A PERSPECTIVE ON EVOLUTION OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

This is the way I understand evolution by mutation.  DNA "stutters" a bit and the different ones may be better adapted to survive.  It is NOT about power but about fittingness in terms of the existing ecology.

First, one-celled beings able to move around in water rather than being pinned in one place.  (We call the pinned down ones "plants.")  They had to have a head for approaching food and a tail for backing away from danger.

Multiple-celled creatures who figured out meiosis.  (Sex!) Each generation got a new start.  BUT every repeat keeps the basic plan while adding new code that might change the way the old code works. Rarely, bits of code are gone.  

Worm things, with tube systems for blood and linked bits for sending electrochemical messages.  Sometimes multiple hearts or brains.

Fishes with notochords and then backbones, which are so deep in the coding that bilateralism and quadropods rule from then on.

Amphibians who can go on both land and in water.  The new development is internal lungs instead of gills.  One brain per creature, but increasingly complex.

Reptiles who live on land with a minimum of oxygen or need for calories because one of the things they discard is body temp control.

Mammals with fur for temp control, making babies inside the mother's body instead of laying eggs, which means nurturing, attachment, and elaboration of the brain. This is the beginning of culture.

"Eutheria is one of two mammalian clades with extant members that diverged in the Early Cretaceous or perhaps the Late Jurassic. Except for the North American Virginia opossum, which is a metatherian, all post-Miocene mammals indigenous to Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America north of Mexico are eutherians."

"The simians or Anthropoids are the monkeys, incl. apes, cladistically including: the New World monkeys or platyrrhines, and the Catarrhine clade consisting of the Cercopithecidae and apes. The simians are sister to the tarsiers, together forming the Haplorhines. The radiation occurred about 60 million years ago."  (Says whoever wrote the entry at Wiki.)

"A primate is a eutherian mammal constituting the taxonomic order Primates. Primates arose 85–55 million years ago from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests."

"The Hominidae (whose members are known as great apes or hominids, are a taxonomic family of primates that includes eight extant species in four genera: Pongo/orangutan; Gorilla; Pan, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo; and Homo, which includes modern humans and their extinct relatives (e.g., the Neanderthal), and ancestors, such as Homo erectus

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Several revisions in classifying the great apes have caused the use of the term "hominid" to vary over time. Its original meaning referred only to humans (Homo) and their closest extinct relatives. That restrictive meaning has now been largely assumed by the term "hominin", which comprises all members of the human clade after the split from the chimpanzees (Pan). The current, 21st-century meaning of "hominid" includes all the great apes including humans." 

We now think there may have been as many as 200 hominins, interweaving with each other, traveling over long distances, gradually accumulating knowledge through culture, which is passing information across generational lines, as in the "stone age," the "copper age," the "iron age" and so on.  We might say we are in the silicon age because of putting code on silicon wafers, but the forecast is that we will begin to write code on the genetic code.  We can now edit our own organic code as created by conception.

"All humans have the same genes arranged in the same order. And more than 99.9% of our DNA sequence is the same. But the few differences between us (all 1.4 million of them!) are enough to make each one of us unique. On average, a human gene will have 1-3 bases that differ from person to person." (U of Utah genetics)

The information in DNA is stored as a code made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). ... DNA bases pair up with each other, A with T and C with G, to form units called base pairs.  These are what make us adapt, change, develop by pushing each living being up against an environment that supplies different molecular materials, growing conditions, and internal specializations.  

At one time the thought was that the organic creature created through the egg code was separate from the ability to "think" with the brain, which specializes in neuron cells with the ability to form systems or circuits, that are capable of building knowledge taken both from the environment and from inside the body,  called "inskin/outskin."  This knowledge is in "concepts" which are pre-words but organized by sensory information into memories.  When spoken word code developed, this information became share-able between humans.  

When the written code based on spoken word code developed, human information could be passed from one human to another over long periods of time or carried from one place to another by a messenger.  When the Morse code was invented, it was possible to send the written code over wires for long distances.  Then came the telephone that could carry voice code just as far, and then television that could transmit through thin air both sound and sight, but not smell, taste, or temperature -- alas.

Math was capable of expressing complex and abstract code and manipulating it.  Computers greatly increased all these abilities having to do with code, but neglected the sensory life, which led to people overvaluing anything a computer could do, including operating from outer space, and devaluing the human sensory life which is full of information both inskin and outskin, so much that it became an ideal for a person to be like a computer, a reduction.

Meanwhile the operation of the human body has continued to evolve.  Empathy, the ability to respond to the "expressive frame" of face, heart and lungs, has  potentially expanded one person's understanding and creation to a whole community of shared ideas, both deliberate and arising from circumstances.  These communities interacting may be both destructive or constructive.  

Some feel that empathy and the art of self-management, which is largely dependent on the individual's interaction with the community in order to feel safe and think clearly, is the growing edge that will save us from whatever it is left from earlier developments that wants to kill, destroy, prevent change, and dominate.  Bits of those impulses go all the way back to the first "animals," the microbes who still try to eat us.