Bob Garvin Deviantart

Evolution

How many millions of years have been necessary for evolution to develop the complex forms we see in our world today. It is a slow process of trial and error. We can contrast this development with the development of machines. Machinery is now faster, stronger, larger, longer lived, and more powerful than any living animal. The difference between evolution and engineering is incredible. Evolution involves the progress of an organism through blind trial and error. Random changes are selected for their benefits and passed on through genetic information. Engineering involves the intelligent design and testing of improvements, leading to rapid advances in machinery. Engineering has surpassed many of nature’s creatures in only 200 years. The fastest animal is the falcon at 120 mph: the fastest jet aircraft is the sr-71 at 2,430 mph. The horse has long been the measure of power, yet we measure our average automobile in terms of hundreds of horse power. Modern aircraft carriers dwarf the blue whale, the world’s largest animal to ever live. The modern machines have only been created recently, but there are numerous steam engines from the 1800’s still in operation and there is no reason to doubt that many machines could be maintained indefinitely. This is why clerics saw the idea of evolution so threatening. It reveals the randomness of our natural world and defies any intelligent guiding hand in its creation. For if man can achieve such incredible accomplishments in only 200 years, why did it take 4 billion years for God to create the natural world that we know. 

The last bastion of nature’s record holder is intelligence, but that may soon be surpassed by the computer. And at what point will the computer become self-aware?

          Many people do not believe that man should engineer his own DNA, but if he does not then he may face a successor in his own creation, the machine. It took millions of years for animal intelligence to evolve from simple single celled organisms that reacted only to light and chemical stimulation to the more complex insects. Today’s computers are somewhere between the two, depending on who you ask. But the rate at which computer intelligence is increasing, as measured by their speed of “thought,” is truly astounding, doubling every two years. In contrast, human intelligence has not changed over the last 4,000 years. The people that constructed the pyramids were just as intelligent as the people that constructed the space shuttle, the difference being only the amount of stored information that they had available to them. Will we become the second most intelligent system on Earth or will we merge with the machine in a symbiotic organic/inorganic new species that is unlike anything that has gone before?