The evolutionary process produced humans, and humans can create certain things that evolution wouldn’t have been able to produce without producing something like humans to indirectly produce those things. Your question is no more interesting than, “How could humans have built machines so much faster at arithmetic than themselves?” Well, humans can build calculators. That they can’t be the calculators that they create doesn’t demand an unusual explanation.
Well, humans can build calculators. That they can’t be the calculators that they create doesn’t demand an unusual explanation.
Yes, but don’t these articles emphasise how evolution doesn’t do miracles, doesn’t get everything right at once, and takes a very long time to do anything awesome? The fact that humans can do so much more than the normal evolutionary processes can marks us as a rather significant anomaly.
Not really. Birds can fly better than evolution can. As far as intelligence goes, we’re far from the only animals who can make tools. Since this typically takes less than a year, they’re already faster than most versions of the mindless process called evolution.
This does beg the question, How, then, did an evolutionary process produce something so much more efficient than itself?
(And if we are products of evolutionary processes, then all our actions are basically facets of evolution, so isn’t that sentence self-contradictory?)
The evolutionary process produced humans, and humans can create certain things that evolution wouldn’t have been able to produce without producing something like humans to indirectly produce those things. Your question is no more interesting than, “How could humans have built machines so much faster at arithmetic than themselves?” Well, humans can build calculators. That they can’t be the calculators that they create doesn’t demand an unusual explanation.
Yes, but don’t these articles emphasise how evolution doesn’t do miracles, doesn’t get everything right at once, and takes a very long time to do anything awesome? The fact that humans can do so much more than the normal evolutionary processes can marks us as a rather significant anomaly.
Not really. Birds can fly better than evolution can. As far as intelligence goes, we’re far from the only animals who can make tools. Since this typically takes less than a year, they’re already faster than most versions of the mindless process called evolution.