Vulnerabilities of Our Human Species in the Future Evolutionary Process

Vulnerabilities of Our Human Species in the Future Evolutionary Process

While it is a moot point, does God know the ending of the evolutionary process?  Is there an ending? Just as we cannot comprehend how something had to have come from nothing, we cannot predict the future, or possibly comprehend, whether this process—billions of year old, has any ending, let alone what kind of ending or future. Lincoln, a sort of wise human being, would have had little luck predicting what human life in our country would be like 150 years after his death.

We tend to think that humans (homo sapiens) will be the one advanced species to never become extinct. It is easier to envision God’s laws controlling evolution as the basis for the whole process, at least until we came along, and then we kind of feel we now control our own destiny. We run the world now, and determine the future of our species and many other species. There were other human-like species way back tens of thousands of years ago, but our homo sapiens variety eliminated them (like the neanderthals). 

Humans have advanced so much in ‘brain power’ that it is easier to surmise we now control our own destiny as a species. The last five hundred years seem to illustrate this. Of all the changes occurring in human life the last 500 years, most seem to have come from our own inventions, and social changes. In some sense we blindly ‘feel’ that we, as a species, have nothing to fear because we control our own destiny. Amidst that kind of feeling, God’s laws are not really relevant anymore to more and more people. We, as a species, are the deciders of our own future and supersede God’s laws. We have gained dominion over the process or so we arrogantly infer. It is probably mostly illusional. 

But this is, in essence, a self serving notion. First of all, all species are innately self serving. They adapt to their environment as best they can, and to the extent they can, and they survive varying lengths of time in the evolutionary process. On the other hand, roughly 97% of all known species that ever existed, became extinct. There are species today becoming extinct which we have never even identified as existing. Few species have evolved as rapidly and as effectively as our own species. Almost all of this reflects changes in ‘brain power’. We stand alone in terms of creativity, cleverness, comprehension of our environment, ability to reason, to remember (including using books, computers, etc.), and social complexity. What, common sense dictates, could possibly go wrong? After all, we are the smartest creatures on Earth.

Well, it is also possible that any species with so much brain power—still embedded with so much inherent violence, greed, and intolerance to diversity—might possibly self destruct if these inherent qualities cannot be curtailed or eliminated. It becomes necessary to view the big picture and not get caught up with the relatively irrelevant issues which consume our attention. 

At the present time humans pretty much ignore major long term issues and focus on immediate self serving greed, intolerance, and inability to comprehend when enough is enough of individual goals. While we as humans universally acknowledge the Golden Rule is an ethical principle, it often becomes inoperative when pitted against personal gains in various aspects of our lives. What are these long term issues which threaten the welfare of the human species? Some are listed below:

1. Human Overpopulation—only one country, China has made any progress here. The most economically prosperous countries are interestingly divided into the wealthy, who reproduce at a much lower rate than the least economically prosperous, which then generates a much more rapid growth of urban, suburban, and rural ghettoes. This means a greater and greatepercentage of young people are being raised under extreme stresses during their formative years— including inadequate health care, poor schools, poor teachers, scarcity of employment, and personal fear for their safety—all of which leave many with permanent physical and mental damages by the time they reach adulthood. Nevertheless, global control over human reproduction is not even a driving issue. Many actually believe God demands that wereproduce at will. A few still believe birth control is a sin. 

2. An exponential shift of national wealth to the already wealthy at the expense of the lower economic class and middle class is currently in vogue. To acquire even more wealth, the wealthy, seriously addicted to wealth as a means to achieve some contentment, must gain that increased wealth from the middle class, since the poor have nothing left to give. No society in history has ever been able to sustain this domestic accumulation of wealth by the richand sustain the cost of some sort of empire abroad. Domestic implosion is always the end result and this implosion occurs rapidly once the ‘dominoes’ start to fall. This is the lesson of history but hardly anyone fears history enough to change the situation.

3. Climate changes which became incompatible for many species has been another fact of evolution. The last ice age 70,000 years ago almost destroyed the human species. This is the first time climate change is being induced by the activities of one species, and that is the activities of our own species. It takes decades to reverse the situation, and thus our weakresponse is likely too little too late.

