One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Are humans really more evolved?

Human as a dominant organism on earth become habitual of thinking in dominance. They declared themselves as super creature. Surely, men have many characteristics and features distinctive of them but there are characters that men share with other creatures. Men used similarities and differences in all observable things and based on them they have classified all things they know or have observed. This is the main methodology almost in all fields of knowledge. This is particularly true for science. These common characteristics reveal al lot about human but there is controversy about thinking strategies. As men declared themselves as super-creature so they don’t allow themselves to be compared with creatures and organism that are less evolved than them. Surely! This behavior is expected from a dominant creature but besides men is rational beings and they love learning, so they are always in quest for new understanding.

We can disagree with evolutionists but it is fact that evolution provides a thinking methodology especially through comparative studies. Spiritual ones believe men are centre of universe and what exist in universe, exist in men. Even thinking in this spiritualist line, again evolution is a helpful tool in understanding how all in nature concentrate in men and how men are super creature.

Social men and Social ants: Certainly human is super creature but again there are examples in nature make us surprise when we compare with human. One such strange example of nature is social structure of ants. Men have the most advanced and complex social structures with specialized structures for human health. We have health ministries, Medical colleges, universities and research organizations in health, well established multinational companies that research and massively produce health products for global distributions, Hospitals, clinics and conventional and unconventional health facilities. We educate ourselves and our children in schools, colleges and universities through formal educations and citizens through informal educations using every media to improve human health but again health is the most expensive and serious social problems even in most advanced countries like USA, where presidential candidates make health insurance as the basis of their election campaigns.

The most basic thing in health education is balanced diet or healthy nutrition. We know well that balanced diet of is categorized according to mass to height ratio. Surely, the balanced diet of an infant is not balanced for a hard working adult. Similarly, the nutrition that a growing boy requires is different from an office holder. In most human families the family members eat together and eat what will be prepared by home maid. It may be a mother, a sister, a wife, a cook or any individual linked with family. Children, parents of any age and gender and profession eat the same diet. Those with jobs that require less physical and mental works get obese and those growing children and hard workers get under nourished. The diet of family also influenced by likes and dislikes and get imbalanced.

Contrary to us, ants have well developed and more evolved nutrition system. They have nurses that prepare special foods according to the requirements and needs of every social group. Queen, larvae, workers and knights all have different food requirements and hence nurses prepare balanced diets suited every group separately. Knowing this fact make us feel ashamed that despite of our advances in medical sciences, educating ourselves through formal and informal education again our diets haven’t been specialized or we haven’t leant to know our dietary needs. All that guide us in our diet is likes, dislikes, cultures, traditions and commercials.

Chimps have more advanced genes than us: By the spirit of a super creature, men declared themselves more evolved than all organisms. Anthropologists, biologists and paleontologists helped making lineages of human evolution. It is accepted that men and similar organisms like chimps and gorillas are diverged from a common ancestor, “sahelanthropus” some seven to six million years ago  (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2709797.stm). It is thought bipedalism, tool making, language, evolved cognitive functions like advanced learning, speech, creativity and self expression etc are the result of positive natural selections and men have evolved more positively than their close relatives like chimps and gorillas. But comparative studies on shared genes of human and chimps by analyzing strings of DNA from nearly 14,000 protein-coding genes by a group of scientists (http://www.pnas.org/content/104/18/7489.full) showed that more genes evolved in chimps that were useful and beneficial than human.

Microbes evolve more rapidly than human: Though microbes are very small to be seen by naked eyes but they have a lot to do with human lives. Actually they compete with human in certain areas. Human discovered penicillin to wipe out bacteria but more resistant bacteria are evolved. They are changing rapidly their genes compared to new antibiotics so there are always dangers of new diseases introduced by rapid evolution of bacteria in resisting antibiotics. Surely, evolution is more rapid in unsuitable environments as organisms evolve to adapt new environments for their survival. Adapting new tactics for survival increase diversity and rate of evolution. Human’s technological advances are making environments more suitable for survival hence it is technologies that are evolving not human. On contrary, there are new challenges for bacterial and other microbial lives hence they are evolving rapidly.

There are many areas where other organisms are more evolved than human and hence challenging their super-creature status (though certainly they are). It will be more obvious if new areas are added to list through your comments.

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