Pandemonium Read Online Free Page A

conceiving, communicating, and implementing ideas and at the same time set conditions for selecting those aptitudes over generations. It would not have mattered if the ancient genius who thought of the first word had the best vocal cords or brain specialization to fully exploit speech. The invention of language conferred benefits on those equipped to take advantage and pass those genetic traits to their descendants. In this way, humans created themselves as their own ideas influenced their evolution.”
    Nell clicked to a close-up of a gibbon gripping a branch. “When a prehuman ancestor suited to tree-swinging thought of a new use for hands—making tools—an idea, once again, became an adaptive force. Without language, such a creative breakthrough could not have been passed through offspring long enough to have an evolutionary effect. But with language—the DNA of ideas—a toolmaking culture could be transmitted from generation to generation over a sufficient amount of time to select for improved opposable thumbs, hand-to-eye coordination, geometric thinking, and a host of other complementary adaptations.”
    Nell clicked through a series of primitive stone axes now, all of which appeared roughly the same. “This identical style of stone tool was made by Homo erectus for nearly one-and-a-half million years with no significant variation. But the hands and the brains making them over that time were changing and adapting to the task at hand along with the teaching of it. Just as Edison, Einstein, Ford, or Gates did in the modern day, one person finally improvised, long ago—and that innovation could be passed on through language, changing and focusing the pressures of adaptation.” Nell clicked to an image of a diverse collection of stone knives, spearheads, tools, and adornments made by Homo sapiens . “By the time we appeared, an explosion of biological and technological adaptations had already occurred.”
    Nell clicked through a gallery of skydivers, spacewalkers, ballerinas, and Olympic swimmers. “We recognize in our hands, our mouth, our mind, our face, and our feet customizations that serve the needs of the spiritual, creative, inquisitive, and intellectual being that we are. There is something unique about human evolution, something that has made our bodies specialized vessels for the human spirit. Unlike any other animal, we ski on snow, skydive through air, swim in water, and walk in space. Something tells us that our origin could not simply be the result of purely mechanical or physical forces acting on the randomly mutating sequence of nucleotide bases in our genes. Our evolution is most profoundly of intellectual origin, expressed and carried forward, I submit, through language . Speech joined with DNA to complete a unique feedback loop between our minds and bodies, which over time accelerated and directed our own evolution. The intuition inspiring creationists—that humans must be different in some special way from all living beings and that there must be a conscious plan in our design—is not mistaken. Strictly physical theories of evolution are blind to an empirically obvious truth: We are the product of conscious design in almost every way that distinguishes us from other living things. But the designer we have searched for from time immemorial is us .”
    The audience churned like waves kicking up ahead of a storm. Nell showed an image of the famous biologist Richard Dawkins, whose picture elicited cheers, boos, scolds, and laughter. “The eminent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has introduced a corollary to my hypothesis with his theory of ‘memes.’ His genetic metaphor suggests that ideas, or memes, are selected in the same way mutations are selected, leading to the evolution of human cultures. Good ideas have a way of surviving, along with their hosts. Bad ones perish, taking their hosts with them. I propose that not only do ideas select for or against their human hosts, as Dawkins