I was reading somewhere that the evolution patterns were abnormal, and remembered that there is still a missing like to humans and animals.
There is no such thing as a “normal” evolutionary pattern. Biological evolution is a completely passive process; think of it as a byproduct of an underlying cause. That cause is natural selection, wherein the species most able to adapt to changing circumstances are the ones that continue to prosper and thrive. A rapid evolution in a given species is an effect rather than a cause and indicates some environmental event(s) during that time which caused a reactive adaptation significant enough in difference from previous speciary behaviors to create the appearance of evolutionary rapidity in the future.
The “missing link” between humans and animals is a red herring perpetrated by religious types who don’t like the thought that humans are animals too. But, if you cut out all the insinuations, their basic point is correct: In terms of fossils, we have yet to demonstrate with irrefutable certainty that modern humans reduce to protohumans reduce to some known form of lower primate. That’s attributable to the scarcity of the fossil record, and the swiftness with which this evolution occured.
One question that came up to me was like how can animals sence approaching danger when humans totally cannot?
Humans have instincts too, but these have been coopted by rational thought. When an animal has a rational intellect at its disposal, as we do, many instincts are muted and some do not even register. Also, remember that animals are behavioral. When our behaviors are reinforced, we are more fervent in persisting in them. The natural warning signs, say, of the tidal retreat ahead of the tsunami last year, were completely overwhelmed by the constructs of social life. I would venture to guess that our actual, physical capacity for being aware of these sorts of things is largely still intact, buried within us. That guess of mine could be proved (or disproved) by putting a very large population of human toddlers and young children out alone in the wild, with no human contact ever, and charting their progress over the years. I suspect many of these instinctual vestiges would return in force—that is, would prove to be not at all vestigial.
Also, saw that 30,000 years was no way enough time for humans to change drematically.
You don’t seem to be appreciating just how long “30,000 years” happens to be. 30,000 years, at 16 years per generation, equates to 1875 generations. That is more than enough time for ample variation in the human genome. However, just because a species
can evolve does not mean it
will evolve. There must be environmental conditions to spur this. And, so, we get back again to the fallacy of your idea that evolution has a “normal” pattern. It’s just the opposite. The normal course of evolution is completely arbitrary, utterly dependent upon external events. This is why many periods in history are relatively long and uninterrupted in evolutionary terms, with short, sudden punctuations of this normalcy peppered throughout history. These were no doubt the result of significant shifts in the balance of nature, either from sudden catastrophic events or, more often, from small, gradual changes that caused significant realignment at the top.
So I started thinking, is there any possibility that our ancestors came in contact with the Frozen Flame? Or something similar that could evolve us? Lol, maybe i’ve just been replaying to much CT and CC XD Thoughts?
It is very unlikely. Contact with the Frozen Flame is separate from some other random event in that the Flame has an intelligence, which changed the human genome directly and deliberately, in turn causing us to become more like we are now, whilst skipping a great deal of intermediary evolutionary steps, and ultimately delivering us with disparity into a more highly-evolved form. This is separate from the natural process of biological evolution, which can never skip a step. The Flame, therefore, is an example of a differend kind of evolution...something that I call “artificial evolution,” but which laypeople may think of simply as “intelligent design,” with a lowercase “I” of course. Such an event in human history is not impossible, as
2001 playfully suggests, but it lacks both historical evidence and historical need. In other words, we could have evolved to the point we’re at today by known evolutionary methods, rather than relying on some outside, intelligent source like the Frozen Flame for which there is no proof. In all likelihood, when it comes to our real-world evolution, the equivalent of the “Frozen Flame” is a reification that encompasses a great number of distinct, individual steps in the history of our species, which, taken together, happen to comprise a fascinating and artistically separable page in our evolution.
