Consider for a moment the first primitive amphibian that crawled up out of
the sea around 400 million years ago. A contemporary biologist, had any
existed, would certainly have classed this species as a rather unusual type
of fish, for it would be far more closely related to certain kinds of fish
than any other extant species. It is only in hindsight that we can see that
it was not a fish, but the first representative of an entirely new
class[41]
of [vertebrates], the amphibians. But intelligence and tool-using are
developments of comparable scope to the ability to breath air and move about
on land. I therefore argue that human beings are not primates; we are not
even mammals. Homo sapiens is a radical evolutionary phenomenon, the first
representative of a new class of [vertebrates].
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.
-- Ronald E. Merrill
(The brackets around “vertebrates” are just for a spelling correction.)
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.