Month: May 2019

How Big is the Human Evolutionary Turn?

Are humans just another species in a long evolutionary line? Or, are humans part of an unknown and unfolding large change in the nature of evolution itself – something beyond the species? Common opinion, I think, holds to neither of these; instead, humans are considered to be a very special species, which has somehow surmounted and escaped evolution-as-usual. Evolution led up to us; today we ride airplanes. Sure, we might go extinct, possibly in some sci-fi version of apocalypse or some primitive version of evolution after an ecological collapse. But in general, we are assumed to be somehow post-evolutionary.