4. Our strong inherent tendency for intolerance to diversity, and use of violence to settle conflicts has generated human death rates that are growing exponentially every year. Weapons of mass destruction, coupled with individual acts of terrorism are now in a race which is likely to prove catastrophic to the lives of millions or billions. Biological warfare, chemical warfare, atomic warfare, the rising ability to cause implosion of major industries via hacking, including hacking the computers needed to launch weapons of mass destruction—are all on the table now. So is the total inability to reign in individual acts of terrorism. Those who feel they have nothing to lose now have the power and willingness to die, taking many others with them. Moderndrones and sophisticated electronic devices are likely to make the lives of public officials become more easy to assassinate. When no one will be able to run and hide, where will the carnage end? Talented, educated, quality people already often refuse to run for office because of the endless circus that goes on literally for years now in campaigning.

5. All forms of government are now failing at varied rates. If good governance is determined by the maximum number of citizens having the maximum contentment in their lives, then all forms of governments are now failing. This includes democracies since the issues are now so complex that most voters have no real personal basis to understand how best to vote.Lobbyists have well oiled propaganda programs to create massive voting based on feelings, not reason or facts. The already wealthy have the money to create the biggest and most effective manipulation of public opinion. In some places, like the United States, less then half the eligible voters often even vote. More and more leaders of more and more countries, regardless of form of government, are basically thugs of varied sorts, not educated ethical leaders focused on achieving the greatest amount of contentment for the greatest number of their citizens, or take responsibility for all the communities within their jurisdiction. They simply take care of their political/religious/economic base.

6. The real ethical advantage of all the invented machines, which can do work that otherwise humans had to do with long work hours, is to provide humans with shorter work weeks and more leisure time. Unfortunately, this advantage has been turned into a means for the rich to get richer, with more leisure time, while the poor, lucky enough to have a job, work long hours or two jobs at slave wages. This is unsustainable and not only is bad government, but atrocious ethics. 100 years ago workers often worked 60-70 hours per week, children worked long hours, as did many of the elderly. Once the typical work week reached 40 hours per week it simply got stuck there while wages for the lower economic class could not keep up with the cost of living. Lincoln was right, labor comes before capital. But not today, as 2-5% of American citizens own 90% of our wealth. Just 3 Americans own as much wealth as the bottom half of our citizens.

What humans have that other species do not have is a more complex and advanced culture. But buried in our genetic genome is a violent, greedy, intolerant nature which surfaces to varied degrees and creates havoc for other species and many of our own members. It is not at all clear that our species can shed these aspects of our nature in time to avoid severe consequences. With all the great things we have created with our brain power, we have also created weapons and knowledge enough to destroy our own species and other species. We are now living in the 6th evolutionary period of mass extinctions, only this time activities of our own species is the cause. 

At first in evolutionary history, our violent nature was needed to protect ourselves from larger stronger animals. Our cleverness enabled humans to drive most of these larger stronger animals into extinction. The few remaining large animals are pretty much restricted to animal preserves, but even there poachers have driven more and more to extinction.

Part of the problem is that humans are quite patriotic (if I can use the term in a broad sense) to their own families (with plenty of exceptions), their own race, their own religion, their own nation, their own community, and other special groups to which they may belong, but it is relatively rare they have any real sense of specie patriotism. Also, humans have an innate sense of ethics (the Golden Rule) but this is more a theoretical concept, used only when convenient for most humans. Violence as a means to an end has always been a human tradition throughout the existence of our species. Humans have always lived with a myriad of complex contradictions in their actions and thoughts. This sort of leaves history with a endless Tower of Babel along with it’s companion violence. 

Ever since humans ceased being hunter/gatherers and formed permanent communities, greed became a normal aspect of their life. More is better became widespread in all types of communities. These contradictions in human behaviors are present throughout all of human evolution. The Puritans may have escaped persecution by fleeing to America, but as soon as they set up their own community they were more than eager to persecute any perceived non believers amongst them. Humans have always invented Gods and created human written scriptures as soon as humans invented writing. The result, for the most part, no matter the religion, were killing fields where extreme acts of violence were committed on perceived heathens, a sort of no violence or cruelty is too much when the killing is being done in the name of God. Religions, in theory, exist to bring peace and prosperity to our species, but in reality religions have been mostly the avenue for more violence of a more vicious nature. Just another example of contradictions in human behavior. 

