Darwin Revelations
Through our recent studies of Darwin within Cor-220 I have come to better understand Darwin’s findings and idea’s in a much clearer light than I have previously before. I have adapted his concepts, theories and beliefs to structure my own personal revelation on modern day evolution and how it has changed since his time. That revelation is as follows; evolution is still the same but for humanity it has been taken away from nature and put in control of our two hands. Evolution works differently and much more rapidly on the modern day human as the vast quantities of information continues to build up and affect us all. It is no longer an internal change of DNA but rather the external modification of us. It is our new form of adaptation, to get smarter and learn more rather than wait for evolution to pick what is right for us. In the article “Get Smarter” by Jamais Cascio, she states:

“WE’VE been augmenting our ability to think for millennia. When we developed written language, we significantly increased our functional memory and our ability to share insights and knowledge across time and space. The same thing happened with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, and the radio. The rise of urbanization allowed a fraction of the populace to focus on more-cerebral tasks—a fraction that grew inexorably as more-complex economic and social practices demanded more knowledge work, and industrial technology reduced the demand for manual labor. And caffeine and nicotine, of course, are both classic cognitive-enhancement drugs, primitive though they may be.”

This is an important aspect of humanity that most people never seem to consider. We have freed ourselves from evolutions grasp and found other ways to more rapidly adapt. There is so much information out there that we cannot simply know it all anymore. The internet is one of those external adaptations that has affected us so greatly on not only how we gather information but how we learn/record that information and even our cognitive process. We can longer read every little detail and word out there on the page, we have to skim through and pick out the important stuff to keep moving, there simply just isn’t enough time out there to absorb it all if you were to read it all.

Some people on the other hand feel that this is making us stupid rather than smarter. Author Nicholas Carr, writer of the article “Is Google making us stupid?” claims that “…And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Saying that he has some form of constant ADD. It could be seen that the internet is making us stupid but is it really or is it just a radical change in how we think and an adaptation to how we can further understand and learn more in much less time? According to an article that interviews Stephan Hawking, it would take 15,000 years to read all the books in a national library which by the time you finish there will be many more made. (Casey Kazan) He further goes on to explain the concept of the external transmission phase” where evolution applies to the external transmission of information through databases down to the next generation as a form of evolution, thus allowing quicker pace of evolution through our own hands. (Casey Kazan)

Lastly, here is a link to a Youtube video about how we “find, store, create and share” information from the beginning to now.

I chose this video for the reason that it clearly shows how much information is around on just the internet alone and helps people grasp why it should be considered a part of our evolution. Simply because we do not loose information between generations anymore, it continues to grow to a point to when we can simply control our genetics and modify our beings to new heights. It also demonstrates that if we were to not have this information stored digitally how inefficient the entire system for finding information would be. We have reached a point where information is so readily available that it can allow for the forgetfulness of certain things since they can be simply reacquired so easily.

Works Cited
The Atlantic. July & aug. 2008. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .

The Atlantic. July & aug. 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .

Information R/evolution. Youtube. Google, 12 Oct. 2007. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .

Kazan, Casey. "Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"" The Daily Galaxy: Great Discoveries Channel. 3 July 2009. Web. 30 Nov. 2009. .