I have blogged about this before to some degree, so I will make this blanket statement:\u00a0 Everything Evolves.\u00a0 Let me explain what I mean by that.<\/p>\n
The biggest part of this is the biological one.\u00a0 Everything living on this planet today has evolved from some other form.\u00a0 This has been proven over and over and over again.\u00a0 This<\/em> evolution, however, is the one which spurs the most controversy.\u00a0 It is a fact, but many people want to blind themselves with religious viewpoints which ignore evidence in favor of comforting fairy tales.\u00a0 But not only has everything evolved, everything is still<\/em> evolving.\u00a0 Evolution is not a journey with a destination or even stops along the way.\u00a0 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<\/em>.\u00a0 This is something impossible to pinpoint.\u00a0 One can’t point at one generation and call it X and then call the next generation Y.\u00a0 (Yes, I know that has<\/em> been done, but that labeling doesn’t have a biological basis.)<\/p>\n Living things are not the only things which evolve.\u00a0 The Earth itself has evolved from a barren chunk of rock to the living platform it is today.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Life imitates life in many ways, and evolution is one of them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That is<\/em> an adaptation to the changing needs of today’s world.<\/p>\n I have talked in past blog posts about the evolution of games.\u00a0 Once upon a time, they were simple things like chess and checkers and the various card games.\u00a0 Then, in the late sixties and early seventies, two guys developed and released Dungeons and Dragons<\/em> on the world.\u00a0 No longer did games have to have a conclusion or even a winner.\u00a0 This concept has evolved to where games are invading our lives on an unprecedented scale.\u00a0 There’s a college professor (in Indiana, I think) who awards experience points<\/em> for assignments and tests rather than standard grades.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter that this is mostly a semantic thing; assignments and tests have always had point values.\u00a0 But by calling them experience points, his students have excelled and gotten better grades.\u00a0 They see their achievements differently and work harder to get them.<\/p>\n One important thing here, though, which I have subtly pointed out:\u00a0 Every evolution has a beginning.\u00a0 Aircraft has the Wright Brothers (or Leonardo Da Vinci, if you prefer) and gaming has Arneson & Gygax.\u00a0 In the same fashion, biological evolution has its beginnings, too.\u00a0 The most obvious part of this is to go way<\/em> back in history and find the single-celled creatures which first developed here on Earth.\u00a0 Life came from organic but non-living matter, and then it evolved into more and more complex things.\u00a0 One could even argue evolution began before this, beginning with the processes necessary to form the single-celled creatures.<\/p>\n After the beginnings, however, there is a great deal of divergence.\u00a0 There are still fighter planes, after all, as well as a wide variety of passenger planes.\u00a0 In gaming, once Dungeons and Dragons<\/em> became popular, there was soon a plethora of role-playing games, from the now anachronistic Twilight 2000<\/em> to the spacefaring Traveler<\/em> and much, much more.\u00a0 Each divergence, however, still required a first.\u00a0 D&D was the first fantasy role-playing game, for example, but now there is a wide variety of games which fit that description.<\/p>\n And so it goes in biological evolution, and it is something we are seeing today, something I think is being overlooked.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Although we have yet to understand their speech, it has been proven dolphins can communicate with each other using the sounds they make.\u00a0 Chimpanzees have now been seen using a written language<\/a> and making tools for hunting<\/a>.\u00a0 Crows have figured out how to open nuts using traffic<\/a>, cats have learned to catch buses<\/a>, octopi have started using tools<\/a>…the list goes on and on!<\/p>\n I am reminded of the original Planet Of The Apes<\/em> movie series.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This worked well until one of their time-traveling descendants taught them speech and led them to revolt.\u00a0 While I am hopeful this last bit doesn’t happen, I can<\/em> foresee a future where some other species develops an oral and possibly written communication we understand.\u00a0 Scientists have now at least tentatively determined that monkeys are capable<\/em> of speech; they simply haven’t chosen to develop it yet.\u00a0 If they do, I am betting it won’t take a million of them to start writing Shakespearean literature.<\/p>\n Being number one is sometimes hard to see.\u00a0 That is, it’s easier to see humanity as being the only<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 I think we’ll be faced with this question sooner than we think.\u00a0 I only hope our answer is, well, more civilized than what was in the Planet Of The Apes<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have blogged about this before to some degree, so I will make this blanket statement:\u00a0 Everything Evolves.\u00a0 Let me explain what I mean by that. The biggest part of this is the biological one.\u00a0 Everything living on this planet today has evolved from some other form.\u00a0 This has been proven over and over and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}