Part of the problem is that, by nature, humans do not easily appreciate diversity. We also can become addicted to all sorts of practices that bring us happiness. These addictions, however, become a trap. To acquire the same level of happiness requires a higher level of the addiction. This is then followed by a low which is lower than before and the vicious cycle becomes endless. Addictions and compulsive behaviors can become the major drives for one’s pursuit of happiness. Ironically, those who can discipline themselves to know when enough is enough are the ones who achieve the greatest degree of contentment in their lives.  Add to the mix here is this: for the Golden Rule to be an effective ethical principle there has to be a reward. If there is no Heaven, and there is no logical reason to think there is, then the reward is during our lifetime and this then would be an increased degree of contentment with our lives dependent on the degree of personal allegiance to the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule applies to all of humanity, not just immediate family, or ethnic groups, or religious affiliation, or certain cultures, or citizens of certain nations, or those of a certain social status, and so on. This, of course flies in the face of our prejudices, no matter their origin. Now add to the mix the innate genetic tendency of greed. The Golden Rule is not compatible with excessive greed. If the best governance is governance which maximizes the greatest contentment for the greatest number of citizens, then there has to be limitations on greed for those who cannot on their own accept when enough is enough for themselves. No form of government today is achieving good governance.

All the basic problems listed earlier are the consequence of our species failing to control our innate violence, intolerance, and individual greed. What is now different today from all the yesterdays is the potential for all three of these human vulnerabilities to actually cause all human societies to implode and create massive self induced human bloodshed.

We are basically in self denial—humans are not overpopulating the planet, climate change is a hoax created by the scientists who study the subject; protecting the environment is not a global problem; all these current means for massive destruction of lives and property (including weapons of mass destruction and terrorism) are not a danger, especially if we all arm ourselves and can legally create situations where we can stand our ground; human ghettoes across the globe grow bigger, more violent, more dangerous for their citizens, with the number of citizens feeling there is no light at the end of their tunnel—all of which are likely to lead to massive well coordinated (via cyberspace gadgets) uprisings in which the police and armed forces cannot be everywhere at once, just like the situations under which our various invasions of the past fifty years have already demonstrated. Many governments are now being toppled by such domestic implosions with various armed groups of thugs taking turns terrorizing local communities. No advanced civilization can survive under these circumstances. On top of that, while the lucky ones can escape and become refugees, no one wants refugees for clear enough reasons. Right now the number of refugees is approximating 100 million, and the number is rising exponentially. No one seems to have a solution. 

While in the long term, God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process, are not affected by the short term effects of human cultures, the impact of our changing culture does put our species in immediate danger. This is not to infer that our species will become extinct, nor does it guarantee our species will not become extinct. Perhaps this is the means whereby human overpopulation will be solved—humans eliminating billions of human targets. Modern weaponry and terrorism are now competing to see which one can do the most damage to the greatest number of humans. Modern weaponry can do the trick outright. Terrorism works by causing the implosion of civilized societies, replacing them with roving bands of thugs competing for temporary control over individual communities. 

Human genetic genomes of course have more innate properties than violence, greed, and intolerance for diversity. We have ethics (the Golden Rule), tolerance, empathy with the less fortunate, the capacity to know when enough is enough for personal things, power, money, etc, and it could be reasonably be postulated that these characteristics are in the clear majority. But violence, greed, and intolerance, once past a tipping point, and when these negative characteristics are empowered with modern weaponry and terrorism, the better angels of our nature become a disadvantage. There were plenty of German citizens who knew Hitlerism was wrong, but to say so verbally, or through actions to oppose Hitlerism, was a sure death sentence. There were plenty of puritans who probably knew witch burning was wrong, but to speak out would get them burned at the stake. There are always plenty of people who know what organized crime syndicates of varied sorts are up to, but to finger these individuals could well get them killed. 

