. Evolution is a mechanism of survival. It must be geared toward both sentience and sapience.

The earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old and less than half the age the of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is little less than the age of the Universe by current estimates. Life is estimated to have begun within the first billion years after the Earth's formation. It existed as simple cyanobacteria for nearly 2 billion years thereafter. When evolution kicked in about 1.5 billion years ago, however, life exploded on the scene. In approximately 1.5 billion years, the continuum has went, via evolution, from being simple, dimmly aware prokaryotic cells to complex, highly aware, sentient and sapient multi-celled beings. And in as little as 90, 000 years (a short time span in cosmic years), Homo Sapiens went from scattered hunter-gatherers to having the technology to fly to the moon and the comprehension of quantum mechanics, etc.

Life began quickly on our planet. Its reasonable to assume that it would have begun quickly on other planets as well. Intelligence and corresponding technology has continued to evolve exponentially on Earth. We might presume the same for other life sustaining planets if evolution is driven toward intelligence and sentience. Other life forms on other planets may even be further along in their evolution than we are.

As noted, intelligence evolved at a rapid rate and continues to evolve exponentially. Where might the next 100,000 years take us? Where will it lead the continuum as its awareness, sentience and sapience continues to evolve at such an astounding rate? Homo physiology changed in proportion to evolving intelligence. How will our physiology change in the future? 100,000 years from now would we even recognize ourselves as Homo Sapiens? Or will we have evolved into a new Homo species as our ancestors did before us? What is the next step in evolution?

This post has been edited by iwant2believe2: May 5 2008, 10:01 PM

i think the next step will be a backward one.life came about by accident i think.you can only evolve as far as your enviroment allows.we are still very primitive,fighting wars,keeping poor countries poor so the rich can plunder.we may have a long way to go,but our journey will be cut short.as water an oil become more exspensive and more scarce the next war will be fought.

And indeed, we may go back before we take any great leaps forward again.
To be honest, I feel the next real big leap for us, is when we can conquer space travel.
We can not ever say we will ever do that until we discovered a way to vastly exceed the speed of light and do it reliably. Now, how long do you think that will take? Most all science still believe, moving faster than light, is an absolute, total, impossibility.

I think I would have to argue a couple of points, both with the original post and the follow up.

Evolution didnt begin 1.5 billion years ago..rather it began as soon as life began. In fact, non-Darwinian evolution may have begun even sooner.. it gets murky because we dont know how life began. But there are chemical processes, etc they can serve as non-Darwinian evolution. Thats a minor quibble.

The next is more substantial. It might be reasonable (though very debatable) that life emerges quickly and that it always evolves at the rate it has here. Although it emerged quickly here, it was billions of years before multi cellular life evolved. It may be that this transformation, from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells is ..extremely, extraordinarily rare. It is an extraordinary assertion that evoultion is driven towards human type intelligence and self awareness. It is easy to be overly impressed with our own place on the planet. There may not even be a drive towards complexity, rather what we see as that drive maybe a function of the "drunk man along the wall" analogy combined withour own bias towards giving weight to complex animals. In fact our planet is and has always been dominated by single celled life. Multi celled life is more..interesting, particularly viewed through own viewpoint..but it can almost be viewed as an oddity even on our own planet.

And my point, and the point that most concerns the question.. is that I question the assertion that our intelligence is growing, particularly exponentially. If we took a Cro-Magnon, not even a modern human.. put him or her in jeans and a T shirt and let him loose on a US campus there is no reason to believe he wouldnt learn at the same rate as anyone else. Upon graduation, she or he would perform their cubicle based job just like anyone else.

Where will we be in 100,000 years? We would definately recognize our relatives from 100,000 years ago.. 250,000 years ago.. probably even 1.8 million years ago (though we wouldnt invite THOSE cousins to dinner). Human evolution now is probably more sexual selection driven than anything else.

100,000 years from now..MY best guess.. IF humans are still around.. difficult... I dont think current lifestyle is substanable.. so life may revert at some point to being to some degree more isolated in regions.. which means the different ethnic groups will be semi isolated again and may, 100,000 years into the future have enough genetic differentiation to actually be different species... I mean, they may actually lose their ability to breed with each other. Particularly the most seperated ones now.. i.e. Aboriginal Australians and Africans.. Beyond that..its hard to guess. If this does happen, then each of the new species would need a new name..

Briefly my side point to macdaddy.. Your comments show a lot of "judgement" in evolution.. but evolution is void of judgement beyond "fit for the environment or not" and "attractive to the other sex or not".

I dont have much time to reply but...just a note here...I disagree...intelligence is somewhat correlated with brain size and our ancestors definitely had smaller brain size. Next, when I said 1.5 billion for evolution, I was pointing out the jump between cyanobacteria and mulit-cell organisms. Anyway, gotta go...will reply in depth later...

Our ancestors.. WAY back had smaller brains. Yes. But or brains are not "exponentially" larger. And our brains are not significantly larger than Cro Magnon..not even our most recent ancestor. Our near cousin Neandertal had a larger brain.

I kind of figured that you meant that for evolution..but I think it sort of sells modern bacteria short. Although we like to think of ourselves as "advanced".. we have evolved exactly the same length of time as the bacteria that exist right now as well. Compared to the earliest bacteria modern bacteria are evolved.. with much more complicated and specialized biochemistry etc.


