Is there a point where an intelligent race begins to evolve into something different than it was? There are those who believe this is what happens just before huge changes come to a race of intelligent beings. These are the people who believe in natural selection. Natural selection is a basic tenant of evolution. An environment can’t support every variation of an organism so only some get to reproduce. If we are talking about insects for instance picture two different colored flies. One color attracts more birds who eat them so the other color become the dominant fly. What some scientists believe is we have reached a plateau where there will no longer be natural selection, but intelligent selection. Intelligent selection will allow those with the most desirable traits to mate with others who also have those traits, pushing evolution along at a much faster rate and improving the human race. Will this happen? We can’t be sure, but it seems a very strong possibility.

What will this mean to humans? The traits that are most desirable are also the traits which will advance us. If very smart people marry other very smart people and their offspring do the same and so on, it could be the answer to producing far more Einsteins and Newtons than we produce now. People like this in theory will discover far more things and may be able to answer questions about our existence and the universe than anyone has ever answered before. In turn this could drive our advancement at a pace never seen in the history of man. The human race has wasted a lot of time by not taking advantage of some of the inventions it had. One which always comes to mind is the steam engine which was invented by Hero thousands of years ago. Although an ancient Greeks living in Alexandria invented it, the concept of the steam engine wasn’t pursued until 1698 when Thomas Savery used a steam engine to draw water from flooded mines. Just imagine where our society would have been today if advances in steam engines started back in the 1st century AD after the invention.

Smart people seeking out smart people is only one of the possibilities in advancing the human race. Intelligent selection could also be people in extremely good health with healthy ancestors seeking out people of the same ilk. It could turn out there would be a great reduction in disease. We might see the life expectancy double or go even higher and the level of disease fall off dramatically. The medical profession might set up groups of these types of people and we could even see marriage clubs or agencies set up along the lines of desirable traits where people with certain traits would go to meet others like themselves. As these groups would intermarry, somewhere down the road other perfected types might marry into other groups and eventually we could have not only super smart people, but also super healthy ones.

It makes one wonder if the same could be true for the arts. Could great artists marry and their children marry into groups of great artists? I guess they could, but would artistic genius be something which could be passed down? Scientists do say some types of art effect the right hemisphere which coordinates the left side of the body and performs tasks which have to do with creativity and art. Finnish scientists studied this problem a few years ago. They noticed people with increased creativity had duplicate DNA strands which affected the processing of serotonin a neurotransmitter. The two hemispheres of our brains are connected by the corpus callosum which is a bundle of fibers. Scientists at Cornell University noticed that the corpus callosum in artists was smaller allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to develop ideas more fully. It seems like this could be passed on through our genes.

Since we are evolving ever more quickly even without intelligent selection, we are changing. The DNA in the modern human is now 7% different than it was in humans only 3,000 years ago. If things were to continue this way, we would have no DNA which matched our ancestors in about 44,000 + years if my math is correct. Of course there would always be some which would match and the proof of that is we still have some which show humans mated with Neanderthals. This little exercise was only done to show you we are changing and the time period in a geological time frame is incredibly fast. While we would still be able to recognize our ancestors from 3,000 years ago as humans, would we be able to do the same 44,000 years in the future? Maybe not.

We may have to change in order to survive. Solutions we can’t find now to existing on earth in the future will have to be found whether by human or machine intelligence. I for one believe it would be better for us if we became a lot smarter because it doesn’t seem relying on smart machines for everything is good for us. We might even forget what we have learned and become easy targets for either machines taking over or even other races of beings. Can you imagine a human who doesn’t know anything and relies on machines for every bit of knowledge? The idea doesn’t seem very appetizing to me. I think part of our survival is based on doing things and if we stop we will become lazy, fat and eventually wiped out as a race.

When we think of evolution we should also think about science. There may be breakthroughs in certain drugs which will be able to advance evolution. If certain drugs are developed which wipe out disease wouldn’t this contribute to a healthier human race? I believe it would and it could eliminate the need for the health segment to have to intermarry to evolve. In this case evolution would come out of a box or bottle. The pharmaceutical industry could be the key to improving humans and they are already trying to find drugs which would extend the human life. Mortality is one important factor in advancing the human race. Think about it, if DiVinci would have lived twice as long, who knows what else he might have invented. The same goes for Einstein and many other geniuses.