March 19 - Gasp, a Missed Day

Every so often it is important to update your opinions. Yesterday, I began to write a post about how Human evolution was very near to non-existent when I realized how wrong I was. I developed that opinion a long time ago when I realized that humans had pretty much cut out one of the most important components of evolution, natural selection. Human technology has ensured than most of us live to pass on our genes.

As I was writing that article I realized that that opinion was formed years ago and since then I've learned a lot more about the processes of evolution. So when I got all fired up to write after a reading an article where scientists expressed their "discovery" that human brains were evolving very slowly, I set off down the wrong path. Quite recently some scientist or other announced how we were actively in the process of bifurcating the human family tree into beautiful people and troglodytes. This is occurring through preferential selection. That is to say, beautiful people seek other beautiful people to be their mates and the rest are, well, the rest. This is similar to what happens when populations become split by geography and what was one becomes two over time.

That was just for completeness. The real story, here, is that there were two complete and contradictory opinions sitting in my little brain and only through happenstance did I discover that on my own. In other situations, I'd always have to have someone else point out how wrong I was. So the question I have now, is, how many more of these examples of cognitive dissonance lie undiscovered. It would be so nice to be able to press a button and automatically have all your opinions updated to reflect the best knowledge you have or, at least, flag your opinions for review.

I set about re-writing the post, but I ran out of time and the original premise turned out to be not so interesting after I figured out it was wrong. So I missed a day.