The point of Jesus' existence wasn't to lessen or diminish our appreciation of each other, but to expand our appreciation of each other by reminding us what lies within all of us, because Jesus was an example of the pinnacle of human evolution.
For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.
Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now.
Where we are going as a species is a big question. Human evolution certainly hasn't stopped. Every time individuals produce a new zygote, there's a reshuffling and recombination of genes. And we don't know where all of that is going to take us.
Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.
I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.
Only an artist as preternaturally acute and copacetic, as oddly visionary and just odd as Richard Artschwager, would be able to lay out the whole course of human evolution and have it make some kind of sense while also seeming like a dazzling insight.
In literature classes, you don't learn about genes; in physics classes you don't learn about human evolution. So you get a fragmented view of the world. That makes it hard to find meaning in education.
Fears of creating new kinds of plagues or of altering human evolution or of irreversibly altering the environment were only some of the concerns that were rampant.