IS MANKIND EVOLVING?
by
ROBERT J. LEWIS
___________________________________
The
world is divine because the world is inconsequential.
That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential,
is capable of grasping it.
Albert Camus
Science
gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
The
question that isn’t being asked is what’s happening
– if anything of significance -- on the natural selection
front? Who isn’t breeding, and is the natural selection
process streamlining the human gene pool so the species is
better fit to face its most critical challenges?
A
quick glance around the world reveals two groups in particular
are dying off: infants and children that can’t feed
themselves, and young soldiers fighting in wars. However,
this form of selective gene-death has had virtually no qualitative
impact on the gene pool, since the hard wiring that accounts
for human behaviour remains unchanged. Despite our fondest
hopes in desperate times, there is no indication that a new
and improved version of Homo sapiens is coming to the fore
to more effectively manage himself, and by extension, his
natural and man-made environments.
If
we agree that we would rather our best and not second best
pilot our planes, perform our medical surgeries, we self-evidently
prefer that either natural selection or selective forms of
human governance provide for the fittest of Homo sapiens to
lead the species. We want our most capable to be able to make
those crucial decisions that bear directly on the well-being
of the planet and its inhabitants. In short, we want to be
led by men of wisdom, or by whom the Greeks designated as
the philosopher kings.
But
there is considerable evidence (and accusation) that the world’s
elected and self-appointed leaders harbour, pace Freud, a
not so secret species death wish. Conservatives and liberals,
secularists and theists, capitalists and environmentalists
alike, with the backing of scientific reports and leading
social indicators, routinely charge the other of preparing
the ground for the ‘Apocalypse Soon’ obscenario
from which there will be no exit or redemption. What is constant
in this ice-cap melting pessimism is that the dire warnings
are coming from every corner of the earth, and the din, like
white noise, isn’t being heard, forcing the conclusion
that man’s much touted faculties of reason upon which
he has set huge store are in fact bit players of no consequence
in a game which can’t be won because ‘reason’
can’t break into the lineup.
An
idea that is incapable of inciting men to action lies somewhere
(or nowhere) between being and nothingness. I can sing the
praises and cite a litany of reasons why it is desirable for
men to be charitable, but if men don’t give, charity
doesn’t exist, other than as a weightless, spineless
abstract concept.
What
isn’t weightless or spineless is the institution of
the corporation. As a multi-tentacled entity that has wrapped
itself worrisomely tight around the good earth, the corporation
was conceived so men could do what they wanted instead of
what they should. Camus, in The Rebel, unblinkingly
observes: “The entire history of mankind is nothing
but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal
prestige and absolute power,” where the latter discovers
the corporation is the most effective means to its ends. Next
to the powers wielded by the corporation, the great conquerors
from the past (Alexander, Attila, Genghis Kahn, Charlemagne)
are feather weights.
From
natural resources to financial markets to the armies of the
night, humans don’t want to share power, they want to
amass and control it. The time-honoured separation of power
principles first proposed in the 18th century (Montesquieu)
is a concept that is outrageously foreign to human nature.
The
corporation, in its formative years, understood that in order
to attain real power it would have to wrest money away from
government, which it did by creating a taxable third party
(a non-human entity), a ruse which left the treasury with
less money and the corporation with more. During the past
century, the corporation has gradually gained control of the
world’s financial institutions and natural resources
while divided governments, in thrall to separation of power
clauses, countervail with artful doublespeak before submitting
to the will and directives of the Halliburtons and their lobbies.
That the corporation, in its present guise, is in danger of
poisoning the well from which it drinks speaks to both government
impotence and human nature relentlessly asserting its will.
It’s
not government but corporations that determine who gets what,
when a country goes to war, and what countries they will help
and hurt. The US tax code, a mere 70,000
pages long, largely writ by the corporation,
is the nation's equivalent of the constitution. Since the
goal of the corporation is profit, and since you can add an
indefinite number of zeros to a dollar figure, the corporation
can never be satisfied. In pathological pursuit of profit,
it has turned much of the earth into a wasteland and Homo
sapiens into endangered species.
In
light of the dark side of human nature whose authority goes
unchallenged, and a benighted planet we refuse to see in the
light of day, it beggars belief that the best minds of our
generation are not asking if the methods and operations of
natural selection are allowing for the kind of correction
that is necessary for the species to save itself from itself?
