by Xauri'El Zwaan

Created on: February 11, 2008   Last Updated: March 10, 2009

Every form of life is continually evolving, being shaped by the feedback loop of variation, selection, and retention of complex characteristics. Human life is no exception to this universal law. People have a tendency to think and act as if the human form has never changed and never will change, even those who profess to believe in the manifest evidence to the contrary. Because we are the most complex and powerful species on Earth, the top of every food chain and a force of nature unto ourselves, we arbitrarily assign ourselves to the 'pinnacle' of evolution. In truth, every human is a part of the continuing evolutionary process. Both on the individual level and on the level of discrete population groups, not to mention the species as a whole, we are shaped by our interaction with the environment around us and by our ability to survive and thrive in this environment - our evolutionary fitness.

Humans, on the other hand, are rather unique because our own intelligence and technology are perhaps the most important factor in our own evolution. For most of history evolution has been driven by essentially random factors- climatic shifts, food supplies, mutation, predation, and sudden catastrophe. For a relatively small portion of the history of life, positive pressures such as sexual selection and reciprocal altruism have increased the pace of evolution while maintaining its essentially blind character. However, with the coming of an intelligent and self aware species, the character of evolution has fundamentally changed. For the first time in all of the billions of years since the first primitive replicators formed in the primordial sludge, evolution is no longer a random and mindless process of biochemical trial and error. Humanity has the capability not only to evolve, but to deliberately influence its own evolution - as well as the evolution of other forms of life. Moreover, many facets of human culture are themselves now thought of as evolutionary processes. Memetic theory posits that all human knowledge and ideas evolve in essentially the same way that biological life does. Language, the economy, and even the basis of thought itself can all be better understood in terms of evolution. The greatest difference between cultural and biological evolution is that compared to our genetics, our memetic evolution proceeds faster by orders of magnitude. Within the span of a single human generation, human culture can evolve significantly.

It is easy enough to see that humanity

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