Is it generally accepted that there is a very strange discrepancy in the evolution of the human being?
Supposedly, at some point eons ago, man's ancestors suddenly started evolving at an abnormally rapid pace...... or so I've heard.
I was just wondering if most scientists have agreed on this issue.
*I just recently watched "2001: A Space Odyssey", so........*
There is some confusion among the ordinary public that what passes for an "abnormally rapid pace" in geologic time can legitimately be called "rapid" by any measure of the imagination. A thousand years is an excruciatingly long time. A million years is almost unfathomable. Hundreds of millions of years...is ineffable in human terms. Even the least of these spans is sufficiently long for a species to evolve significantly.
The reason that evolution sometimes occurs more quickly and sometimes more slowly is that, so long as a species is successful in its environment, natural selection will favor mutations that pretty much amount to "more of the same," and therefore will produce what might be perceived in hindsight as a period of evolutionary stagnation. However, if environmental circumstances become adverse to a species, only those mutations that restore prosperity will be selected, and this is where most of the interesting evolutionary "progress" occurs. Naturally, all of this occurs on a grayscale, as opposed to black and whites, meaning that much of what really happens is a subtle combination of the two with varying propensity for one or the other when the specifics are laid out.
To some degree, the periods of significant evolutionary diversification are shorter than the corresponding periods of stability, because they only tend to last until a new stability is attained. Much like the motion of the tectonic plates, with evolution there's always a gradual drift, but many of the most exciting developments occur in much shorter bursts of activity.
The rapid periods of biodiversification in history are not only accommodated by evolutionary theory, but actually predicted by it.
So, do "most scientists agree" that humanity evolved relatively quickly in geologic terms? Yes. But is this something to cause a scandal in the scientific community or poke a hole in the theory of evolution? No. In fact, it's just the opposite.
