More than human

In the olden days, people use to think that the Earth was at the center of the Universe. They thought that their particular city or country was at the center of the world. All of their maps were drawn this way, but this isn't just a matter of convenience - it was an outlook, a philosophy. People are by nature self-centered and narcissistic beings.

Today, some people believe that human beings are the end-product, the apex of billions of years of evolution.  Again, it's not a matter of convenience, but an actual perception of biological history. The cartoon above (parody of the iconic illustration by Rudolph Zallinger) shows a progression from ape to modern man. It presents evolution as an inevitable ascension toward the top: us. This view is false. Though we can trace our own lineage back to proto-apes, and though there are no surviving semi-human species, evolution is not directed, and it does not have an end-goal. We are merely an extremely successful species among millions of others.

There's no reason to believe that the homo sapiens is the final step. The optimist tells me that we are not a dead end species either. No, there will be a next step; we will become more than human. Once we embrace that idea, only one question remains:

How long?