Stephen Hawking
Hawking 2018 Questions
Brief Answers to the Big Questions,
London: J. Murray
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Excerpts from Hawking 2018 Questions
| Language | p. 58 |
Biological evolutionNote 1 “The process of biological evolution was very slow at first. It took about two and a half billion years before the earliest cells evolved into multi-cellular organisms. But it took less than another billion years for some of these to evolve into fish, and for some of the fish, in turn, to evolve into mammals. Then evolution seems to have speeded up even more. It took only about a hundred million years to develop from the early mammals to us. The reason is that the early mammals already contained their versions of the essential organs we have. All that was required to evolve from early mammals to humans was a bit of fine-tuning. Human evolution But with the human race evolution reached a critical stage, comparable in importance with the development of DNA. This was the development of language, and particularly written language. It meant that information could be passed on from generation to generation, other than genetically through DNA. There has been some detectable change in human DNA, brought about by biological evolution, in the 10,000 years of recorded history, but the amount of knowledge handed on from generation to generation has grown enormously. I have written books to tell you something of what I have learned about the universe in my long career as a scientist, and in doing so I am transferring knowledge from my brain to the page so you can read it. [...] This means that we have entered a new phase of evolution. At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection—from random mutations. This Darwinian phase lasted about three and a half billion years and produced us, beings who developed language to exchange information. But in the last 10,000 years or so we have been in what might be called an external transmission phase. In this, the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has changed somewhat. But the external record—in books and other long-lasting forms of storage—has grown enormously”. |
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Notes
- Note 1: The headings in bolded italics have been added by the author of the present page. Back to text