Microsoft Word Kurzweil, Ray The Singularity Is Near doc

Hominidae
). The human lineage is thought to have diverged from its great ape relatives five to seven 
million years ago. The human genus 
Homo
within the 
Hominidae
includes extinct species such as 
H. erectus
as 
well as modern man (
H. sapiens
). 
In chimpanzee hands, the fingers are much longer and less straight than in humans, and the thumb is 
shorter, weaker, and not as mobile. Chimps can flail with a stick but tend to lose their grip. They cannot pinch 
hard because their thumbs do not overlap their index fingers. In the modern human, the thumb is longer, and 
the fingers rotate toward a central axis, so you can touch all the tips of your fingers to the tip of your thumb, a 
quality that is called full opposability. These and other changes gave humans two new grips: the precision and 
power grips. Even prehominoid hominids such as the 
Australopithecine
from Ethiopia called Lucy, who is 
thought to have lived around three million years ago, could throw rocks with speed and accuracy. Since then, 
scientists claim, continual improvements in the hand's capacity to throw and club, along with associated 
changes in other parts of the body, have resulted in distinct advantages over other animals of similar size and 
weight. See Richard Young, "Evolution of the Human Hand: The Role of Throwing and Clubbing," 
Journal of 
Anatomy
202 (2003): 165–74; Frank Wilson, 
The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human 
Culture
(New York: Pantheon, 1998). 
9.
The Santa Fe Institute has played a pioneering role in developing concepts and technology related to 
complexity and emergent systems. One of the principal developers of paradigms associated with chaos and 
complexity is Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman's 
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-

---

Organization and Complexity
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) looks "at the forces for order that lie at 
the edge of chaos." 
In 
his 
book 
Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1988), John Tyler Bonner asks the questions "How is it that an egg turns into an elaborate adult? How is it that 
a bacterium, given many millions of years, could have evolved into an elephant?" 
John Holland is another leading thinker from the Santa Fe Institute in the emerging field of complexity. 
His book 
Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1996) 
includes a series of lectures that he presented at the Santa Fe Institute in 1994. See also John H. Holland, 
Emergence: From Chaos to Order
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1998) and Mitchell Waldrop, 
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 
10.
The second law of thermodynamics explains why there is no such thing as a perfect engine that uses all the 
heat (energy) produced by burning fuel to do work: some heat will inevitably be lost to the environment. This 
same principle of nature holds that heat will flow from a hot pan to cold air rather than in reverse. It also posits 
that closed ("isolated") systems will spontaneously become more disordered over time—that is, they tend to 
move from order to disorder. Molecules in ice chips, for example, are limited in their possible arrangements. 
So a cup of ice chips has less entropy (disorder) than the cup of water the ice chips become when left at room 
temperature. There are many more possible molecular arrangements in the glass of water than in the ice; 
greater freedom of movement equals higher entropy. Another way to think of entropy is as multiplicity. The 
more ways that a state could be achieved, the higher the multiplicity. Thus, for example, a jumbled pile of 
bricks has a higher multiplicity (and higher entropy) than a neat stack. 
11.
Max More articulates the view that "advancing technologies are combining and cross-fertilizing to accelerate 
progress even faster." Max More, "Track 7 Tech Vectors to Take Advantage of Technological Acceleration,"