In other cases the vast majority actually participate in endeavors which lead certain citizens to have little chance of becoming prosperous and valued members of Society. For example most realize that if education is to be primarily financed by property taxes, then affluent neighborhood will have good schools and good teachers, while poor neighborhood will have poor schools and poor teachers. Most citizens understand the importance of the formative years to children, and scientists know that dangerous neighborhoods leave most children and adults with chronically high levels of stress hormones— and these levels, especially in the formative years in youngsters, may cause damage to all their body systems, especially the central nervous system and endocrine system. Most people understand violence begets violence, but still most people support endless invasions and support to rebels against independent sovereign nations. Most members of most major religions do not personally want to attack heathens, but in the end, heathens will sometimes be cruelly attacked, maimed, and killed by those members of that religion eager to do so. Obama was one of those rare humans who never found a religious, ethnic, social, or cultural group he didn’t like, and would try to assist to solve whatever particular problems for any group. But a large number of citizens hated him for just exactly that, and saw him as weak and totally unsympathetic with their own prejudices toward certain groups. Prejudices are often hard to conquer. Feelings are hard to change despite the extent facts or evidence otherwise to the prejudice in question. 

If one wants to measure the extent of discontentment in any society we just need to look for the symptoms—when welfare is near wages of the lower paying jobs; when addiction to heroin becomes a greater and greater problem; when various groups energetically and hatefully blame minorities for their personal situations; when voters start voting for anyone who will promise to blow up the whole system and can win elections because “why not vote for me, could your situation be any worse?; when violence becomes the means to an end domestically and with foreign interactions; when tax money goes primarily for weapons and wars; when prisons become overcrowded; when good health care is not available to more and more citizens; when 43% of adults don’t earn enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes; when 2-5% of citizens own 90% of our wealth; when the size of our ghettoes grow while the safety and living conditions therein keep deteriorating; when patriotism becomes a means for the have’s to keep the have not’s in their place; when crackpots of every ilk can find solace via association with like thinking groups in cyberspace; when feelings rule over facts; when personal interactions become limited to social internet groups, and so on. 

Our species seems to be at a crucial point in our evolutionary history. We have become quite clever enough. But so many crucial problems, all global in nature, are coming at us from so many directions,  causing us to behave like deer—frozen in the headlights—while our long history of blind patriotic national patriotism prevents the needed global actions to meet the challenges of these global problems. For example, as long as minimum wages are not globally set at living wages, slave labor in some countries will make it impossible for many workers elsewhere to earn livable wages. Unemployment figures mean little, the percentage of people earning livable wages means everything. When some have to work two jobs to earn a living wage, then there are not enough jobs for everyone who needs one, and when machines keep being invented to do the work human labor once did, then 30 hours need become the normal work week so full employment can be sustained. 

The human species is not the first species to contain innate traits which are not compatible with evolutionary advancement. Because our negative innate traits are buried in our advanced ‘brain power’, it is less easy to envision the elimination of our species. On the other hand, our penchant for violence, intolerance to diversity, unlimited greed, inability to stifle ourselves when enough is enough, our inability so far to change a global patriotism with global governance so that the all important global problems, affecting all of humanity can be addressed—this is catastrophic in the short term for millions of humans. It seems to this observer that human overpopulation is going to be death within a very violent and far reaching self inflicted massacre. The 75 million refugees, and existence of poor, dangerous, hopeless ghettoes all over the world are probably just the tip of the iceberg ready to soon melt into a cauldron of conflicts as senseless and vicious as the isolated conflicts already in existence some places today and the last century. Thugs of varied sort (military, religious, ethnic, and socio-economic class) are likely to reign until the slaughter ends, and then the evolutionary process dictated by God’s laws which govern the process, will engineer some kind of evolutionary correction on evolutionary time; and when the process starts a new progression, it will be a whole new world, just as it has been over and over throughout evolutionary history. As individuals, we will all be dead, that we know for sure, just as we know for sure the dead are stress free and decidedly non existent. To me, this seems fair enough, if also a disappointment. New replaces old, nothing new here, thus: 

“The clock of life is wound but once,

And no man has the power

To tell just when the hands will stop

At late or early hour.

To lose one's wealth is sad indeed,

To lose one's health is more,

To lose one's soul is such a loss

That no man can restore.

The present only is our own,

So live, love, toil with a will,

Place no faith in "Tomorrow,"

For the Clock may then be still.”  (Robert H. Smith)

Marriage and Divorce in America

Marriage and Divorce in America

The current divorce rate is around 50%. So is the percentage of adult Americans who are married. But the last 3 years divorce rates have been dropping. Until 1970 the divorce rate was around 25%. In 1950 78% of adults in the US were married. Having never been married, I claim no expertise regarding on how best to handle marriage. These changes above are huge and I, like most, wonder why they are changing so much. 

