I have blogged about this before to some degree, so I will make this blanket statement:  Everything Evolves.  Let me explain what I mean by that.

The biggest part of this is the biological one.  Everything living on this planet today has evolved from some other form.  This has been proven over and over and over again.  This evolution, however, is the one which spurs the most controversy.  It is a fact, but many people want to blind themselves with religious viewpoints which ignore evidence in favor of comforting fairy tales.  But not only has everything evolved, everything is still evolving.  Evolution is not a journey with a destination or even stops along the way.  I am different from my parents, and they from theirs, and so on back through history until we have a designation other than homo sapiens.  This is something impossible to pinpoint.  One can’t point at one generation and call it X and then call the next generation Y.  (Yes, I know that has been done, but that labeling doesn’t have a biological basis.)

Living things are not the only things which evolve.  The Earth itself has evolved from a barren chunk of rock to the living platform it is today.  It’s not the same kind of thing–the Earth has not adapted to its environment–but it is a change on an evolutionary scale.

Life imitates life in many ways, and evolution is one of them.  Many of the things we humans have developed over time have been imitations of something we found in nature, such as the way planes have wings to fly.  Evolution is here, too, as planes have evolved from their conception in the first decade of the twentieth century to the biplane warbirds of the first world war to the three-hundred plus passenger jetliners of today.  That is an adaptation to the changing needs of today’s world.

I have talked in past blog posts about the evolution of games.  Once upon a time, they were simple things like chess and checkers and the various card games.  Then, in the late sixties and early seventies, two guys developed and released Dungeons and Dragons on the world.  No longer did games have to have a conclusion or even a winner.  This concept has evolved to where games are invading our lives on an unprecedented scale.  There’s a college professor (in Indiana, I think) who awards experience points for assignments and tests rather than standard grades.  It doesn’t matter that this is mostly a semantic thing; assignments and tests have always had point values.  But by calling them experience points, his students have excelled and gotten better grades.  They see their achievements differently and work harder to get them.

One important thing here, though, which I have subtly pointed out:  Every evolution has a beginning.  Aircraft has the Wright Brothers (or Leonardo Da Vinci, if you prefer) and gaming has Arneson & Gygax.  In the same fashion, biological evolution has its beginnings, too.  The most obvious part of this is to go way back in history and find the single-celled creatures which first developed here on Earth.  Life came from organic but non-living matter, and then it evolved into more and more complex things.  One could even argue evolution began before this, beginning with the processes necessary to form the single-celled creatures.

After the beginnings, however, there is a great deal of divergence.  There are still fighter planes, after all, as well as a wide variety of passenger planes.  In gaming, once Dungeons and Dragons became popular, there was soon a plethora of role-playing games, from the now anachronistic Twilight 2000 to the spacefaring Traveler and much, much more.  Each divergence, however, still required a first.  D&D was the first fantasy role-playing game, for example, but now there is a wide variety of games which fit that description.

And so it goes in biological evolution, and it is something we are seeing today, something I think is being overlooked.  We humans were the first to develop tools, language and with them civilization, but I do not think we will be the only species to do so.  Although we have yet to understand their speech, it has been proven dolphins can communicate with each other using the sounds they make.  Chimpanzees have now been seen using a written language and making tools for hunting.  Crows have figured out how to open nuts using traffic, cats have learned to catch buses, octopi have started using tools…the list goes on and on!

I am reminded of the original Planet Of The Apes movie series.  According to the mythology of the series, several primate species were bred to become larger and smarter so they could do a wide variety of menial tasks for mankind.  This worked well until one of their time-traveling descendants taught them speech and led them to revolt.  While I am hopeful this last bit doesn’t happen, I can foresee a future where some other species develops an oral and possibly written communication we understand.  Scientists have now at least tentatively determined that monkeys are capable of speech; they simply haven’t chosen to develop it yet.  If they do, I am betting it won’t take a million of them to start writing Shakespearean literature.

Being number one is sometimes hard to see.  That is, it’s easier to see humanity as being the only species on the planet capable of being civilized and developing all the things we have created instead of being the first of many to achieve that.  The harder question, once we realize other species are chasing our tails in this evolutionary aspect, is how will we react when they inarguably demonstrate their capacity for reaching our level of development?  I think we’ll be faced with this question sooner than we think.  I only hope our answer is, well, more civilized than what was in the Planet Of The Apes.