“Mutation: it is the key to our evolution. It has enabled us to evolve from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet. This process is slow, and normally taking thousands and thousands of years. But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

According to an article published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), human evolution has accelerated in the past 40,000 years.

If you’ve read Rudy Rucker’s Software, you might remember in chapter twelve where Cobb and Sta-Hi went past a pair of museum displays, one showing natural selection, the other mutation, and Cobb explains how he came up with the idea of evolution for robots:

• Selection and mutation. That was my big idea, Sta-Hi. To make the robots evolve. They were designed to build copies of themselves, but they had to fight over parts. Natural selection. And I found a way of jiggering their programs with cosmic rays. Mutation.

A podcast debate on post-humanity.

According to this MSNBC article from 2005, human evolution is at a crossroad. Either bio-engineering will cause new forms of humans to emerge, or cybernetics will fuse us with machines. It’s also possible for both scenarios to occur simultaneously. But there is a group who may have the final word on how post-humans develop, if they allow them to develop: The health insurance companies.

So which camp will the post-human most likely end up at? My mind agrees with the simultaneous occurrences but twists it to form a duality between two formidable opposing factions. Biopunks vs Cyberpunks, Mutants vs Cyborgs, Creatures from the abyss vs Automated automatons. Bringing reasons for war above those of race, color, creed, ethnicity, or religion and down to the smallest DNA strain. Definitely something that I will be taking along for my own ride of a roller coaster dystopian novel. An extra dash of spice to mingle within the caste systems of post apocalyptic wrecked humanity.

This ought to be fun.
High Res Version

I think it’s funny that a former colony is now buying land of England.

This Tin Man show really looks interesting.
The website experience alone makes me want to watch it.
(Especially check out the “The Realm of The Unwanted” that looks like my kinda Realm.)

I think it’s pretty cool that a band in this age and time of short attention span and rampant attention deficit disorder dares to release a video that requires your full attention to the very end of the clip to grasp all of it’s subtle details.

time is like a blanket on my face
I try to be here just like you
time is just a fiction of our minds
I will survive and so will you

we are the only ones right now that are celebrating
and we are joining hands right now
we are the only ones right now that are suffocating
we are the dying ones right now

as the water grinds the stone
we rise and fall
as our ashes turn to dust
we shine like stars

kisses on the dancefloor in my past
I need some comfort just like you
beating like a bass drum time goes by
I want the last dance just like you

drowning in the flood of morning light
I’m only human just like you
do you hear the city waking up
I will survive and so will you

we are the ones the only ones
we are the ones the dying ones
we are the ones the only ones
we are the ones and we are joining hands
we are the only ones right now that are celebrating

as the water grinds the stone
we rise and fall
as our ashes turn to dust
we shine like stars