I mean not simply biological evolution into bigger muscles or other physical attributes, but into a species more adapted to this cosmos.
In case you missed the last couple of hundred thousand years, humans have steadily been turning that around and adapting their environment to themselves. I would argue that the essence of humanity is our desire and ability to transcend nature. We've done that with our own nature, by overriding our instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior, arguably having converted ourselves from the pack-social species that our inner caveman still occasionally reverts to, into a herd-social species of anonymous strangers living in harmony and cooperation with one another.
And we've also done it with external nature. What percentage of your time do most of you spend outdoors?
In that regard, some say humans will evolve into robots while others say humans will evolve into super beings. How do you see it?
As I have noted before, we have already "evolved" into a super-organism known as civilization. We are its cells and it has many or most of the attributes that define life. Particularly the new succinct definition: a local reversal of entropy.
After all, this is how the original single-cell lifeforms evolved into complex organisms: by joining up and becoming something larger than the sum of its parts.
Evolution never stops since mutations never stop. Yet when conditions (usually environmental) change dramatically mutations try to catch up, or adapt more rapidly.
That's a bit of anthropomorphism. Mutation is a force without direction and it proceeds at the same pace, subject to variations in cosmic radiation, etc. What happens is that when there's an upheaval in the environment, mutated individuals may suddenly be more suitable for survival in it than those with the original DNA, so they're the ones who reproduce more successfully.
This even happens with simple hybridization. Cross-pollination is ubiquitous among the angiosperms because of the random way pollen is distributed by wind, insects, hummingbirds, etc. Yet hybrid plants rarely survive to reproduce, because they are not as well adapted to the conditions of soil, weather, etc., as the ancestral species. But let man come along and screw up the environment, and all bets are off. Biologists know that the place to look for stands of hybrid plants is along roadways.
I'm not sure how you're defining "mysticism," but supernaturalism comes pretty close. Supernaturalists and scientists are not only able to work together, but in an enormous number of cases
they are the same person. Look at all the scientists who belong to churches and honestly believe in supernatural beings who capriciously perturb the operation of the natural universe. Yet when they go back to the lab they wouldn't think of violating the scientific method by accepting an extraordinary hypothesis without extraordinary evidence, especially an extraordinary hypothesis that gainsays the fundamental premise underlying all science.
This is cognitive dissonance, and it's rampant, especially in the USA: The ability to believe two things that are mutually exclusive.
. . . . biological evolution is a process that is unlikely to ever be halted . . . .
I'm not so sure about that. Evolution is not just the occurrence of mutations. It is also the survival of the mutated organisms because a change in the environment makes it more difficult for the unmutated organisms to survive.
That speaks to one of the aspects of nature that we are determined to transcend: survivability. We routinely expend great quantities of resources saving, nurturing and protecting people who could not possibly survive naturally because of illness, injury, or even genetic problems. Look at all the quadriplegics, the deaf and blind, the ones with Down Syndrome, and the other people who would have been left to die fifty thousand years ago--not because their communities were crueler (I'm sure their mothers loved them just as much then as they do now because love, thankfully, is not rational), but simply because there was no technology then to allow them to survive.
If our environment starts to change--whether by the caprice of nature or by our own hand--to make it more difficult for "normal" children to grow to adulthood, you can bet that the entire GDP of this planet will be diverted into inventing the medicines, shelters, appliances, software, and other technologies needed to overcome the new "universal handicap." Hell, if we do that for "the crips and retards," do you doubt that we would do it for
everybody? Have you ever worked in a hospital and seen our species at its most noble, rallying around a premature baby?
We can't stop
mutation, but we will do our best to stop the other component of the vector that turns mutation into
evolution: We won't let the people with the unmutated DNA die off.
Some may assert that there will be "social" evolution as well, but there I would just say there will be social "changes."
And I call that the evolution of the organism named "civilization."
Social change, imo, should not count as "evolutionary" because society changes in a manner that does not seem to be especially adaptive.
Absolutely correct. Civilization does not evolve to adapt to nature. Civilization evolves to increase its ability to transcend nature, to make nature adapt to it. Every Paradigm Shift has been a step in that transcendence.
The Agricultural Revolution, the precursor to civilization, freed us from the "nature" of the famine cycle by creating the first food surplus that ever existed. The technology of civilization itself freed us from the humdrum of village life by making division of labor and economies of scale possible, allowing people to become professional teachers and artists and permitting the production of goods and services that were not essential to survival. Metallurgy finally freed us from the Stone Age. Writing freed us from the knowledge attrition of oral communication. Industry freed us from the 98% inevitability of "careers" in food production and distribution. Electronics... well it gave us SciForums.
With each step we overcome a little more of nature and live in a universe a little more of our own design. Here you and I are at this moment, living in a "virtual universe" that has almost nothing at all of nature in it.
