Submission + - Could Global Catastrophe Make Humans Smarter?
Hugh Pickens writes: "Robert Roy Britt writes that when the Toba supervolcano erupted with a force estimated to be 1,000 to 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens, Toba may have contributed — by necessity — to our supreme intelligence today. The timing of Toba's tempest fits with an interesting bottleneck known to exist in human evolution, as seen in DNA evidence when the human population became very small sometime between 90,000 and 60,000 years ago. Scientists have theorized that Toba triggered plunging global temperatures that caused ice sheets to grow for a thousand years and led to a mass die-off of plants and animals. Perhaps only a few thousand early humans survived and that's why all human DNA today is so remarkably similar — because we all come from the same few folks who survived Toba. "What's really interesting to ponder is the idea that the next great catastrophe won't just challenge our existence, but it could make us smarter," writes Britt. "After a disaster like Toba, early humans would have been forced to break generations-long habits and get creative to find food." Jamais Cascio says that humans can do the same thing now that the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenges of pandemics, global warming, food shortages, and no more fossil fuels. "But this time we don't have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive," says Cascio. "We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence.""
