I think I need to emphasise that I'm speaking of evolution in two very different senses of the word, both biological evolution and the evolution of human kind as a culture. The former admittedly takes place over a tremendously large time span, but the latter seems to be transpiring very quickly at an ever increasing rate.
One of the often overlooked ways in which technology as adaptation is particularly relevant is because it brings about the concept of human intention. A giraffe cannot say "I am going to find a way to extend my neck to reach the top leaves of these trees" and subsequently create a piece of technology enabling it to do so. If it were to happen it would transpire over the course of hundreds to millions of years (i have no idea, really), but we as a species have the capacity to think in such an intentive way and follow through with our own innovation to make it a reality within the course of a generation. When you look at it from this sense we are circumventing biological evolution, perhaps not removing the influence of biological evolution, but certainly lessening it's influence, as I said in my previous post.
Maybe it's nothing that can be observed from a purely biological perspective, but we are certainly, I think, influencing our evolution through our own collective intention. At the dawn of our species, biological evolution determined our direction as a species almost exclusively, because our technologies were few and quite unrefined, but at this point, and maybe only this point in the grand scheme of the homo genus, we seem to be piloting our own course. This is a very interesting point in human history.
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