Forms of evolutionSo, evolution is about information. Information evolves. In fact it could be said that information only exists because of life. Is the light from the sky, information, before it is seen by a living creature? Even computers were built by living creatures, so again the information processing device came from a living creature. There are many forms of information. 1) Genetic information 2) Brain information 3) Cultural information 4) Software information And probably others. All these evolve, through my "12 levels of evolution". The last one "software"... would be a bit different, it would probably start on the 3rd level of evolution as an "artificial intelligence" and continue up from there. So... information evolves when changes occur to it. A person mostly has to worry about their genetic and their brain evolution. Their genetic evolution can't be changed by them, but they can change the evolution of their children by choosing the right mate to have children with... But people can change the information in the brain, and so evolve in that way! It takes a second to change a thought in your head, or many thoughts. So... in one second you've made a change to yourself, that would take perhaps centuries if it had to be made through your children's DNA. For example, you might realise that eating sugar is bad for you, despite that your DNA tells you to eat it. If your DNA had to wait for evolution to change it so that refined sugar and too much sugar tasted bad to you, because people who ate it got bad teeth and were less likely to reproduce, that could take centuries or thousands of years. But you can make that decision in a second. So this is why personal evolution happens so fast, because we can change our brains in a second. Because a person has two main stores of information in their body, their DNA and their brain... this means a person's brain can be more, equally, or less, evolved than their DNA! Culture probably evolves too. That's a kind of "shared" information across humanity. It's the kind of information that persists and doesn't need to be "refound" all the time. Even music and technology are forms of cultural evolution. With personal evolution... most of the same lessons need to be learnt by everyone, just how to walk or how to play or how to express emotions as a child... and so on as you grow up. Culture can't really save you time in learning these. You just have to learn it yourself. But certain things can be shared and save each other time because they don't have to be individually discovered by each person, and in that sense, the culture itself evolves. Thats about it. |
Last modified: Sunday 15/11/2009 03:55
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