This sounds radical but is if anything far too conservative.
Intelligence and tool using has for millennia allowed us to apply selection pressures which are much more focused than natural selection, and now also allows us to directly edit genetic material in ways which would be slower or even impossible via random mutation alone. Intelligence also allows for the generation, mutation, and replication of ideas, which end up having a much greater, much more rapidly changing impact on ourselves and our environment than the variation in our genes alone.
Those aren’t changes comparable to the difference between breathing water and breathing air; they’re changes comparable to the difference between non-life and life. The very idea of biological clades becomes more and more fuzzy when we make horizontal gene transfer a regular fact of life for even complex organisms, intermixing DNA from species that haven’t had a common ancestor in a billion years.
This sounds radical but is if anything far too conservative.
Intelligence and tool using has for millennia allowed us to apply selection pressures which are much more focused than natural selection, and now also allows us to directly edit genetic material in ways which would be slower or even impossible via random mutation alone. Intelligence also allows for the generation, mutation, and replication of ideas, which end up having a much greater, much more rapidly changing impact on ourselves and our environment than the variation in our genes alone.
Those aren’t changes comparable to the difference between breathing water and breathing air; they’re changes comparable to the difference between non-life and life. The very idea of biological clades becomes more and more fuzzy when we make horizontal gene transfer a regular fact of life for even complex organisms, intermixing DNA from species that haven’t had a common ancestor in a billion years.