Evolution within Humans.

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Evolution within Humans.

Up until recently in was easy to see evolution at work on human populations through natural selection. In Shakespeare’s day, four hundred years ago, only one in three babies survived long enough to reproduce. There was a huge mortality rate. The ‘unfit’ were weeded out through disease, bad conditions, lack of sanitation, malnutrition, violence or mere bad luck. To survive you needed the right genes and the wit to be in the right place and do the right thing.

Nowadays 95% survive. The ‘unfit’ (and I use that term scientifically, not unkindly) are not weeded out. Health and Safety, medicine, sanitation and cleanliness have created a situation where nearly everyone survives to have children.

So is evolution no longer occurring in human populations?

The answer is probably ‘not much’.

The Evolution of Humans

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The Evolution of Humans

Hominids first evolved out of ape-like creatures in the Rift Valley in Africa only 7 million years ago. There have been a multitude of species of subhuman apes. Modern man with his brain-size and thinking power only evolved a mere two hundred thousand years ago. That is the blink of an eye.

The sub-human hominids all died off but for much of our short history we shared the planet with another human species. The Neanderthals, wrongly represented as brutal cavemen, had bigger brains than ours and were probably more intelligent. They certainly had culture and made tools. They were wiped out quite recently. We don’t know if that was through disease, climate change, competition with us or differences over religion. Maybe they came up against an early form of ISIS and were just too kind and nice?

It is a great shame that there aren’t other species of intelligent humans surviving to this day. It would have taken the wind out of religion. It’s hard to be the chosen species when there are more than one. But then I suppose the religious manage to do just that on a tribal basis.

It is only sixty thousand years ago that we migrated out of Africa (and now we’re doing it again) but look at what we’ve done!! We’ve gone from a handful to 7 billion in no time at all.

We think we are here for ever. We think we have removed selection and are immune. We are arrogant enough to think that we can do anything and survive.

But can we?

The Creation of Life

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The Creation of Life

After all the gases and dust created by the Big Bang had swirled its way into galaxies and coalesced into stars the remaining debris orbiting those suns was attracted together through its own gravitational pull to form the planets and moons.

The Big Bang occurred 13.8 billions years ago – a length of time too long for human minds to grasp.

Our planet formed 5.2 Billion years ago.

For 1.7 billion years it raged, boiled and shook as a ball of molten rock with an iron core.

Finally it developed a crust and became cool enough for the creation of life.

Through the searing heat, UV Light, hard radiation, electric storms that bombarded the poisonous atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, nitrogen, and water vapour, along with the catalysts of silica and metals, the simple chemicals fused into the building blocks of life – the protein chains and RNA bases.

It took a billion years or so.

The complex organic chemicals built up into a soupy broth in those primordial seas.

All that is possible will happen given enough time. And time there was.

Simple organisms of protein were formed. Then RNA was incorporated to provide greater organisation. One can only wonder at the extraordinary role of chance and unlikeliness of circumstance that conspired through those billion years.

What we know is that 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions had calmed, the first simple, one-celled organisms based on protein and RNA were created. The DNA came later.

Life was a single cell. It prospered and multiplied and evolved for nearly 3 billion years until the planet was a mass of microscopic bacteria-like organisms flourishing on the soup and each other before developing the means of harnessing their own energy through chemosynthesis.

Then the ability to photosynthesise mutated and the atmosphere changed, the oxygen providing greater possibility.

The creation of life was a wondrous thing. One wonders how many other times anything as astounding has happened in this universe. But then time is immense and chance plays its part. In a universe of this immensity we are almost certainly not alone.

Creation might even be easier than we think and a fairly common occurrence. Time will tell.

Evolution through Natural Selection

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Evolution through Natural Selection

 

Both Darwin and Wallace simultaneously came up with a mechanism for how evolution operates. Their theories have been expanded and confirmed through detailed research.

They postulated that Natural Selection was the mechanism:

  • Organisms produce more offspring than can be supported by the environment.
  • There is a struggle to survive.
  • Only the fittest survive
  • The fittest, in different circumstances, could be the fastest or the slowest, the cleverest or the most stupid, the biggest, smallest, tallest or simply the luckiest. They could be the lucky one who just happened to have a mutated gene that provided immunity against a new virus.
  • Beneficial genes are selectedGiven enough time, and we’ve had plenty of that, the selected changes and random mutations have created an amazing spectrum of life on this planet. It has been transformed from brown to green. Its atmosphere has changed from poisonous methane and ammonia to a gas laden with oxygen.Life is truly wonderful. Breath deep!
  • Animals have evolved with the miracle of consciousness (I use that word in a non-religious sense – more as a recognition of the wonder and awe of its unlikelihood) and we are standing here able to comprehend , work out the mysteries , think, ponder and appreciate the beauty of it.

