Macroevolution

[orogenicman]

For the record, I took and passed the Coursera class on Genetics and Natural Selection. There is no question in my mind that evolution occurs, sometimes quickly as with the dogs in your video, but other times quite slowly.

But I have a question about all this that has been bothering me. How is it possible that with all the species and billions of years of evolution, only one developed the ability to think, and create technology?

It's all happening so fast, just two centuries ago people lived off the land, then electricity, autos, atomic bomb, planes, televisions, computers,the Internet, man on the moon, cell phones, drones, plastics, fracking, now coming shortly graphene, cars that drive themselves, artificial intelligence, water desalination, 3d printing, smart devices everywhere, space travel, sythetic humans, and microbes that eat away your diseased cells.....

It just seems to me, that if all this had come from natural selection and evolution, some other species would have acquired the ability to think before us.

What makes you believe that human beings are the only ones who can think and make tools?

While I find your point interesting, it still doesn't explain why no other species in 5 billion years figured out how to rapidly change technology like humans have in the last few hundred years.

Because no other species has yet evolved the capabilities of the human brain, because human technological development is exponential in its increase. And one must remember that much of the rapid increase to which you refer has occurred due to the desire to win wars. More importantly, the 19th century saw an enlightenment in science that has not been seen in previous centuries, due largely to hard-won political and personal freedoms. That enlightenment led to the scientific revolution.