This musing will be an attempt to identify the reasons for such great changes. For one thing, people marry much later than before, like currently 29 years for men and 27 for women. In 1960 it was 22 years old for men and 20 for females. This kind of change affects the percentage of people who are married.

The number of U.S. adults cohabiting with a partner is on the rise. In addition to the half of U.S. adults who are married, 7% were cohabiting in 2016. The number of Americans living with an unmarried partner reached about 18 million in 2016, up 29% since 2007. Roughly half of cohabiters are younger than 35 – but cohabitation is rising most quickly among Americans ages 50 and older. This brings into play another question, why is cohabitation rising so rapidly?  What follows here is just speculation on my part: More people realize that each person in a coupling will change over the years and this can make their binding stronger or weaker. If divorce hits, there may be fear of the financial consequences and the emotional legal turmoil. Plus, job security is at an all time low. It is now predicted that a teenager today will have, on the average, 33 different jobs in their lifetime. It used to be if you did your job well you could have it for a lifetime with adequate salary increases. Today, good performance often takes second place to the bottom line (a person is too expensive to retain and can be replaced by a younger person at a much reduced salary). 

Back in the 1960’s people thought there was something wrong with you if you still lived with your parents. Now it is quite common for young people to live with their parents for decades. In some cases they cannot afford to be independent (43% of adults today do not make enough money to even qualify to pay federal income taxes). So where did all this money go? Well, just 3 people now own more of our wealth than the bottom 50% of our citizens, and 2-5% of our citizens now own 90% of our wealth.  25% of young people between the ages of 25-35 still live with their parents. Just 54% of young people have jobs. The employment rate for young people is lower than it has been for 60 years.                         

4 in 10 marriages involve remarriages. In 1960 just 13% of married people had been married before. Now the figure is 23%. I guess this makes sense if divorce rates are up (doubled since 1970)

In 1967 just 3% of people married someone of a different race or ethnicity. Today (2015) that figure is 17%. What that means to anything here is a mystery to me. But it is strange that while tolerance for diversity is rapidly falling, interracial marriages are rapidly rising. I know in my wanderings around on long walks, sometimes in cities, I see many groups of young people together socially on the town and the group is totally mixed racially, varied sexual orientations, ugly and good-looking—the kind of grouping which was a rarity when I was young. On the other hand every ethnic or religious group has a strong nucleus of die hard purists for lack of a better term here. Via cyberspace these noninclusive groups are becoming more and more irate and more comfortable acting out their prejudices. Hard to say where this is all going; perhaps the growing income disparity is fueling a lot of this intolerance. It is often easy to blame other groups for one’s own economic misery: “If it weren’t for all these_’___’___my economic situation would be better”. “It is hard to get a job anymore if you are an ‘old fashioned’ white rural American” etc. 

Same sex marriage adds another wrinkle to this marriage situation. Currently, 61% of all same-sex couples who live together are married. This would tend to bolster the percentage of people who are married, but still the marriage percentage of the entire population is substantially declining. Marriage is relatively new for same sex marriages so over time the percentage of same sex couples who are married may be similar to heterosexual-sexual couples.

Before 1960 only 19% of marriages were between spouses of different religious faith.  Today 39% have a spouse who is in a different religious group. Religions are losing more and more control over the institution of marriage. However, what we mean by the term religion is also losing clarity. Fewer and fewer people are serious fundamentalists or dedicated church attendees these days. On the other hand, about the same percentage of of our population believe in God as in earlier years. Scriptures in all religions were, interestingly enough, all written at about the same period in history by humans, and consequently contain many notions of the distant past which have become outdated and obsolete today. Even the fundamentalists pick and choose which part of scripture they wish to believe and practice. Counting how many people are of any particular faith is impossible. Many people are still listed as, for example, Baptists or Catholics etc. even though they have not been practicing participants for years. If we stop going to Church this hardly removes us from the church membership rolls in most cases. 

Aside from religion, sexual orientation, finances, health, physical appearance, sexual preferences in bed including frequency of sex, most marriages will end up involving children—and this certainly complicates the divorce likelihood.  

