From the website:
QUOTE
New research from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) shows that the Internet and technology is already changing the development of the human mind. Gary Small, the director of the Memory & Aging Research Center at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior and the Center on Aging at UCLA (phew...), has found that activities such as
text messaging and
Internet searching improves a person's ability to filter information, perform complex reasoning, and make quick decisions.
Small warns, however, that these evolutionary advancements are coming at the expense of face-to-face social skills and he warns of the danger of
Internet addiction. "The brain is very specialized in its circuitry, and if you repeat mental tasks over and over, it will strengthen certain neural circuits and ignore others," he says. He also told Reuters in an interview that those who are able to combine both the new technologically developed skills and traditional social abilities will be the most successful in years to come.
There is a REAL problem in saying this is an 'evolutionary' advancement. It is evolutionary if parent passes it on genetically to offspring (Darwinian evolution). Otherwise it is a skill which could be, and would have to be, taught from one generation to the next. The predilection to spend time on the internet -may- be something that can be passed on to the next generation, but that is still pretty iffy. This article seems to suggest that evolution works in the mode of Lamarck, whose theories were shot to hell decades ago and kept alive only in the Soviet Union till about the 70's, to prop up their ideology. Basically he said that giraffes have long necks because proto giraffes stretched for high food and stayed that way, passing it on to their offspring.
Now, if something killed off everyone who didn't use the internet, and kept killing off the sluggards, then whatever natural talent leads one to use computers -would- become enhanced over time. We are not there yet. (The giraffe analogue here is that short necked giraffes found less food, and starved more often. Longer necked giraffes had more babies because they lived longer, and so longer-neckedness became more and more prevalent.)
One might argue, if he were willing to take a risk with his career, that societies evolve in a more Lamarckian than Darwinian fashion, but that would take some 'splainin'.
My guess is, two generations after living totally isolated in the Amazon, and how many people there could operate a computer that fell from the sky, much less program one?
Peter