Seed Magazine has a great article on how we evolve. Not just how we got to where we are, but where we're going and how we got pointed in that direction at all.
Benjamin Phelan writes:
When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing . . .[but] the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.
Some of the ideas presented have a history of misinterpretation and misapplication, but the reseachers Phelan quotes are meticulous in pointing out the fallacies that might arise from a misunderstandng of the data. One of the more elegant sentences from Phelan, "High intelligence is to great apes as the wing is to birds." I love the transformation of a process into something physical. The full article is available over at Seed.
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