This is kind of a cool idea. Let's say that evolution writ large is only accidentally about the preservation, transmission, and development of living species, but essentially about the preservation, transmission, and development of information . On this view, organisms are just a means to an end, particularly well-adapted couriers for all of this chemical data. If that's the case, then maybe there isn't anything particularly special about the specific form of that data (i.e. DNA) or the way it's been transmitted in humans (sexual reproduction). That's just one way of doing things - in nonconscious, nonverbal, or nonhistorical species, genetic transmission, instinct, inherited traditions are the only means you've got. But once modern humans arrive on the scene, with all their increasingly sophisticated means of representing... [read full story]
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“In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, ‘an external transmission phase,’ where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed...
clipped by: chestnut501 clipper's remarks: We have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years,...
Errrgghh… Stephen Hawking said something that bothered me. I feel weird…Now, I am not a biologist, or even in the field. I have read The Selfish Gene, and consider myself up on evolutionary theory…OK. There are several...
movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: "'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random...
Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen...
