Been having a sleepy day today, and it is a vast relief.

I have been having trouble with sleep lately. Even taking three Quetiapine was only buying me five hours of very unsatisfying shallow sleep.

And I could feel myself growing a little stupider as the sleep debt built up. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate, and my mental discipline was shot. Even just focusing enough to write a blog entry took an enormous effort. My brain just wanted to lie down for a while.

Luckily, the drought has ended. Most likely cause : taking my Wellbutrin in the morning, like I am supposed to do, as opposed to with supper, which is what I had been doing.

The most common side effect of Wellbutrin is insomnia, and so you take it when you first get up in the morning in order to make sure there is as much time between taking it and your going to sleep again as possible.

But I was being lazy and just taking it at the same time as my other daily meds, and that is suppertime. So I was probably causing my own insomnia.

Well, no more. It’s mornings for me from now on. If that means trudging through a few sleepy days in order to pay off that sleep debt, that is fine by me.

Now for evolution. I just watched a BBC documentary called Are We Still Evolving?, and it got me to thinking about evolution, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects.

Here’s an excerpt from the show. Can’t link to the full thing because the BBC wants to sell you the DVD.

That gives you the flavour of the thing, at least. Honestly, it was a little all over the map and dragged in things not entirely relevant to the question, so you are not missing that much.

But to answer the main question : yes, we are still evolving. There can be no doubt of that. Evolution is not a process which can be stopped. It can only be altered.

The next question is “How, exactly, are we evolving?”.

That is a far trickier question. Modern society is so complicated, with so many factors in play that may or may not lead to reproductive success, that it makes it impossible to plot even the vaguest trajectory for the evolution of the species, at least in those of us living in the modern world.

Certainly, the traditional pressures of Darwinian evolution are still in play. Chief amongst those would be classic good looks. A handsome man or a beautiful woman is still going to be more likely to get the mate of their choice than the baseline of the species.

And other things, like reproductive health, robust immune system, and some forms of intelligence no doubt lead to traditional “success” in the modern context, and also contribute to being able to raise children in a stable home with good nutrition and a full education.

But in the modern world, 99 percent of babies reach reproductive age, and the vast majority of those babies will grow up to have at least one child, so those pressures are not very strong, and probably do not matter much in the long run.

And we have accomplished this extraordinarily high level of reproductive success without needing to wait for evolution, because as human beings, we evolve via culture.

If a human being has to adapt to a change in environment, we do not have to wait for evolution’s slow cruel grind to select out the ones naturally better at survival in the new environment until, many generations hence, if we are lucky, our distant progeny is perfectly adapted to said new environment.

We just build tools. If it gets colder, we make warmer clothing. If the best food is high up on the tree, we knock it down with a pole. If the area floods, we learn to build our houses on stilts.

And because we have language and culture, we can teach other human beings to adapt as well. We are not limited to our individual successes. The innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of many.

Hence, the human species is the most widely spread single species in the world. There is no corner of this globe where humans do not live. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, humanity has found ways to adept to environments as diverse as Pacific islands, broad flat plains, jagged frosty mountains, and vast stretches of frozen tundra.

By any measure, we are the most successful species on Earth. And we have done it far faster than the glacial pace of evolution could ever produce.

So my real answer to the question of whether we are still evolving is “Yes, via culture”.

And on that scale, we have never been evolving faster than we are right now. With the advent of the Internet, the innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of the entire species. With economic globalization, the products which support the modern standard of living are available to more human beings than ever before in the history of humanity. Evolution via innovation goes faster every day.

And in an interesting spin on evolutionary pressures, most of the innovation is in response not to our environment but to ourselves. We are constantly shifting the playing field for ourselves, and that means innovation sparks innovation ad infinitum.

Some people worry that this will somehow lead to a rate of innovation and change that will be so blindingly fast that nobody will be able to keep up with it.

But that’s a ridiculous thought on the face of it. Innovation is not some abstract force that drags us hapless humans along without mercy.

It is a human force and it goes at human speeds. If an innovation is too early or too weird or otherwise before its time, it does not get adopted, and has to wait until the time is right.

It might start to change a little faster than us older people can keep up with, but it will never go faster than we can handle as a species.

So relax, and enjoy the bumpy but exciting trip into the future!