A Thinking Ape's Guide to Trans-Simianism

Enough is Enough: A Thinking Ape’s Critique of Trans-Simianism:

The following was taken from a cave wall painting in southern Tunisia more than 300,000 years ago. Fossil evidence suggests that the author was of the species Homo erectus.
...
Klomp’s primary argument rests on what he calls the ‘Quickening,’ an imagined point somewhere in the future when the advancement of ‘culture’ occurs so rapidly that its pace will far exceed that of biological evolution. In his own words,

"There will come a time when within a single generation we will develop one or possibly even two new ideas… Current advancements in the ‘bow’ and ‘arrow’ industries suggest an exponential trend in the expansion of our technological capacities. We are able to perform hunts in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors, thus freeing up valuable time to ’ think ’ of new ideas. In the post-simian world, we may develop into a species that is not only intellectually superior to our current state, but capable of feats beyond the comprehension of a contemporary simian."

Pardon this author for not holding his breath.

Notice that Klomp cherry-picks discoveries to better support his argument of an exponential growth. It took more than a million years to develop fire and the hand-ax, and yet Klomp believes simply because it took only 2,000 years to develop bows and arrows that new inventions will spring up in even shorter timeframes. This theory is an expansion of ‘Morg’s Law,’ which states that since a sharpened rock can in turn become a chisel to make an even sharper rock, that the sharpness of hand-axes will increase exponentially over the span of tens of thousands of years. While Morg’s Law has so far proven accurate, Klomp can’t escape the reality that there is an upper limit, namely that a rock can only become so sharp.

More on a similar subject here and here.

The 21st century should be an interesting time. Probably a little too late for me... but not for my son, and that's what's important.

Historians will be amazed at the world of 2010. We're so close to becoming, as Obi-Wan said, "More powerful than you can possibly imagine." But it's also a world where religious primates (so to speak) are foxed by blatant superstition.

"Homosexuality," says Pastor Mario Manyozo of the Word of Life Tabernacle Church in Malawi, "is against God's creation and is an evil act, since gays are possessed with demons." The Anglican bishop of Uyo, Nigeria, the Right Rev Isaac Orama, believes homosexuals are "inhuman, insane, satanic and not fit to live".

It truly is the best of times, and the worst.