[Newspoetry] the top of a heap

[DL Emerick]

Near constancy of DNA mutation rate provides evidence that chimp and human
species separation was later than previous estimated (only 4 million years ago)
- the ape family itself apparently emerged some 14 million years ago.  Our other
ape cousins, besides chimps, are somewhat more distantly related to us - those
are gorillas and orangutans.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070223/sc_nm/chimps_humans_dc;_ylt=AusbMBs8dROZ82o3
hBAAUJfMWM0F

 

Now, if the ladder of evolution has no end to it (a bit dubious in these days
when man threatens to make the entire world uninhabitable by anything much more
than roaches and other such creatures), the natural question is how is the DNA
in humankind presently mutating - what sort of new species might emerge from
humans?  When would they recognize themselves as a distinct new species?  When
would they be regarded as a security threat to the (then) provably inferior
species homo sapiens?  Or would members of the news species be so clever as to
take over the systems that run the world, gradually relegating homo sapiens to a
few nature and game preserves, where man might finally return to living "at
peace with nature"?

 

That's really the poser for those of us who accept the implications of
evolution: who comes after us and what will happen to us, the remnants of a
species that would no longer be top dog in the world?

 

And, as long as we speculate, let us ask ourselves whether it is possible that
the forward elements, the advance column, of the new species is already here and
present on this planet - but that it has not yet formulated an understanding of
itself, as a novel phenomenon in the world, a new species.  Thus, the end of man
long trivialized by street corner prophets is not the one that they may have
been expecting - a universal doomsday.  Instead, we shall see the kind of end
that philosophers have proposed, at least since the times of Aristotle.  That
kind of end of man is more like those ideas of "efficient" and "final" causes -
a teleological sense to evolution.  That kind of end of man concept simply
recognizes that man is just a temporary step on the evolutionary ladder and not
permanently at the top of the ladder, at all, as he has long vainly fantasized
himself to be.  For a time, man was higher than all the other animals, in the
way that man esteems his place upon the ladder - but his perch was never more
than temporary, long as it may have seemed to him.  The pace of historical time
is much larger than man's sense of the time of his own life.

 

Man himself will go the way of all ancestral species, to the state of minor
importance in the history of the world.

 

But, to return to the question, of the new species - are you one of them and
don't it?  (And, modestly, I would wonder am I one of them, too - an us that
does not yet know itself to be an us?)

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/newspoetry/attachments/20070224/eda429df/attachment.html