A BUZZARD EGG OMELET NUMBER #34

For a couple of years, I have been saying that we are not only witnessing climate change, but also an evolution of the human species.

Back in the fifties, when I was a teenager, six feet was tall for a boy or man.  I am six feet tall, and when my wife and I go to the college gym to walk the track, the young men passing me on the track make me look diminutive – these young guys and many of the girls are well over six feet tall.

Stanford University just published a research stating that today’s people are fatter, taller and living longer.   The standard human temperature has been standardized for the last fifty years as 98.6, but today's research has set the new norm as 97.5.

  

In my opinion, this is a documented evolutionary change in the human species that is occurring as a result of a rapid societal change brought about by the technological revolution of the last thirty years.

  

Alvin Toffler, celebrated author of the book Future Shock published in 1970, predicted that humans would have difficulty adjusting to rapid change.   He was monumentally wrong; however, he did, meticulously, document how changes to human society and living environment had, for millennium, occurred very slowly – allowing mankind to adjust to change without shock.

 

Changes in societies brought about changes in living environments that resulted, over a period of time, in changes in the human animal; but as these changes took place over centuries, the evolution of the human being was barely perceptible from generation to generation. 

We are now in a new era for rapid social change.  Mankind’s ability to adjust to change has been the hallmark of his survival.   The rate of evolutionary change seems to keep pace with the rate of social change in the species; therefore, we can expect to see rapid changes in human mutation within a few generations.  

the Ol’Buzzard

BACK TO THE FUTURE

The book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler proposed that mankind was psychologically and emotionally unable to adjust to rapid change; that change, to be comfortable, must happen over an extended time. 

Boy was he wrong. 

Change did come slow when knowledge was acquired by trial-and-error. 

At the time of Jesus, the wheelbarrow was cutting edge technology.   The world prodded along for centuries until the invention of the printing press in the 1400’s.   The printing press allowed the mass sharing of information including the technology of the day.

By the early 1900’s the T-model Ford and primitive airplanes were cutting edge technology.   Changes were happening, but they were still slow.   

In 1976’ computers were in their infancy and the Apple-2 with 4 Kb of ram, 5 ½ inch floppy disk and a monochrome monitor that wrote in upper case only was available for home computing for around a thousand dollars. 

Now in only forty years we have gone to hand held gigabyte computer phones with hundreds of apps available.   My GPS has the address, maps and driving directions for everyone living in the United States and Canada.  NASA has probes hurling into deep space and the internet has connected almost every person on earth.

This is only the beginning.  Computers are changing our world at such a pace that it is hard to keep up with new innovations.   We are on the cusp of artificial Intelligence (AI) where computers will learn and think for themselves.   It is almost unimaginable where technology will have taken us by the turn of the 22^nd  century.  

The book is outmoded 

But still a good read

If only to see 

Where we have come from.

the Ol'Buzzard