soon, robotic beings [or zombies] will rule the world, and none of this'll matter

today's anthropology discussion has my mind attempting to secure the gold medal.

roll your eyes and navigate away from this page if you can't sit through three paragraphs of this before i get to the topic at hand, but i just want to interrupt myself to interject that i think it's rational enough to believe in God and evolution. few people would disagree that evolution is the right course of scientific thought, but many have gotten it into their heads that once someone adds God to any equation, the person who did so expects everyone else to stop working with numbers and watch a bunny pop out from the other side of the equal sign.

one believing in God does not change what happens in the equation, only how the equation itself came to be. as no one really knows what inspired the Big Bang, God is as viable a source as 'one day the not!universe got really really bored...'.

i suppose the real dilemma comes in trying to figure out what to do about studying the origins of the universe if they did actually happen to be caused as opposed to random; some cosmologists might find themselves unable to continue working on their projects if even one answer was supernatural.

i suppose there's always evolution to fight about, which is the track i intend to switch to after this horrific excuse for a transition sentence is out of the way.

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someone says "evolution" and i think of Darwin (and for some reason that puts me in mind of the Dewey Decimal system) and primates and the ol' Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon debate. i think of the only way we'll ever see it in action; through adaptation. i consider global warming and how which species will weather the storm (which is perhaps two puns for the price of one!) ahead.

what if it happens and all of our predictions turn out incredibly wrong? we wonder about our species and how it will evolve, but what if it develops all of these different traits - more alleles, a third strand of RNA - and eventually Homo sapiens sapiens splits into other subspecies? will it be, instead of environmental factors, due to a long line of the same sociological choices, like vegans propagating with vegans and producing children who eventually stop having canine teeth? or who's teeth and digestive systems develop into something more herbavoric than what we have now?

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it's not just the future that's murky; the past is all in a fog as well. there are all sorts of wild theories about how modern-day humans got so modern (dandruff shampoo and the invention of the banana daquiri), but even the prevailing theory is mired in debate.

personally i think what happened was the RAO theory, except i would account for the differences in specific traits via a moderate level of interbreeding with the Neanderthals. i don't think there was enough mixing of subspecies to go the Multiregional route, however, because there just aren't enough people walking around with clearly Neanderthal traits.

i mean to say, the structure of modern-day human bodies is anatomically Cro-Magnon. if there was a significant amount of interbreeding - so much that a new species emerged in the wake of the other two - there would be evidence of it in our general population, not just in specific areas. unless i am much mistaken about the theory, the MRE posites that Neanderthals (and perhaps H. erectus?) mingled with the Cro-Magnons all over the globe, and that we have slightly varied traits (what traits, i'm never quite sure, which may be my problem) because of it. Were two different subspecies with subtle but noticable differences in cranium, shoulders, pelvis, leg proportions, etc to interbreed, i would expect their resulting children to have more than little variances; i would expect some people to have a longer skull and others to have a shorter one. i would expect variance to be everywhere, including bones, and therefore obvious in bone structure. i would expect this to be reflected in today's population.

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evolution - we know it's about natural selection and the phrase "survival of the fittest" and the consequences of mutation. we know it's our only response to an ever-changing world, and that all evolution does for us is help us catch up, not keep up. we know it's involved with genetic drift and we can trace the matrilinial heritage of a species back to its ancestral representative millions of years ago, and plot a timeline of the past's changes.

we don't know how to plot the future. we don't know what sparks a new species from an old one, or where the biological lines blur between two already existing ones.

what is evolution, really? will we ever get the chance to find out - before it happens to us?