Then we need remember that many marriages exist in name only. Sometimes the two spouses cannot afford to live separately so stay together mostly as roommates. Over time people change and often the nature of their marriage is totally different from the earlier years. Good-looking couples have less risk in getting divorced since a new mate will not be hard to find. Plain looking couples had a hard enough time finding a mate the first time, let alone get back in the game at a later date. With pornography rampant and thriving on the internet any real partner for sex is not likely for most people to remotely resemble physically those in porn flicks. While studies show single parents can be effective parents, this is not always the case. Often the case is one of whether the children involved will be better off outside a troubled marriage or worse off. And this again becomes individual unique cases in every incidence. 

Actual sex frequency is now declining, especially among married couples. In 1990 couples had sex 73 times a year compared to 55 times in 2014. Never married people have sex an average of 59 times a year. Sex today is more readily available one way or another, including sex with someone you love—masturbation, and probably impacts on sex drive for many individuals. Add to this that most young people are exposed to sex on the internet before their hormones have kicked in to make it all seem sexy. It is anyone’s guess right now how much this impacts their sex drives during adolescence. The variations of sex acts engaged in today are far more extensive than say, 50 years ago. This can become a huge problem in a marriage. What is disgusting for one, may be a turn-on for the other. So where is the solution here? 

Then there are the trophy marriages. What are we to think of these marriages? Essentially they are highly paid prostitutes. In some cases they are sex toys for a few years, get divorced, and live financially quite well the rest of their lives. Isn’t this a win-win situation for both spouses? Well, maybe only sometimes. What about street prostitutes or on-line prostitutes? That might be the only source of sex for the ugly outside rape. Or are only the sexually desirable to be permitted to have sex?What about those people who prefer not to be sexually active at all. Are they abnormal? Probably not, since just about every other form of sexual activity is permissible among willing partners. Is a sexless marriage a marriage? 

Also, more people use on-line dating apps than before, especially young people. The percentage of 18-24 yr olds using on line dating services has tripled from 2013 to 2015.  59% percent of the American population now think online dating is a good way to meet people. 

Also, people live longer today and many elderly people are leery of getting tangled up with a potential spouse with potential serious long term medical situations. 

Above are related stats that impact on the state of marriage in modern America. I am not sure if marriage really has any clear definition. Each marriage is probably about as unique as the personalities of each spouse. Just as all individuals are unique, so are marriages. To the extent this is true, it reflects the difficulty as to how any government can really decide who can marry who. If we extend this line of thought, then every divorce is unique, and therefore what the proper consequences is for divorce is no one consequence fits all. To top all this off, add sex to the equation and of course this just makes reason futile. 

Machines have been invented that replace humans in many human situations. Porn videos have made it possible for humans to have sexual orgasms without a partner. Should sexual orgasms without a partner be counted in how many times a person has sex a year?  Studies have shown that for most people the highest orgasms are achieved via masturbation. That’s interesting. Is that cheating on a spouse?: “What do you mean you have already had sex. With whom?” 

It used to be that we married in part to have kids. I suppose, in theory, the best way to ensure having the best kids would be to use a sperm bank or find the right surrogate mother. Not sure I used the right term here, but the meaning is probably there. No sense having kids deliberately from the shallow end of the gene pool in some cases. 

The sense when I started this musing was that it would lead nowhere. It has ended up as an ending best stated years ago by an English gal: “I don’t care what they do as long as they don’t do it in the street and scare the horses.” If someone says to you when out for dinner that they most enjoy as a couple having anal sex hanging from a chandelier, it is probably safest to say: “That’s nice, would you please pass the salt” and change the subject. Personally, when it comes to promiscuous sex, I have the best protection—my personality/appearance. If anyone says something nice to me I immediately seize the opportunity: “Your place or mine?” True to form, most serious discussions about marriage, sex, divorce, etc. end with jokes. Maybe it all just proves that God has a sense of humor. We all know if sex comes up in any social conversation it almost immediately shifts to humorous jokes. Avoid anything serious like “I have trouble lately getting an erection for my wife, but when the neighbor’s wife comes through the door I get an erection almost immediately.”  Honesty about sex is rarely the best policy. This musing, appropriately, has no ending. It just ends.