The wheels of Creation grind slowly,but they grind fine.

Innovation is perceived to be the exclusive prerogative of sentient beings.I wonder whether that actually holds true.Nature's pretty darn creative:Each person has an individual fingerprint,a personalised iris pattern.Each snowflake that falls is unique.In fact.the whole point of sexual reproduction was to introduce new variations into the gene pool.A new recipe in the primeval soup and lo!we have life.Evolution,in my opinion, is Nature's way of innovation,of introducing a few quirks here and there,which will eventually result in a whole new world.
Mother Nature's got pretty lazy over the past few millenia though.I mean can you think of a single really cool genus since good old Homo or even a funky species since Sapiens.I mean if we can think of the X-Men would it kill Her to bring Wolverine(Read Hugh Jackman with an adamintinum skeleton.Doesn't that give a new meaning to buns of steel?) to life.
But would we as humans even have come into being without the species before us,would we be what we are without our DNA?Everything in existence is built on what came before,and new paths are broken in a series of steps so small that we don't even realise that we've taken them till a great mind illuminates the way with a blaze of glory.

The inspiration for this post:A debate on an online forum regarding innovation in the current age.It was the opinion of some that there hasn't been much in the way of actual originality(over the past 25 years),we are but improving on past glory.They lament that there don't seem to be any Einsteins or Edisons in the world today...that we as a species seem to be stuck in a rut of mental decay.

This was my opinion :
One might say that the World Wide Web(1989 incidentally) and the Internet are path breaking discoveries,but would they be possible without the PC(which in turn is an improvement on Charles Babbage's machine).And would that even be possible without electricity which would therefore qualify as an even more revolutionary concept.We can trace history back even further to the wheel or the discovery of fire or a primate who decided to become biped.
My point being that a blazing fire of knowledge and discovery is all very fine,but life/history has a whole marches on in a series of sparks!So while an Einstein or a Watson and Crick may revolutionize the world,its the humble researcher who tweaks a few details and works on it daily who's the building block of the system for he/she actually brings it to the common man.
So we slog on with our genetics,pharmaceuticals and nanotechnology hoping to do our bit to make a difference and hold the fort till an Edison or a Faraday comes along to propel us to an even brighter future.

Liff As I Know It!