Evolution and Natural Selection

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Evolution & Natural Selection

Evolution is not Natural Selection.

Natural Selection is merely the means through which evolution is brought about.

Evolution is the consistent change in the numbers of a gene within a population. If it is increasing or decreasing as a percentage the population is evolving.

If a new gene mutation comes along and bestows an advantage on individuals that increase their chances of surviving and having offspring then that gene will be selected and become more prevalent in the population – its numbers will increase – the population will be evolving.

 

The Story of Life

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The Story of Life

Once upon a time there was time, more time than the human mind can imagine, billions of years, time enough to do the impossible, time enough for things that seem like magic to occur.

That is the incredible story of life, how it began and how its inception was more astounding than god and almost as unlikely.

Step by slow step the unbelievable happened. The slowness, unlikeliness and wonder of it is beyond our conception. We would rather believe in dragons, magic and supernatural creatures who are spawned from nowhere, just like the universe itself.

But life did not come from nowhere. It formed ever so sluggishly by chance through more time than we can understand because it had all the time in the world.

We know it happened because we are here to tell the tale.

The whole universe is made of nothing!

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I’ve just read an article about string theory and quarks.

All atoms are made of quarks. Quarks are the smallest particles of matter known to man.

The theory is that a quark is made up of a piece of space fabric that is folded up and exists in six dimensions.

My understanding of space fabric is that it is nothing. So all matter is thought to be made of nothing folded into six dimensions. Amazing.

I have trouble getting my head round a universe with three dimensions (four if you count time). I can’t imagine what six dimensions would actually be. My brain hurts.

So the whole universe is basically nothing folded. Shakespeare was right. All life is but a dream.

Isn’t science incredible. I can’t wait to find out more. Ruth is certainly stranger than Richard!

Can Human Beings ever understand the universe?

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The answer should be ‘NO’. But I am optimistic. I think, if we are clever enough to survive long enough, ‘WE WILL’.

When you stand back from humanity and look objectively at who we are it seems very daunting.

We think of ourselves as big intelligent creatures but we are not. We are tiny multicellular organisms who live for very brief lives on the crust of a tiny planet that orbits a mediocre star in the outer spiral arm of an unextraordinary galaxy.

We are so small that if you look at the Earth from as short a distance as the moon you would have to have an incredible telescope in order to see one of us. From the distance of our nearest star you’d be hard put, using our best equipment, to see our planet, let alone a microscopic human being. From some galaxies you’d be stretching things to even make out our galaxy.

Our life is over in a flash in comparison to the 13.8 billion years of the universe.

We are tiny, insignificant and arrogant.

Bacteria in our toilet bowls have a better chance of understanding the bathroom.

Yet I believe that we can understand this universe we inhabit. We’d never manage that with the power of our brains alone. All we could hope to come up with going down that route is mere religion and superstition. Intuition alone cannot solve the important questions. Mathematics might hold the solution. But I put my money on technology. We will solve it because we have an extraordinary ability to design machines.

Science has only been around for a couple of hundred years and yet we have transformed the world. Who would have believed fifty years ago that we would have such powerful computers or the Hubble telescope? Our tools are allowing us to exceed our senses and brain power.

In a hundred years time the intelligence of a computer will so exceed that of a human being that all things become possible.

Right now I marvel at string theory. I am exhilarated to imagine an infinite string of universes existing around us. I am astounded to hear the latest theories such as the idea that a quark might be nothing more than a piece of the fabric of space that exists in six dimensions. I do not claim to understand what that could possible mean. But it is exciting.

It means that all substance in this universe has no physical presence. It is merely space tangled up on itself. Extraordinary.

I just hope there are minds out there who can understand the concept of six dimensions wrapped up in a quark. I sometimes struggle existing in three (four if you count time).

Science is a wonder. It is the most exciting thing possible. The source of wonder and awe.

I just hope that we can finally dispel the ancient superstitions, the travesty of fundamentalism and creationism, and use our intelligence to delve deeper and deeper into the mysteries.

This is the age of science. This is the age of technology. We need to move on.

I believe we are at the beginning.

I’ll put my money on the likes of Darwin, Newton, Einstein and Hawking over the fairy-tale of ISIS and Creationism any day.

 

Consciousness – What is it?

