Humans Still Evolving

To my great surprise, I only recently learned that the consensus among scientists was that humans had ceased evolving more than fifty thousand years ago. They held that natural selection hasd't come into play since then and that our modern skulls houses Stone Age minds.


But closer observation of the genetic material of the last ten thousand years now seem to show that instead, there's rather been a growth, an avalanche of evolutionary changes in the human body during that recent period and apparently the mutations accelerate as we speak.


The brain, digestive system, lifespan, immunity, sperm production and bones, some two thousand mutations have been identified and traced back. We are differenciating under a wide diversity of environments, the variations in social condition, lifestyle, stress levels, pollution, and the intensification of some of these factors that comes with population growth, all at a recently unsuspected speed.

What will we be in five hundred years?


Learn more from DiscoverMagazine.

Death: Loosing The Self

We are going to die, one day.

Hard fact to accept, ingest and digest. First because we never like to think about our own termination, the consequences appear too unpleasant. And it is something we cannot really conceive of. Those who have been through the experience do not talk about it, in fact we can never tell what happens when we die. The living understand the death of someone else, their grief, loss, the sudden absence of personality and the decaying of the body, the biology of death we can map and understand.

But the subjective experience of the loss of self, is most probably impossible to grasp, not enough time to build an idea. And no means of communicating it to someone else, after the fact.

There's also the difficulty of giving meaning to the apparent futility of death when considered coldly, outside the reassuring fantasies of cults and religions. I think it is the hardest path to thread. From the angle of our genes however, it's another matter. Death becomes actually the price we pay for having sex, we must die but our genes will survive.

Death is necessary for the continuation of other lives, of Life itself. Small consolation, but the only one available right now from observation.


I strongly recommend viewing the five parts of this documentary : not always easy to watch as someone has accepted that his own death be filmed and some cold hard facts about physical and mental death are difficult to integrate. But I think we should get to know as much as possible about the only absolute certainty we can entertain: we will die, one day, and our self will dissolve into nothing.


There are no proofs of an afterlife.

Is ignorance really bliss?