Anyway, despite my nitpicking, its a good topic to think about.. when I tried to reply what I thought humans might be in 100,000 years ago I started and stopped my post about.. 4 or 5 times.. and just couldnt find anything I agreed with myself on!

100.000 Years is a short time. But the way we are now i am not so sure if we can survive even that long. If we do however, i doubt we would have evolved very much. Assuming that we continue living in a society which is based on technology then i suppose we might loose some strength. I don't think that our brain will evolve that much tho, i would say that the average person today is dumber then the average person 100 years ago. We are becoming to dependant.

i think we will eventually become a race of long-living,regenerating humanoids that have put war and disease in the history books.poverty and unemployment do not exist.we travel interstellar instead of intercontinent,(with Virgin starways).that of course is being optimistic,it could all turn out like a Mad Max movie.

Nobody in their right mind would allow a Mad Max type of scenario. If you look at all the mass destructive things that have happened to humans in the past, you can see a leap forward in society, not a leap back. Remember, after the black plague citizens of trade were able to raise their prices and cut a good living from royalty who were desperate to find someone qualified to get things done around their manors.

Yes but aren't mutations in genes cause for evolution...irregardless of isolation? Why did Homo diverge from Australopithecus?

How can you say that?!
Do you realize how many more people that couldn't read or write back then, including here in America?!!

hmm..no i dont think so,,but im sure the average person 4000-5000 years ago was smarter then the average person today

crocodile's are smarter,than all of us.they've been around longer than all of us.we are useless without our technology,and we rely heavily on it.

We are useless without technology? Not quite true..but even so.. thats like saying a crocodile is useless without its sense of smell and tough skin.. Take any ANY animals survival adaptions and its "useless".

By your criteria bacteria are are smarter than anything.

Knowledge is not the same thing as instinct. Then again, knowledge is not the same thing as intelligence. Perhaps Vet is trying to say that while we possess more knowledge than we did thousands of years ago, we do not possess any greater degree of intelligence? Intelligence is the capacity to comprehend, retain and apply knowledge...in other words, to reason...

Whales have the biggest brain of all animals. Never seen one build a rocket, but I never dove to the bottom of the oceon either. We don't have to get much smarter to control our own evolution and therby evolve as we see fit either. We made computers to do the heavy calculations of genetic mapping.

With genetic engineering, evolution is no longer dictated by nature, but is expressed as whatever we wish it to become. Perhaps that is the natural evolutionary stage that all inteligent beings in the universe evolve to. Not total mastery of the universe but total mastery of themselves.

Bart you forgetting half of natural selection. "Survival of the fittest" gets all the press, but "sexual selection" is also part of it and there is no way we will be escaping that anytime soon. Also, though the importance is not settled there are two other factors that will take human evolution out of human hands: neutal mutations (mutations which occur but neither make the organism less or more likely to succeed) and genetic drift.

Those three factors aside, humans are still evolving. Genetic tests show that actually we are evolving quite rapidly (that term is relative obviously).. that there is more genetic disparity already than what one would expect... this is probably due to such a massive population (no other animals of our mass have ever approached our numbers).


Thanks Tutu.. yes, what I have implied in a couple of posts in this thread is that while humans are accumulating information, particularly since the invention of written language, that is not the same as getting smarter. And while all animals are particularly well adapted for what they do (i.e. whales are very good at being whales), what humans do is human type intelligence and nothing else on this planet holds a candle (including the beloved dolphin). That doesnt mean we are better..just better at being human. Dolphins are much better ..at..being..dolphins. Its is a type of speciesism to over value our particular talents.

i get the impression sometimes that we don't come from here.every animal is perfectly adapted to live here,each species has its adaptations.we are quite vunerable in this enviroment.we don't have sharp claws,leathery skin or fur,immense strength like gorrila's and elephants or wings so we can fly,or gills so we can swim without risk of drowning.we have all that we came with,our hands and minds.other life has been here for eons,its has taken a long time for us to appear,and when we did we popped out of nowhere,almost like being marooned.we have always gazed with wonder at the stars,maybe we are still looking for home.waiting to be rescued.

Humans are PERFECTLY adapted for our lifestyle. You want evidence? BILLIONS and BILLIONS of us.. mere hundreds or thousands of other African apes. We "uninvested" in teeth, etc.. we invested in brain power which gives us the flexibility to deal with near every situation. Make no mistake, the signs we are African apes are everywhere.. we need to consume Vitamin C, 8% of us have a 13th rib, wisdom teeth, goose bumps, body hair, male uterus, extrinsic ear muscles, etc.. our eyes are backwards just like every other African ape, our arms are adapted for tree climbing.

We did not "pop out of nowhere".. we have 7 or 8 million years of evolution after our common ancestor with chimpanzees.

hi guys I'm new here...just wanna share my veiw about the whole evolution thing...i have just recently read an article from the net.
the article said that there is now a possibility that the earth was once inhabited by not only one but 3 different human species...
homo sapiens,homo erectus and the netherthals..the notion was based on the bones dug up by group of scientist,archeologist.they
discovered that the bones or fossilized bones predates to the modern man....now a theory was raised such that this 3 human species co exist.
what happen to the two species erectus and netherthals is still in question...if these are all true..then Darwin's theory will be of waste..
I personally do not believe that we evolve....