[ExI] Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

[Emlyn]

Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html

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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 Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe
lecture,  is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books
published in the English language each year, containing of the order
of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great
majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of
life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added
is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that 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, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange
information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge
that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and
particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include
externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution
of the human race," Hawking said.

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 significantly. "But the external record, in books, and
other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown
enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the
internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being
applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too
narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has
collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process
this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of
hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems.
In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every
book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take
you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national
Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self
designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve
our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to
the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular
dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly
easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence,
are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much
more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them.
Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will
discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like
aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate
the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars
and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes,
with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic
components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace
DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of
life."

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Emlyn

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