snow hope wrote:Are we reaching the endgame of human evolution?
I read this statement (or similar) tonight and realised I had never really thought about this before.
We have had fantastic evolution over the last couple of centuries. Just look at what we know today compared to two hundred, a hundred, even 50 years ago. Computers, Internet, mobile phones, text messages, email, cars, aeroplanes, television, astronomy, medicine, standard of living, etc. etc.
Now that we are entering contraction/decline, does theis mean the end for human evolution?
Is the inevitable die-off and technology loss going to take us backwards from the peak of human evolution?
Here is an answer I prepared earlier...
What is the relationship between human civilisation and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection?
One possible answer to that question is that Darwin's theory was the intellectual crowning glory of modern civilisation; that for the first time it allowed humans to understand the mechanism by which the entire terrestrial ecosystem, humans included, was created. It dispensed with any need to believe that God was required as the designer of that system by offering us a far more elegant explanation for its origin and made redundant any belief that the human tendency to "sin" is the result of the influence of the devil. There is a very good scientific explanation for why humans are generally greedy, selfish, dishonest and covetous of their neighbour's spouses: all of these behaviours increase reproductive fitness at the level of the individual. Infidelity and dishonesty pay great dividends provided you manage to get away with them. It is not so beneficial if you get caught. All successful human civilisations imposed harsh punishments on individuals who were found to have broken the basic commandments which held them together. Biological evolution was giving way to cultural evolution, and it was those cultures which most effectively prohibited the most socially-destructive of naturally-evolved human behaviours which survived and prospered. This process of cultural evolution has now led to a situation where, for the majority of humans alive today, biological evolution has been halted in its tracks. This, I submit, is the relationship between human civilisation and the processes of evolution: civilisation is our name for what happens when biological natural selection has been suspended by the cleverness of animals.
In The End of History and the Last Man (1992) Francis Fukuyama wrote that
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Fukuyama believed that not only has biological evolution been halted, but that cultural evolution is also approaching a final state, epitomised by the "beneficial hegemony" of US economic and political imperialism. His thesis generated a great deal of criticism, both from proponents of other political/economic systems who didn't agree that "western liberalism" is the best we can do, and from ecologists and anarchists who believe that liberal western civilisation is fundamentally unsustainable and unstable. Fukuyama eventually altered his position, but only to include the caveat that future scientific and technological progress might lead to a post-human or "transhuman" future where humans take control of their own evolution, with potentially catastrophic consequences for liberal democracy. I agree that some genetic technologies are a like a Pandora's box which might be better left closed, but I am skeptical as to whether civilisation as it is currently known in what we call "the developed world" is going to last long enough for this to become a serious problem. I suppose there is always the possibility that we'll use genetic engineering to create humans who have no desire to consume resources they don't really need to consume, and this might indeed cause problems in a world where the need for economic growth trumps both God and ecology.
Human civilisation is the state of human culture where all humans who are biologically capable of reproducing actually get a chance to reproduce. Where this does not apply - where humans live in a state of poverty so severe that being born comes with no guarantee of the chance to successfully rear offspring - we see a failure of civilisation. When ecological or economic catastrophists speak of "the collapse of civilisation" they refer not only to the demise of civilisation as we currently know it but to the return to a state where biological natural selection begins to operate once again on the majority of humans, not just those who currently comprise the bottom layer of the global pyramid of wealth.
The true ending of human ideological evolution is not, as Fukuyama would have us believe, linked to the ending of natural science in a completed "theory of everything." The suspension of natural selection which currently applies to the whole of the western world and much of the rest of humanity is in itself fundamentally unstable, because it is accompanied by the widespread destruction of the ecosystem upon which we depend. We may have come close to stopping the process of natural selection as it applies to humans, but we have vastly amplified it as far as most of the rest of the ecosystem is concerned. Any species which cannot adapt to the new order is threatened with annihilation. At some point in the future, and it looks like it will be sooner rather than later, the damage we have caused to the ecosystem and our reckless dependency on non-renewable natural resources will be our undoing. The true ending of ideological evolution is not a state where natural selection has been temporarily halted at the expense of the rest of the Earth's living systems, but a state where natural selection has been permanently halted by a human culture which has learned to live in sustainable harmony with the rest of that ecosystem. Only then could we be free from the threat of ecological catastrophe, the collapse of our civilisation and the grim return of biological natural selection.
Homo sapiens is an arrogant beast. "Wise man", it called itself. With the benefit of hindsight, "clever man" may have been a more appropriate name -
Homo callidus. When faced with challenges like disease or starvation we have always found some ingenious way to turn the forces of nature to our advantage. We have split the atom. We have walked on the moon. We have sequenced the human genome. But we have conspicuously failed to augment our cleverness with the wisdom required to acknowledge and act upon the single greatest threat that we face - the feedback effect from our own unbridled dominance of our environment. Conquering nature requires cleverness, not wisdom. Conquering our own nature would have been the wiser path and this we have found more trying.
Homo sapiens still has a chance of becoming the concluding phase of hominid evolution. If we succeed, it will be because our cultural and ideological evolution has progressed to the point where it becomes possible for the majority of humans to effectively overcome the behavioural "flaws" which were put there by the evolutionary process whereby our species was created. If we fail - if we respond inadequately to the threat - then civilisation will falter and natural selection will return to shape a new hominid, better adapted to survive in an ecosystem ruined by its ancestor, which it shall rename
Homo stultus - "foolish man" - the creature which was clever enough to dominate its environment like none before, clever enough to understand that its behaviour was destabilising the system which created and supports it - the creature which saw the catastrophe coming but lacked the wisdom and will required to prevent it. Perhaps that new hominid will call itself
Homo humilis - "humble man."
Geoff
