Jack loves Jill (with her bionic and cognitive enhancements)

Darwin's Theory of Evolution is a mechanism to understand a forward-causation physical process which seems to mimick backward-causation or teleology such that a progression appears designed and "intelligent". That's where the religious proponents of "Intelligent Design" get it fundamentally wrong. Rather than rely on a notion that a preternatural being is shaping this intelligent course of design and improvement, we have a simple process which can explain something which moving forward in time, looks to design itself in amazing and complex ways.

I'll take an example from "How the mind works" by Steven Pinker. He describes the concept of a replicator and how that is central to the Theory of Evolution. We have two states, A and B. B can't cause A if A comes first (e.g. seeing well can't cause an eye to have a clear lens). Assume that A causes B, and B causes A to make a copy of itself which we call AA. AA and A look identical, so much so that you could be forgiven for thinking that B caused A, but it didn't, it just caused AA (a copy of A). Now suppose there are three animals, two with a cloudy lens and one with a clear lens. Having a clear lens (A) causes the eye in that animal to see well (B). Seeing well causes this animal to reproduce by finding mates and avoiding predators. The offspring (AA) have clear lenses and can see well too. This all appears to an observer that the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (which is backwards causation), but that's actually not what's really happening. The offspring simply have eyes because their parents had good eyes (which is good, forward causation). Futhermore, if this process continues through many generations then you may end up with offspring with incredibly well designed vision. There isn't a supernatural designer here, just a process which explains the progression to a complex, "designed" end state.

There seems to be a sentiment that human civilisation is progressing and becoming more sophisticated at an ever increasing rate. While this may afford cozy, fuzzy feelings of security I would argue that this is not actually the case. By-products of our intelligence are increasing rapidly in sophistication. Human behaviour isn't. Our nature isn't changing. The industrial revolution or the information age has changed the context in which we live, but hasn't changed us. Conceptually, on a very basic level we are progressing very slowly, whilst the pace of improvement in our creations is outflanking us. If you were to put a timeline of human technological advancement and a timeline showing human evolution next to each other and try to determine which has grown at a more outstanding pace I think you'd agree that the the technological advancement timeline would win. We can fly, we can kick-start nuclear fission, we can bundle information into an abstract binary language and shoot it around the planet in milliseconds. But we still follow popular fashions, we detox, we work out in gyms, we still dance to tribal music to attract the opposite sex (albeit in darkened bars) and we still follow advertising campaigns which target our needs to be physically attractive. It's all so primitive, and it should be.

Attraction between humans uses the most primitive communication methods available to us to express itself. Sight, a physical appearance. A dominate, powerful male image. A nurturing female appearance. Body language, another pervasive form of physical communication. Smell, an attractive fragrance or scent conjouring sexual interest, or expressing sexual compatibility. Sound, the timbral quality of a voice or laugh. We place so much emphasis on these forms of communication. Throughout history the human brain has spent more than 90% of it's existence fine tuning methods to impress others using such devices. These are some of the most basic elements of human communication, elements we probably relied on before speech and language developed. We marvel and wonder at how clever and intelligent some of our closest primate cousins are, yet don't find it remarkable how primitive and base our natural behaviour is.

Technological advancement is outstripping human advancement. It's easier to design a smaller transistor than it is to design a different reaction to rejection. What happens when technological advancement proceeds to the point where we're left behind? The answer is a science fiction fantasy, which will become a reality sooner than we think. The Augmented Human. That has to be the most effective way for us to piggy-back onto the pace of our technological evolution.