At present world affairs are being shaped by three major forces: industrialization, the reaction to industrialization and emerging post-industrial views, values, structures and technologies. Although stories about the rapid expansion of the consumer society and its battles with Islamic traditionalists have dominated the news for decades, environmental problems will increasingly shape national and global events.

This is because resource shortages and failing ecosystems will not only limit the ability of the global economy to expand, but cause it to contract. The result will be growing economic and social crises, which will in turn provoke more local, regional and international conflicts. As a consequence the industrial system will weaken while both pre- and post-industrial forces will strengthen.

Some politicians love to say that this is the information age. They believe that processing information in such large scale as we are capable of today is the ultimate in our achievement and, therefore, the information age is the golden age of our civilization. This is a very narrow view of the human potential.

What is information?
If you don’t have any information about the answers to a problem, then all answers are equally probable, a not-sodesirable situation. With information, the probability of particular answers grow, and your chance of the getting the appropriate answer improves. So information is certainly useful. But information does not make you happy. Sure it can be exciting to use the e-mail to communicate extensively around the world and gather a large amount of information in a short time. And that may help to keep our worrying mind at bay. It is also an occasionally effective medicine against boredom to go surfing on the internet for information that may come in handy later.

Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.

Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: