This is a message to let you know how evolution is progressing in the industrial age. Evolution is very
slow, as you know, and as a result, humans haven’t evolved much since they lived in caves. They
simply don’t feel like they fit into modern society and its technology. They don’t feel comfortable
wearing three piece suits, sitting in front of computers all day and living in cities built of steel and
concrete.
There are really only two solutions to this problem. The first is to slow down technology and the
second is to speed up the evolution of humans.
Successful humans will pass on their genes to subsequent generations. A friend of mine who lives on a
farm has a 15 year-old daughter who is studying animal husbandry. They have 25 cows. She has
convinced her father to sell their bull and use artificial insemination to impregnate their cows. This
will provide them with calves whose father is a prize bull but whose mother is of quite ordinary
breeding. Her next goal is to treat their cows as surrogate mothers by implanting fertilized ova which
are bred in a Petrie dish from prize bulls and prize cows. Using these techniques, the evolution of
cows is becoming even more rapid than it was using standard breeding and artificial selection
techniques. There is some concern as to maintaining diversity as these techniques gain acceptance.
Using such techniques on human beings is problematic because of ethical considerations. In modern
societies such as the United States, humans whose genes are quite defective still have the right to
breed if they choose to. Women with excellent genes often choose to have a career rather than to pass
on their genes to the next generation. The statistics show that 40% of women in the United States who
earn more than $100,000.00 per year are without children. As a result the gene stock of humans is
actually declining. We call this dysgenics.
There is now potential for speeding up the evolutionary process in ways to alleviate this problem.
This era is characterized by the invention of automobiles, airplanes, microwave ovens and many other
items which have drastically changed our environment. We have done this, for the most part, by
developing a set of principles expressed in mathematical terms which allow us to design new machines
and equipment which will act as our tools or ‘slaves’ as we go forward. These rules and techniques
are used by engineers when designing new products.
But now we are entering a new age. Many things that used to be designed using engineering
principles are now being designed using a mixture of design and evolutionary principles. In the past,
for example, we designed airplanes by using wind tunnels to test out how well our preliminary
designs could fly. This allowed us to test out a new design without actually flying it. This is valuable
because actually flying an untested design could be very dangerous. But now we have gone beyond
the use of wind tunnels by making computer models of the airplane and wind tunnel so that we can
test the “virtual” airplane before even making a physical model.
This has led to our now having the ability to “breed” virtual humans whereas we couldn’t ethically
breed actual humans. First we must use computer models to create virtual humans and correlate
various features of the human with the blueprints (DNA) that create those features. The blueprint of
one person, Craig Venter, has been documented and as we add new techniques we will be able to
reduce the cost and time that it takes to do the documentation of many other people. As we document
more blueprints of other people and identify which aspect of the blueprint contributes to which
characteristic of the human, we will be able to create computer simulations of humans with sets of
genes which don’t actually yet belong to any human. By doing this, we can effectively evolve new sets
of human genes which will lead to the creation of humans which are more suited to modern society.
More and more babies are being conceived in fertility clinics. More and more tests are being
developed which allow the parents to be informed as to which of their fertilized eggs have genetic
defects. In the future, we will also be able to tell parents which of their fertilized eggs will bring
offspring that will adjust more readily to the modern society and technology. Whereas actual
breeding of humans would be unethical, the pre-gestational selection of human fertilized eggs by the
parents has proven to be quite acceptable.
Effectively we are in the process of accelerating the evolution of human beings. It is an exciting time in
which to live.
You may want to refer to the Journal of:
Artificial Life and Robotics (Volume 13, Number 2, March 2009)
http://springerlink.com/content/h35105241472/?p=961c5f61f6f949e68888beaeb3d2e26c&pi=0
Articles Include:
* "Haptics for medical applications" by Kouhei Ohnishi, Tomoyuki Shimono and Kenji Natori, 383-389.
* "Membrane computing and brain modelling" by Marion Oswald, 390-393.
* "Modular robotic tiles: experiments for children with autism" by Henrik Hautop Lund, Martin Dam
Pedersen and Richard Beck, 394-400.
* "Artificial life and embodied robotics: current issues and future challenges" by Malachy Eaton and J.
J. Collins, 406-409.
* "A multi-objective strategy in genetic algorithms for gene selection of gene expression data" by Mohd
Saberi Mohamad, Sigeru Omatu, Safaai Deris, Muhammad Faiz Misman and Michifumi Yoshioka 410-
413.
* "Artificial living beings and robots: one root, variety of influences" by Jana Horáková and Jozef
Kelemen, 555-560.
* "A dynamic simulator for humanoid robots" by Tomislav Reichenbach, 561-565.
* "A simple method for simulating biochemical reaction networks" by Mai Umeki and Yasuhiro Suzuki,
566-569.
Anon
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