After having another good discussion with @everittdmickey on the post Sightings from the future: the society that awaits us, with AIs and robots. I decided to talk a little bit about evolution this time.

What is evolution?

Evolution can be defined as:

a gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form Source

the process by which an organism becomes more sophisticated over time and in response to its environment Source

Taking those definitions as the base of our argument, we can say in order for evolution to work, there must be a factor of competition and survival so that in this way specimens (or patterns) survive, others die, and those that best adapt to the environment survive and multiply more than the others, making their genes more and more common.

The polar bear is a perfect example of a successful mutation (evolution). Being of the same color of the environment makes it easier for the polar bear to hunt preys.

This is exactly what happened with the first humans when they started to life in different environments. Many of those who went to live in cold places ended up perishing, but those who survived did so because they were smaller and obese people, which helped them keep warm, and pass their genes on to their descendants, who did the same.

Similarly, those who went to hot climates, had to adapt to that environment, so in those climates people who were not good at emitting as much heat as possible from their bodies ended up perishing, while people better adapted to these climates (tall and thin people) survived, had children and multiplied.

All of this is thanks to natural selection, defined as:

A process in nature in which organisms possessing certain genotypic characteristics that make them better adjusted to an environment tend to survive, reproduce, increase in number or frequency, and therefore, are able to transmit and perpetuate their essential genotypic qualities to succeeding generations Source

This is why, after so many centuries we have small and and thick people and animals in cold places, thin and tall people in African countries, and people with excellent lungs in places with little oxygen because of high altitudes.

Are we evolving?

I do not believe that the human being has simply stopped his evolution, but what has happened is that we are exhausting the means of biological evolution and we are entering a new type of technological evolution.

It is important to understand that right now we are very different in comparison with a person 1 century in the past. Because we are using technological innovations to improve ourselves, something our grandparents were not able to do so.

"From enhancing our physical bodies through cyborg limbs to creating new bodies entirely" Source... Our bodies and minds are changing, faster than ever... therefore, we ARE evolving

We need to realize the knowledge to which any human being today has access thanks to the Internet and tools such as Google or Wikipedia is exponentially larger compared to a human of even 10 years ago.

Today any 16-year-old can answer questions that 30 years ago could only answer few people in the world.

Many will say that "that does not count as Evolution", since a tool like Google is something "external" to the human body, but the truth is that this is not the case, since the human mind is also part of the human being, and is the human mind that we are amplifying with these new tools. Our minds are expanding like never before in history, at an accelerated rate.

Just a few people notice that these tools are already fusing with our bodies. Today there is already technology of all kinds to provide artificial prostheses (arms, legs, eyes, ears, parts of the brain) that will soon be perfected to such an extent that they will make our biological bodies look obsolete in the future. We are looking at a society with possible human beings able to live much more years than what is biologically possible, even immortality. I call that evolution.

So even if biologically we are not really evolving much, our technology innovations as they merge with our own bodies can count as a form of evolution, created by our own knowledge. With a totally different speed than regular biological evolution

Conclusion

Since we are improving our capabilities and making us stronger and more intelligent, and if evolution is nothing more than a process of making a being more sophisticated, then we can certainly say we are evolving faster than ever.

Is exciting to see where this new era will take us, we will probably be able to have lives difficult to imagine today.Things like super strength, improved sight, a faster mind, perfect health, even immortality. This will turns us into a totally new generation of humans, with repercussions never seen before, but always fun to speculate about.

Therefore, in this evolution subject, my answer is clear. We are evolving, and not only that. We are evolving more than ever before.