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