Natural
selection can be said to be doing its job well when a species
is being led by its most fit. However, when conditions on
the ground suddenly change, the selection process requires
considerable evolutionary time to catch up with these new
changes, and it doesn’t care what life forms emerge
to face the challenges of the new environment.
In
the African savannah, the lay of the land favours the thin-legged
Uganda kob because its speed allows it to outrun its natural
enemies. But if an unforseen influx of predators were to force
the kob into rocky terrain where being able to climb is the
difference between life and death, over time, not just the
fastest but those kobs capable of climbing would enjoy a selective
advantage and the alpha status which insures reproductive
entitlement.
If
we grant that Homo sapiens is in the midst of a similar life
threatening crisis, will natural selection arrange for a more
fit (rational) species to better handle with care its one
and only habitat?
Beginning
with the Bronze and Iron Ages, but especially since the Industrial
Revolution, the species has shown itself to be increasingly
incapable of making wise decisions as it concerns the health
of its habitat. The air we breathe is bad-going-on-worse while
our oceans are turning into acid. And when you factor in the
continuing proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons and
the volatility of human nature, it could very well be that
nothing less than a new configuration of man is required to
lead Homo sapiens through this most difficult period in his
evolution.
According
to our apocalypseticians, there are two huge negative events
on the near horizon which potentially threaten the existence
of the entire species: a far-reaching, all destructive nuclear
holocaust; or the earth becomes uninhabitable due to extreme
environmental poisoning. Either one of these catastrophic
events has the potential to lay the genetic groundwork for
the emergence of a new and improved version of man.
Let
us hypothesize a nuclear holocaust and 10,000 survivors who
are exceptionally constituted to withstand otherwise toxic
levels of radiation. There is no reason not to expect that
during the next 5,000 years these survivors will eventually
produce the kind of world that we recognize today since they
will be genetically the same in every respect but one. And
once again man will find himself facing the same challenges
of providing for seven billion, and having to manage his unruly
nature and weapon systems capable of destroying the planet.
You can be sure the corporation will be calling (and firing)
the shots on the way to the bank while once again “things
fall apart . . . (and) mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
So what’s the point if it’s going to be more of
the same, if, after near-extinction, man’s nature remains
essentially unchanged? Optimistically, if all that is required
to save the planet is that man be either 15% more rational
or empathetic, what accidents or interventions must take place
for this higher being to assume his historical mission?
The
disconsolate fact of the matter is that there is no guarantee
that natural selection (in short term) will provide for a
more fit version of Homo sapiens -- at least without a huge
element of luck. If only 500 were to survive a nuclear holocaust
and the few who are capable of breeding just happen to be
constitutionally more rational and empathetic, it is in deed
possible that a much improved version of the species will
take command.
Presently
on earth, there surely exists these higher types, but they
are not emotionally equipped to wrestle power from the powerful;
and looking forward it is almost impossible to imagine an
event, either natural or man-made, that would allow for their
ascension.
THE
BELL TOLLS FOR THEE
Unreasonable
men are slowly doing away with themselves everywhere on the
planet because human intelligence, at the adolescent stage
of its development, is simply not capable of overruling choices
that are indisputably harmful. From smoking, to the abuse
of drugs and alcohol, to making critically unwise decisions
concerning diet and exercise, there is no behavioural evidence
that man regards his one and only life as sacred. The individual
may, in theory, perfectly understand that in his choices he
is betraying -- at the highest level -- the gift of life,
but he lacks the mental muscle, the will, to outthink his
self-destructive tendencies.
On
a much larger and consequential scale, the corporation --
proxy for man’s worst instincts -- is proactively abetting
those destructive tendencies. That the corporation is a runaway
train that will not survive the next major turn in the track
since it owns and controls both the train and the track threatens
to corroborate Freud’s death-wish theory and expose
man’s unholy unfitness for his times.
Perhaps
in some not so distant future, biogeneticists will be able
to reconfigure the brain in order to diminish the role human
nature plays in the affairs of man, but that would require,
en masse, the world’s elites voluntarily ceding
power to their lab-tweaked betters, which of course is a non-starter.
In
the meantime, natural selection is biding its time, which
it has in abundance, knowing full well that a more intelligent
and fit species will one day take over the reigns and finally
do honour to the planet and the life it sustains.
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