Will Life Extension Make Us A New Species By 2050?

 Aging  

Arguably human evolution is now being driven solely by cultural evolution, which may suggest some deeper evolutionary  transition away from biological evolution is already in the process of occurring. An anthropologist now suggests that life extension technology may yield a new human species by as early as 2050.

According to new research by evolutionary anthropologist, Cadell Last your grandchildren be an entirely new kind of human being. The researcher says mankind is undergoing an evolutionary transition as big as previous jumps from monkeys to apes, and apes to humans.

Last's theory was recently published in the journal Current Aging Science.

"The whole of human evolution in some sense can be viewed as our species trying to abolish the category of adulthood. We want to keep the creativity of cultural reproduction into adulthood."

Instead of the biological evolution that caused massive physical changes over millions of years, Last a and researcher at the Global Brain Institute, believes that cultural evolution is changing the human species in a matter of decades.

He thinks that as early as 2050, we'll be living to an average age of 120, making the the biological clock essentially obsolete.

"Humans are naturally interested in music, movies, mathematics, and science and all of these things. So we're just entering a world where we can own our own cultural reproduction, and we can engage in this for an entire lifetime," Last told Aol. "We're not in this world yet, but this is sort of where we're going."

He says human evolution is a long transition from quote, "living fast and dying young" to "living slow and dying old."

Related articles The Dawn of De-Extinction  Two Mutations Found to Have Triggered Evolutionary Leap 500 Million Years Ago In Humans  Biological Underpinnings of Modular Networks May Help Create Advanced Artificial Intelligence

"These are sort of the beginning signs that we're making a transition to a radical life extension — within 20 or 30 years," Last told Business Insider.

"What my paper tries to show is that the whole of human evolution in some sense can be viewed as our species trying to abolish the category of adulthood," Last said. "We want to keep the creativity of cultural reproduction into adulthood."

In Last's paper, he writes:

I predict that the full realization of this life history transition should occur before 2050, which suggests that this theory could be in some way connected to the hypothesized metasystem transition commonly referred to as Global Brain. In order to take this 21st century future seriously we need only assume that the pressures of the modern developed world hold and accelerate globally. First and foremost, the pressures for the acquisition of more advanced cultural information must accelerate as a result of advanced ICT [information and communication technologies]. This will continue to force an extension of a widespread postponement of biological reproduction. Secondly, continued advances in our understanding of aging and degenerative diseases must accelerate dramatically, allowing us to radically extend life expectancy and possibly usher us into a post-aging world. This will remove the evolutionary imperative to create complexity through biological reproduction, as delaying current reproduction would always be preferred in favour of dedication of energy towards culturally mediated growth and maintenance.

"We'll be having babies later in life, and fewer of them, in order to focus on their cultural development," he explained.

"People are going to be able to have more control over how they spend their time and energy, culturally speaking. And that will be a big change, that will be a fundamental difference between industrial society and the society we're making."


SOURCE  Aol

By 33rd Square

Embed