MAN 57 



the accelerated rate at which he has completed the final 

 stages of his evolution may lead to a conscious control of 

 his destiny. 



Man is far out in front of other organisms in the con- 

 scious enjoyment of understanding, and yet he is very much 

 a "Johnny come lately." In the whole stretch of 3,000,000- 

 000 years man, as Homo sapieiis, has been here less than one 

 million years. Even his earliest separation from the line of 

 ancestral apes is comparatively recent, probably not more 

 than 30,000,000 years ago. As visualized in Chapter 1 by 

 the condensed perspective representing all organic time in 

 one calendar year, man's ancestral branching off from the 

 ape ancestor did not occur until near the last week of the 

 year. He became fully human only four hours before mid- 

 night on the last day of the year. He is the incredible prod- 

 uct of an enormously accelerated evolution— so much and 

 so thoroughly accelerated that man's physical evolution is 

 very close to being complete. 



Man, a bipedal-bifocal ape, has completely freed his 

 hands, and therein lies the beginning of his success. Freed 

 from locomotor restraints, these marvelously dexterous or- 

 gans, coming under the guidance of a concurrently devel- 

 oping brain, language, and tradition, have become so thor- 

 oughly adaptive that man now has no need whatsoever of 

 any other kind of organic evolution. If he desires or needs 

 to adapt to new situations, he need only build a machine. 

 He travels in and upon the waters, he flies through the air, 

 he burrows underground, without waiting for the extremely 

 slow genetic evolution of fins and gills or wings or digging 

 claws. He risks nothing in the way of specialization. He re- 

 mains unencumbered and generalized in his structure and 

 habits, by far the freest organism on earth. It has been his 

 personal achievement to add enormously to his seeing and 

 hearing and hence to his knowing. It is man's knowledge of 

 reality that is now evolving, not the blind adaptive fum- 

 blings of genetic evolution. 



