Food for thought...

I've been reading voraciously of late (escaping dire circumstances) and I'd like to share a couple of ideas I've come across:

1) There is evidence that humans are a self-domesticated species. What does this mean? Intentional selection for tameness in animals generally leads to a retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood - less violence, more sexual behavior, smaller skulls, brains, jaws and teeth, thinner bones.
(Other traits that emerge in the domestication of animals include curly hair, short tails, lopped ears and the mysterious star mutation - a white spot on the forehead that appears on some domesticated horses, cattle and goats).

This appears to be exactly what has happened to humans in the last thirty to fifty thousand years - and is continuing at a good pace. While the common belief is that brain size has been increasing for two million years, the fossil evidence suggests that, in fact, human brains have shrunk by as much as fifteen per cent in the last thirty thousand years, and continue to do so.

2) We are the cyborg species. Considering technology in the broadest sense, including spoken and written language, number systems, etc., humans seem to be hard-wired to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures. The popular view of the brain-mind dichotomy posits a ghost in the machine, some supernatural essence provided by some spooky skyhook that "explains" the intellectual/spiritual/moral capacities of humans, separating us from the animal world. But ghosts and skyhooks may be unnecessary. Instead we might say that the "mind" is the sum of the brain and its cognitive and computational extentions. We are cognitive hybrids, continually moving into new regions of design space as our technology evolves, and the process is accelerating.

Just a little food for thought. Do with it what you will.

PS: Clearly there are hazards involved in negotiating the world as cyborgs. The current global economic melt-down is a good example. We, as a species, have in recent years been living in a design space that we might call "Planet Finance", where the use of incomprehensibly complex financial technologies, supporting unprecedented levels of debt, have allowed the global economy to balloon to many orders of magnitude over and above any reasonable notion of value. Now we are experiencing an awkward and painful return to Planet Earth, where we will regroup and prepare for our next journey to the unknown.

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