Discussion

Discussion

The rate of the rate of change

There are several “changes” that punctuate this; the most prevalent is the changing time scales. The rate of change is increasing[i].

The advances in the computer capacity have increased our ability to collect facts and build a knowledge base; Computers gas increased our ability to analysis and present our knowledge and this increase, increases with each technical advance. This increased ability to handle large and ever more complex systems feeds on it’s self, growing at an ever faster rate.

The question is can the human brain keep up. The answer is a resounding no!

The most important aspect of all these time-lines is the ever-shorting time frame. Each of the following time scales becomes shorter than the one preceding it, while at the same time the amount of change increases in each time scale. The change is measured in the increasing diversity of structures and processes in relation to a period of time.

Big bang time scale

From a biological perspective nothing happened on the Big bang time scale for the first 20 billion years. At 10 billion years ago matter began to clump i.e. the stars formed. It was only 4600,000,000 ago the earth formed. See the appendix and references for a detailed time line.

Geological time scale[ii]

With the formation of the earth around 4.5 billion years ago the earth’s geological history starts, the measure of time is in the million of years.

From this point, we still had 1000 million years before biological evolution started. Geological time is divided in to Era: Units of a Billion Years since the beginning of the planet. We are now in the Cenozoic era. Each era is divided in to Periods and Periods are divided in to Epochs.

Up until now things were moving at a natural pace. The pace has quickened. It took 16 Billion years (biochemical traces 3.875 billion years ago)to stumble on the first organic molecule[iii], and only another 1 Billion years more to stumble on the first cell, but after that there was so much living stuff laying around that new creatures popup[iv] much faster. Scientists have made baby steps in artificially reproducing some of the building blocks of life[v]. One paper gives the rate of evolution of a genus as about 8 million years[vi], these numbers vary due to the level of organization considered, chemical, cellular, Organismal, ecological and so on. There are many works which cover the discrepancies in the know rates of Evolution at different levels of organization; I have listed several of them here if you want to investigate them further.

Rate of Evolution and Unification of Evolution Theories[vii], Limits on the Rate of Evolution[viii], Horse Evolution[ix]

Historical time scale.

Cultural Stage: Each Epoch is divided into biological life, or cultural stages...an anthropologists or biologist’s opportunity to set each time period to event which is considered significant by the classifiers

The time scales change from periods of billions to millions to thousands, to hundreds of years in an ever decreasing time period and increasing rate of change. We finally arrive at the human time scale where individuals get names.

Whether you take the father of chemistry to be Laurent Lavoisier in 1750 ad, or Jabir bin Hayyan in 803 ce the present age of enlightenment is very new.

Again it is the acceleration in the rate of change, which is important here. Each of the previous time scales becomes shorter than the one preceding, while at the same time the rate of increase in the diversity of structures and processes increase.

Behavioral timescales

If we assume the human time scale limited by our rate of learning then the average human lifetime is close to the limit of the human timescale.

Now in the evolution of technology the time frame has shifted to a 10-year period. See Time Line of Genetics in the appendix

When the rate of change exceeds the human’s behavioral timescales (the time to learn exceeds the life time of an individual), then the stage is set for a “faster” organism to evolve.

Evolutions Sweet Spot

The science of change, which includes evolution, is coming into its own right. The following example is derived from Evolutionary Design by Computer[x]. Evolution can be analyses by considering it a race and its Sweet Spot. The race is a race between innovation and selection. Innovation can be genetic recombination, mutation or any process that produces a change in traits. The selection process has been analyzed and has parallels in markets share.