What is Next in Human Evolution. (Spoilers)

By Vince Higgins · Mar 4, 2022 ·
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  1. My recent reading of Darwin's Origin of Species has me thinking about our evolution as a species. At quarter of the way through Darwin's work, I decided to re-read something I had read during my aborted attempt at graduate school. It was an excerpt from The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan titled The Escape Route: The Aquatic Theory of Human Origins. In it, she argues that that roughly five million years ago during a climate upheaval that turned much of Africa to desert, and drove our ancestors out of the trees, caused those living near the coast to adapt to that environment in ways that drove the species closer to our current form.

    I will not elaborate here on what this reading has me considering, only that it informs recently conceived work. I have now made it a quarter of the way through Origin of Species, and am considering what path our future evolution will take. Vonnegut had a satirical take on the subject in his novel Galapagos. In that book he had humans evolving over the next million years to return to the sea. Morgan postulated that our hairlessness, bipedalism, downward facing nostrils were adaptations to living part of the time in the sea's shallows. It helped us escape predators, and provided an abundant food source.

    The point in Galapagos was that our big brains, once an evolutionary advantage, had become a liability in that it was developed to a point that it allowed us to build a massive civilization at the expense of the environment. That environmental crisis would eventually spell the extinction of the human race, except for a small contingent stranded on the Galapagos Islands. They would go on to seed our future evolution of smaller brains so our skulls would be more streamlined so we could swim faster and catch more fish.

    This was all meant as satirical allegory for the trouble our big brains have gotten us into. My project is inspired by a similar sensibility. I have been considering how intelligence at the level we have developed came about. What are the evolutionary advantages? On my walk today I had an insight. I'll save that for the finished work. The focus of the work will be how our big brain could be an advantage in some ways to our surviving the environmental changes we are causing, and in some ways a disadvantage.

    The disadvantage should be obvious to thinking people. Our development of toolmaking, and language gave us the power to poison our environment to an extent far beyond what any other species has been able to do. The variability in intelligence across the human population insures that there will be disagreement among different individuals, and cultures, about how to address the crisis.

    Evolution requires natural selection over many thousands of generations. We may or may not evolve traits that are beneficial to survival in a rapidly changing environment. Our big brains have enabled us to adapt in that we are able to build structures that will protect us from the environment. This provides the ability of the population to continue growing at a geometric rate of increase. There will, inevitably, be a limit. When will we reach that limit? How will those limits manifest themselves?

    I believe we are in the early stages of one of those manifestations of collapse. This is in the growing disparity of wealth. There have been cycles throughout recorded history of great accumulation of wealth, followed by social upheaval, as occured recently in the French, Russian, and Mexican revolutions. The recent "Arab Spring" is related.

    Those are my thoughts. I have more, but don't want to give those spoilers now.
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