Have humans evolved more in the last century than in all of history combined?

Ever get the feeling that the world is changing faster than we can keep up? That the phone in your pocket has more power than the computers that sent humanity to the Moon, and it’ll be obsolete in two years?

It’s not just a feeling. It’s a fact.

Some days ago, while rewatching Jurassic World, I fell down a rabbit hole, asking a simple question: Have we, as a species, evolved more in the last 100 years than in all of our previous history combined? From a purely scientific, biological standpoint, the answer is a clear "NO." Human evolution, the kind driven by DNA and natural selection, moves at a glacial pace. We are, biologically, almost identical to the humans who lived a thousand years ago.

But that answer feels profoundly wrong, doesn't it? Because in every other way, we are an entirely different species. This is the crux of it: our sociocultural and technological evolution has uncoupled from our biology, and it’s hitting warp speed. To really understand the sheer vertigo of our current moment, we have to appreciate the sheer scale of the journey that brought us here.

Let's put it in perspective.

Imagine the entire story of our species, Homo sapiens, as a single day. If we appeared just after midnight, we spent the first 23 hours and 30 minutes of that day as hunter-gatherers. The Roman Empire rose and fell in the last 10 minutes. The entire Industrial Revolution took place in the last 60 seconds. And the device you're using to read this? It was born in the final tick of the clock.

This is our story: a species defined by long periods of slow change, followed by an explosion of progress so violent and so rapid that we haven't yet begun to comprehend it.

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Part 1: The Long Dawn of Consciousness

For hundreds of thousands of years, we were just another clever primate. Our evolution was happening, but you'd need a geologist's sense of time to notice it. Yet, within this immense quiet, a series of fundamental "unlocks" occurred, creating a new kind of being on planet Earth.

The Foundational Sparks (Prehistory)

• The Control of Fire (~1 million years ago): This was arguably our first great divergence from the animal kingdom. Fire wasn't just a tool; it was a captured piece of the sun. It provided warmth, protection, and cooked food, which in turn fueled the growth of our most precious and energy-hungry organ: the brain.

• Complex Tools (~500,000 years ago): A sharpened rock is one thing. A hafted spear is another. The creation of composite tools showed a new level of planning and abstract thought. We were becoming the planet's apex predator through ingenuity, not just brawn.

• The Cognitive Revolution (~70,000 years ago): This is the moment we truly arrived. Something shifted in our minds, giving birth to symbolic language, myth, and a profound new toolbox for survival and meaning.

  • Art and Music: We began to create for reasons beyond pure survival. The first bone flutes and cave paintings show a mind that could not only see the world but also interpret it, find beauty in it, and share that experience with others.

  • Religion and Spirituality: Whether a discovery about reality or an invention to explain it, the emergence of spirituality was revolutionary "software." It answered unanswerable questions, provided comfort, and created a framework of shared myths and moral codes that allowed us to cooperate in massive numbers, bound together by trust in something bigger than ourselves.

The Slow Grind of Civilization

After we learned to think and dream together, we began to reshape the world. The Agricultural Revolution (~10,000 BCE) led to villages and cities. And in these new societies, we began experimenting with our greatest invention: our own governance. In Ancient Greece, we saw the birth of democracy - a radical idea that power should not be seized by the strongest, but shared among citizens.

For the next several thousand years, progress continued its steady, deliberate march, with each century adding new tools to our collective toolkit.

• 11th-12th Centuries: A reawakening began. The first universities in Europe (Bologna, Oxford) became engines of inquiry. The magnetic compass arrived, opening the oceans to more reliable navigation. Towering Gothic cathedrals showcased new leaps in engineering and art.

• 13th-14th Centuries: We began to codify our societies. The Magna Carta (1215) established the principle that even a king was not above the law. In China, the invention of gunpowder led to the first firearms, a grim turning point in the mechanization of conflict. The Black Death, a horrific catastrophe, also reset society, helping to end feudalism.

• 15th-16th Centuries: The world cracked open. The Gutenberg Printing Press (~1440) created an "internet of paper," accelerating the spread of ideas. The Age of Discovery connected the hemispheres. And the Copernican Revolution displaced Earth from the center of the universe, a humbling and crucial step toward scientific maturity.

• 17th-18th Centuries: A revolution of the mind took hold. The Scientific Revolution, led by figures like Newton, gave us a method for understanding reality. The Enlightenment championed reason and individual rights, leading directly to the birth of modern democracy in the American and French Revolutions. The First Industrial Revolution began, and the smallpox vaccine marked our first major victory against a plague.

• 19th Century: The pace quickened dramatically. We harnessed electricity, transforming night into day. Darwin's Theory of Evolution reshaped our understanding of ourselves. Germ Theory revolutionized medicine. And, crucially, our moral software got a major upgrade with the global movement for the abolition of slavery.

