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)
