Doug Casey: The Human Species will Evolve to Other Species

The visionary Doug Casey believes that people will continue to evolve in line not only with the changes in the environment, but also along with the changes in technology or through adaption to technology

Once humans get established in space, evolution will take over – and take off. Before then, however, and likely even before we leave the planet, I'll bet there's going to be a lot of intentional, as opposed to natural, genetic alteration. It will start with efforts to eliminate undesirable genes that predispose one to heart disease, cancer, or genetic disorders. But while we're at it, why not also select for blue eyes, taller, more muscular frame, greater intelligence, and anything else people might want their children to have? Some people won't want to go that route, preferring to leave things to nature, but their children will be at a disadvantage to those whose parents have selected superior genes. That could lead to speciation along several lines.

Read the rest here.

I encountered this article earlier.

But having been immersed in too many readings, it took Bob Wenzel’s post to remind me to share with you this, what I think is a, significant outlook.

If I am not mistaken, Mr. Casey may have been reading futurist Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is Near.

Has Human Evolution Been Culturally Driven?

The ever spectacular author Matt Ridley proposes a thesis where our genes evolved from cultural developments.

Mr. Ridley writes,

The human genome provides penetrating and unexpected insights into human individual and collective history. Among them is the counterintuitive idea that genes are at the mercy of experience – that what we do in our lives affects which genes are switched on and off.

A stressful experience, for example, can make you more vulnerable to infection, because stress hormones indirectly alter the switches that control the expression of genes.

So, far from genes being the cause of how we act, the new understanding sees them as just as much a consequence of how we act. This subtler view of genes has yet to colonise the popular imagination.

On a much longer, evolutionary timescale, the same reversal of causation is necessary.

We now know that many genetic changes in human beings are driven by cultural ones, at least as much as the other way round.

For example, the ability to digest lactose as adults spread among Africans and Europeans because of dairy farming, rather than vice versa.

Read the rest of the fascinating theory here