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Part 2: The Great Acceleration

And then, the 20th century dawned, and the steady march became a frantic, exponential sprint. The last 100 years have seen more change than the previous 10,000.

It began with a cascade of power: the first flight, Einstein's theory of relativity, and the discovery of penicillin. But it was the middle of the century that brought our journey to its most critical pivot point.

In 1945, the Manhattan Project yielded the atomic bomb. This was a new kind of innovation. For the first time, we had created a direct, controllable means for our own annihilation. The quiet quest for knowledge had produced a roar loud enough to end all conversations.

Just three years later, in 1948, the world responded with another kind of innovation: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This groundbreaking document, for the first time on a global scale, declared that all humans are born free and equal. Crucially, it unequivocally condemned practices like slavery and servitude - which had been fixtures of human civilization for millennia - formally ending a brutal chapter of our history. This juxtaposition is the central story of our time: our capacity for self-destruction grew to be infinite, and in response, we reached for a new, global definition of our shared dignity.

The second half of the century saw the birth of a new substrate for civilization: the digital world.

• The transistor (1947) was the humble, solid-state spark that started it all. It was the neuron of the coming global brain.

• ARPANET (1969) became the nervous system, connecting those neurons together.

• The Personal Computer (1980s) and the World Wide Web (1990s) distributed this new power to individuals, triggering a Cambrian explosion of information and connectivity.

Alongside this, our moral evolution continued with the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism, showing that our societal software was also capable of rapid upgrades.

Now, in 2025, we stand at the dawn of the next great leap. Artificial Intelligence, a field that has been developing since the 1950s, is finally having its breakout moment. AI isn't just another tool; it's a new kind of mind, an amplifier and accelerator for every other technology we have. It is the force that is tipping us out of the Great Acceleration and into something else entirely.

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Part 3: The Coming Transformation

If the last century took us from horse-drawn carts to AI-piloted drones, where does the same exponential curve take us next? We are moving from merely using technology to the verge of becoming it. The next frontier for our evolution isn't in the savanna or the workshop; it's within our own cells and our own minds.

The Great Filter: Humanity's Final Exam

Before we speculate about dazzling futures, we must confront the most terrifying possibility: that there is no "next step." The universe is vast and ancient, yet we see no evidence of other intelligent, star-faring civilizations. One chilling explanation for this is "The Great Filter" - the idea that at some point, developing civilizations invariably encounter a technological or societal challenge so great that it leads to their own extinction.

For humanity, that filter is no longer a distant threat; it is our present reality. While the dangers will likely reach their most volatile and unpredictable peak within the next 50 years, they represent a new, permanent shadow that will follow our species for as many centuries as we survive. They are the final exam, and it is a continuous one. These risks include:

• Nuclear Annihilation: The original sword over our heads remains. A global conflict, a miscalculation, or a moment of madness is all that separates our complex civilization from a radioactive wasteland.

• Biologically Engineered Pandemics: We have cracked the code of life, meaning a sufficiently advanced actor could theoretically design a pathogen with maximum contagiousness and lethality, creating a silent, replicating threat that could outpace any response.

• Unleashed Artificial Intelligence: The risk is not a Hollywood-style "robot uprising," but something more subtle: creating an AGI whose goals are simply misaligned with our own. We risk not being wiped out in hatred, but as a footnote in a calculation we ourselves initiated.

It's a heavy thought, and it's meant to be. This isn't science fiction sensationalism; it is the central, sobering challenge of our time.

But humanity has never been a species to stare into the abyss and give up. The sheer scale of these risks is precisely what is catalyzing the most radical innovations. So, with this great and terrible filter as our constant backdrop, let us shift our minds. Let's explore the possible paths that open up if we don't annihilate ourselves. What does humanity become if we pass the test? The following scenarios are not just flights of fancy; they are potential outcomes in the high-stakes race against our own extinction.

The Next 50 Years: The Age of Augmentation

With the existential risks firmly in mind, the next five decades will be a race to use our own technology to solve the problems technology has created.

Humans are saddled with a biology that evolved for survival on the African savanna, which creates profound limitations in the world we've built:

• We Degrade and Die: Our bodies are programmed for obsolescence. We are susceptible to cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and the slow decay of aging. Our craving for sugar and fat leads to obesity and diabetes.

• Our Minds are Limited: We forget things, we are prone to cognitive biases, and we can only process a fraction of the information we generate. Our brains, designed to remember which tree has the best fruit, are now overwhelmed with data and struggle to comprehend long-term, abstract threats like climate change. Our tribal instincts are weaponized into nationalism and online echo chambers.

• We are Physically Fragile: We are bound to a very specific set of environmental conditions (gravity, oxygen levels, temperature) and are incredibly vulnerable to radiation, vacuum, and physical trauma.

