Evolution

Ive been thinking about my future for a while now....specifically with respect to imagining what my descendants would look like if sufficient generations ended up in front of computer displays at random IT companies!! Jokes apart, here is my take on evolution...

Early life evolved, adapted and selected itself based on the environment organisms found themselves in. When the primordial atmosphere was reducing, there arose a proliferation of anaerobes, when temperatures were higher than boiling water, there evolved thermophiles that bred in under ocean volcanoes and when continental plates collided to form dry land, fish climbed out of the oceans. Life preyed on life, crawled, soared, mated, adapted and oftentimes perished. This was the beginning.

Subsequently, two factors began to moderate a species' instinctive struggle to pass on genetic material- firstly and as always, a harsh environment waiting to claim the weakest link and increasingly at this point, a competition for scarce resources and healthy mates. So the system continued, churning out species after species, each better than the last, up until the first Homo sapien came along.

And then, a third factor emerged...... Intelligence.

A species that did not clash with the elements anymore but actually bent them to its will. Intelligence that put a man on the moon as easily as a person thousands of feet below the ocean. It tore down mountains and slapped a harness on the rivers. It domesticated the wilderness, employed machines to do its will, invented the Sciences and declared itself master of its environment.

Has man in his infinite intelligence managed to bypass evolution?

How can we talk of survival of the fittest when passing on ones genes is a matter of fusing sperm and ova in a test tube? How can we talk of evolution when Scientists routinely genetically engineer organisms to endow them with the specific traits that they wish for? If natural selection were still at play, would it not have ensured that a man like Stephan Hawking (suffering from a life threatening form of muscular dystrophy) would'nt have survived long enough to even learn of a black hole?

Evolution as we know it, no longer makes any sense.


If you want to know more about self designed evolution, read Prof Stephan Hawking's public lecture on evolution.