Although I did not attend Steven Pinker’s lecture, I have been recently thinking about whether or not humans have infact stopped evolving. I believe that we’ve started to “devolve”. We are still adapting to the world around us, however it does not seem that it’s an adaptation that will benefit humans (recent growth in child obesity, for example.) We’ve managed to make our surroundings adapt to us. A perfect example of this is air conditioning and heating; if we feel cold, we turn up the heat, or if we feel hot we crank up the a/c.

I saw Pinker a few years ago during another speaking engagement at UofT – fascinating body of work.

In response to the consensus that humans may have stopped evolving, I think we need to turn our attention to the long road which in some degree is difficult as it forces us to think beyond our own lifespan, unlocking the imagination toward speculation about the future, and away from the interpretive path of examining history to which the study of evolution is inextricably tied.

To build on Veronika’s point, technology has changed how we interact with our landscape and each other. Take a broad example of information synthesis: in the past 10 years there has been a torrent of demand on our attention spans which is forcing us be selective when faced with finite limits on our own ability to digest and prioritize information. This phenomenon is being studied by Edward Hallowell at Harvard whose research suggests that this information flooding is contributing to adult-onset attention deficits that need to be consciously managed using behavioural interventions.

In today’s rapidly evolving and information-rich business environment, do we see this storm letting up? Will diverse channels of information get easier to digest? Will the demands on our attention lessen? Will humans push back or will they submit to being overwhelmed? Will they use the information and learn to synthesize it in such a way that leads to more creativity and collaboration or will they implement more filters, making them less open to possibility? Tough to say if we try to imagine another 100 years of rapidly increasing information flow during a human’s productive life. Is 100 years long enough to have observable changes in the way our brains are hardwired to process information? Will it be considered brain evolution or simply unlocking latent cognitive potential?