Friday, May 05, 2017

Evolving ourselves

Oi, estou lendo este eBook e gostaria de compartilhar esta citação com você.

"move, and species emerge, disappear, and change. By the time Darwin died, the generally agreed-upon age of the Earth among scientists was 100 million years. Today there is overwhelming data, from chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, and anatomy, evidencing a 4.54-billion-year-old Earth.9 DarWa 1.0 still provides a very accurate and detailed framework for understanding life forms and their development, successes, failures, and ambiguities. So, to explain and understand some of the changes taking place around us daily, why is a modified theory—an expanded theory—of evolution needed today, a DarWa 2.0? First, it is impossible to overlook or even underestimate the effect humans have had on the planet in just the past few centuries. A very few animals and crops, genetically selected to fulfill our needs and desires, now dominate half the world’s landmass. An area equivalent to the whole of South America is under cultivation just so we can feed ourselves and our animals. And a further 8 billion acres are used for livestock. More than 19 billion chickens and 1.4 billion cows live in highly urbanized animal environments we call “farms.”10 Despite most of us regarding these settings as rural, the animal population density often exceeds even the most crowded of our cities. The wild is becoming rural, the rural urban. Nature is not “selecting” what lives and dies in these environments. Humans are. The logic of survival, for the majority of some species, is unnatural selection. And it is the species that humans have unnaturally selected, consciously or unconsciously, that are increasingly dominating the planet. Second, under DarWa 1.0 one would never see evolution occurring the way it’s depicted on modern T-shirts; remember those cartoons where a creature crawling out of a primordial ooze eventually begets a small mammal, then an ape, then a hunched Neanderthal, and finally a handsome" (from "Evolving Ourselves: Redesigning the Future of Humanity--One Gene at a Time" by Juan Enriquez, Steve Gullans)

Start reading it for free: http://amz.onl/9VMdNW1

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