How We Evolve

As humans we are no strangers to evolution. We have come to learn through science and math that the complex creatures we are today was not always so, we came from somewhere and that place was not nearly as intelligent as the one we are in today. Obviously I'm talking about our ancestors that began as apes and worked their way up to homo sapiens through the intense process of natural selection. All of those changes are very obvious and map out our exact creation to just the human eye. Now that we've got to where we were going that whole time, Phelan is questioning whether or not the process that got us here is still occurring and to what extent. On an even larger scale Phelan questions the extinction of our species entirely coming from the same process that evolved us onto the planet extincting us right off of it as well. Scary stuff huh?

Basically we are to understand that yes mutations and natural selection is still occurring to help us adapt to our environment today, but it is much smaller and much more condensed. Phelan claims that today the mutations are happening to help us deal with environmental changes today, "Our numbers swelled, our world changed, and our DNA is still catching up." While technology is the main resource today that helps us to make positive changes in society, it has also harmed our culture in a massive way. Technology has created our fast paced lives to be possible with the creation of transportation and convenience related inventions to help us stay on track however, this is one of our biggest problems. Now that we've started to harm our planet with our technological waste or our greenhouse gas emissions our bodies are struggling to keep up with it. "Erlich fears that evolution will be unable to help us." Usually the changes in our environment occurred naturally so our natural bodies had time to catch up with it, now we are the ones changing the environment and it is happening far too quickly for genetic mutations to be able to help us. "Intelligence builds on top of intelligence." Lahn infers that we can only work with what we know and then we will continue to work on top of that. While we are busy creating the cure, we are also creating what will cause our demise.