Our once-primitive brains are now in control of planet-altering technologies. Our emotional, short-sighted, and often irrational impulses hold the keys to the nuclear codes, the gene-editing labs, and the AI data centers. This isn't just a mismatch; it's a danger zone. Our finger is on a button our brain was never designed to comprehend, and we are building bigger buttons every day.

We are a species running stone-age software on space-age hardware.

Our biology is holding us back - and for the first time in four billion years of life on Earth, one species is realizing it doesn’t have to put up with that anymore. If biological evolution is too slow, why not use our technological evolution to speed it up? Why not upgrade the hardware of the human body to match the ambition of the human mind?

The line between human and machine will blur as Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), initially for restoring sight or movement, become elective upgrades. Personalized medicine will shift to "biological programming," with AI-designed nanobots maintaining our health from within. The physical and digital worlds will merge into a single, augmented reality we live in, not just look at through a screen.

This entire field of thought, this deliberate drive to use technology to guide our own evolution, has a name: transhumanism. It is the ultimate expression of our journey - the point where the tool-maker turns the tools upon himself. Could this be seen as a luxury or as a potential survival strategy? The question for you is whether this is the ultimate act of hubris or the necessary next step in our survival.

It's a terrifying ledger of possibilities, but it also perfectly frames the central challenge of our era. It forces us to ask the ultimate question: Are baseline humans, with our Stone Age brains full of cognitive biases and tribal instincts, even capable of safely steering this ship?

This is the desperate gamble that will define the 21st century. The same technologies that pose these threats: AI, biotechnology, global connectivity - are also the very tools we might use to transcend the flaws that make us so dangerous to ourselves. This is the core argument for transhumanism. Can we use our accelerating power to upgrade our own wisdom? Can we augment ourselves to become less impulsive, more empathetic, and more capable of long-term thinking before our primitive instincts push the self-destruct button?

This choice - to risk extinction by remaining as we are, or to risk our definition of humanity by becoming something more - is the project for the next 50 years. The answer will determine everything that follows.

The Next Century: Redefining "Human"

The transhumanist path could lead to a point where the very definition of our species comes into question. What makes a human? We may achieve a form of indefinite lifespan as medical technology extends life faster than we are aging. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will likely exist, and the most successful humans may be those who enter a deep symbiosis with it. We will have permanent, self-sustaining bases on the Moon and Mars, the first true off-world citizens.

The Next Two Centuries: Masters of Matter and Mind

The concept of digital consciousness, or "mind uploading," may offer a path away from biological fragility. This, combined with advanced genetic engineering, will lead to a post-human speciation event. Humanity could branch into different forms - some purely biological, some cybernetic, some entirely digital.

The Next Three Centuries: Engineering Reality

With the energy of entire stars at our command via fusion power, we could become a multi-planetary species. Our descendants may learn to manipulate the fabric of spacetime for faster-than-light communication or travel. The very definition of "life" will be rewritten as we design entirely new synthetic organisms from scratch.

This is the trajectory we are on. From the first shared myths around a fire to potentially engineering new universes. The power our ancestors sought to master the natural world is now turning inward. Our Stone Age minds are wielding god-like powers. The upgrade to transhumanism may not be a luxury, but a necessity - a final, desperate attempt to install wisdom that can handle the awesome and terrifying power we've unleashed. We are standing on a knife's edge between becoming something more... or becoming nothing at all.

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A Fantastical Epilogue: What if We’re Leveling Up (or Down)?

So, where does this runaway train of evolution ultimately lead? After pondering the immense stakes, it’s fun to let our minds wander into pure speculation.

All this talk of cybernetic upgrades, genetic rewrites, and post-human speciation reminds me, oddly enough, of the vibrant, chaotic world of a video game like League of Legends. It sounds crazy, but peel back the fantasy, and you’ll find a surprisingly fitting metaphor for the very future we're exploring.

Think about it. The gleaming city of Piltover is the ultimate vision of clean, elegant transhumanism, where people replace limbs with powerful Hextech prosthetics. Its underbelly, Zaun, is the darker side of bio-augmentation, full of gritty, desperate chem-tech modifications. Up on Mount Targon, mortals ascend to become god-like beings, a perfect parallel to a biological or spiritual form of evolution.

It’s a world where humanity has fractured along ideological lines of enhancement. Sound familiar?

Perhaps, as we become transhuman, our technology will advance to the point where we can truly bend the laws of physics around us. As the old saying goes, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Maybe one day we’ll be able to manipulate matter at will or draw energy from unseen dimensions - things our ancestors would undoubtedly call magic. In that truly fantastical world, the choice wouldn't just be whether to upgrade your body with tech, but whether to become a cybernetic assassin, a celestial demigod, or a master of the elements. It’s a playful thought, but it highlights the sheer, world-altering gravity of the path we're already on.

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Thanks for reading my random musings.