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I am aware that I am conscious. I have an awareness of self, feelings, sensations and awareness of the world around me. I think. I have memory and imagination. It is wonderful.

It is also sometimes terrifying. I am writing now. I am transferring thoughts in my mind into words into sentences that (hopefully) make sense. I am aware that I really do not know how I am doing this. I am not in control.

That is fine when I am writing. If the words dry up I take a pause. If I am speaking in public and start to think about the process it fills me with dread. What if I am standing there and the words dry up? What if my mind goes blank? What if I cannot remember what I want to say? The more the fear grips the more your mind tightens up, your throat constricts, your fear wells up.

I’ve been there and done it. I’ve also, as a teacher, got used to standing in front of people and allowing my thoughts to roam, the words come and I am relaxed, free and quick witted. As a Headteacher I stood in front of halls of adults and spouted forth, cracked jokes and relaxed. Practice makes perfect.

I am a conscious being. I find it hard to understand this consciousness.

What do I know about consciousness?

I know that it is the result of the fantastic neuronal net, the most complex thing that we know of in the universe. I know that this operates with a range of neurotransmitters, there is acetyl choline, nor-adrenaline, endorphins, dopamines and such. I can even explain how they operate. I can diagrammatically show how the wave of polarisation travels up an axon, dendrite and jumps a synapse. But that does not explain consciousness to me.

For me the universe is full of wonder and awe, things I want to know more about, galaxies, big bangs, quantum mechanics, quarks and string theory. I am enthralled by polyverses, string theory and the idea that all matter might be nothing more than space coiled up in a further unfathomable six dimensions. WOW!!!!  Isn’t science wonderful? But the greatest wonder of all must surely be our own consciousness.

We are not at the end. We are at the very beginning. Newton, Einstein and Hawkins are the new boys on the block. We have only just begun to unravel the mysteries. I am astounded by how far we’ve got so quickly. The speed is incredible. My grandma watched the first biplanes take to the air and crawl across the sky while standing on a dirt road where horse and cart was the most common mode of transport. They did not have electricity in their house and television had not been invented. The world we now live in was science fiction to that young girl.

Trying talking about quantum theory or DNA with a religious fundamentalist or creationist. They’d prefer we were back in the Dark Ages.

I want to know more about my mind and consciousness. I don’t want to snuff it out in the vain hope that I will wake up in another universe. I don’t believe that. That’s too far-fetched for me.

Skin Colour

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We are all children of Africa. Our species evolved from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia. We have a common ancestor with the Chimpanzees and Gorillas with who we share 99% of our genes.

There used to be a number of different species of hominids but unfortunately only two survived to recent times and our close relatives, the Neanderthals, didn’t make it. We are alone.

We nearly didn’t either. At one point it appears that our numbers got so perilously low that extinction was the more likely option. We prevailed.

Now we are present in teeming numbers (7 billion and counting) and are changing the very eco-structure and climate of the planet.

We appear to be so different yet we are not. I look at Asian, African, Australian and European and I see differences. Under the skin, aside from the cosmetics of appearance, we are the same. Incredibly there is more genetic variation within groups than between groups. We can all be traced back to the same mother.

I wonder. I can imagine her sitting on her haunches in that African valley, cradling her first born, surveying the landscape, watching the rest of her troupe, and wondering. She could have had no idea.

At first our skin was black; full of the pigment melanin. That black pigment gave us protection against the strong UV light of the African sun. That sun gave us Vitamin D but it also gave us melanoma. With our hairless bodies we need protection.

When we migrated out of Africa to more temperate regions we underwent minor mutations. They gave us our body shapes, our facial characteristics and our skin colours. The different races of mankind were born.

We were all black once.

In terms of skin colour the reasons are simple. We need Vitamin D to keep us healthy and give us strong bones. We need protection against UV Light to prevent skin cancer. It is a balance. In the tropical sun the skin needs to be black. In the temperate regions white. And in the between regions shades of brown.

Our skin colour is the result of minor mutations to balance protection from the UV rays and the production of vitamins.

Now we settle in various parts of the world there are certain lessons we need to learn. If you are black and living in Norway then take some vitamin supplement and get out in the sun as much as possible. If you are white and living in Africa then cover up and use strong sun shield.

Incredible to think that such pragmatic evolution should have resulted in such prejudice, discrimination, racism and hatred.

Human beings are a recent evolutionary invention. We are not yet civilised. We have much to learn. We are still cruel, tribal and incredibly stupid.

It is our mother’s birthday! We should all celebrate.