Today I caught the last moments of a Terry Gross interview on NPR. In it, she was speaking with Jack Miles, general editor of The Norton Anthology Of World Religions and professor of English and religious studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the author of God: A Biography, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. What I heard was of great interest, but most interesting of all was a seeming throwaway line I might have missed had I not gone back to read an online transcript of the discussion and reflect on what had been said.
“I have no confidence that the world [awaiting] us — given global warming, given the threat to the human habitat — is a world of ever-increasing knowledge…,” says Miles. “We may be at a peak now from which we will decline. Who knows?”
I think I can honestly say it never occurred to me that human beings would stop evolving; in fact, I have often taken comfort in the belief that we could grow out of our smallnesses and stupidities to become the enlightened band of sisters and brothers we were meant to be. But one glance at the day’s headlines, and I have to wonder if we are, in fact, on a slow, steady slide downward.
ruminationville 
They say our brains have not increased in size in hundreds of thousands of years so we probably aren’t getting any smarter. We’ve been building upon the ideas of others before us because we don’t have to re-think them (thanks to the development of language and writing etc.) I think computers and silicon technology will be where our next wave of evolution will and is taking place. Who knows what we, with computer enhancement help will think of next? Let’s hope it’s something good!
Thanks so much for your terrific comment. After reading it, I immediately thought of Spike Jonze’s movie HER. Have you seen it?