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Later, I will describe some major technical developments, where measurement is based on the speed and complexity of change since this created more food, accommodation, and machines that Homo Sapiens used to multiply in number and take some control over certain areas of their environment.
Such development is in some ways possible to measure, even if is difficult to balance these benefits with the parallel construction of more lethal weapons, both mechanical, nuclear and biological. In contrast, social development is very difficult to measure. While it is clear that our present stress-free society is far superior to earlier societies, where there were vast amounts of stress and associated wars and conflicts with numerous deaths, it is very difficult to rank other societal arrangements over the past 6,000 years where we have some written information. It was noted above that later Christian religions exalted the importance of freedom of the individual. This will be discussed later in the Chapter on role stability. However, I will already point out that as you read this history you should remember that there is no inherent positive value in the concept of freedom. While some of the religions, described in the previous chapter, proposed a god or gods that postulated what was “good”, there is no evidence that Homo Sapiens initially appeared with a developmental goal. It may be, of course, that Stichin is correct and some extraterrestrials have goals for Homo Sapiens, but the evolutionary theory described here has no divine rights. |