The Evolution Solution

I don't think many people get evolution. I also think that it's quite often misrepresented in the media and in fiction, being a convenient buzzword or shortcut to explain an idea in a seemingly plausible way.

I understand evolution as being a blind, directionless system that comes about through accidental changes in genetic make-up. Those changes that are advantageous to survival inevitably propagate into subsequent generations. However, here is no goal or ideal of perfection to which evolution strives. Indeed, 'evolutionary advancement', despite being a common term, could be seen as somewhat misleading - after all, to 'advance' there needs to be something preferable than the present state of affairs to move towards. And this suggests preordained order, a grand plan. And this suggests - well, lets not go there in this post!

The fact is that every existing living species exists in a state of evolutionary perfection. That's the definition of a 'species'. A slug is as perfectly suited to it's environment as human beings are to theirs. Human beings are not the utmost peak of evolution, they are not what life has always been aiming for and striving towards. Any conceit of hierarchy of life, be it in a religious sense of reincarnation or a pseudo-scientific one of 'the next stage of mankind', is totally off the mark. We are just another animal who has found it's niche - one day we will be extinct and no longer suited to that niche.

To take some examples, I am currently watching the rather excellent remake of Battlestar Galactica. You don't need to know the story here, but the opening spiel describes how the Cylons were made by man but rebelled and evolved. The Cylons are robots who are trying to wipe out mankind, and part of their plan is to infiltrate mankind with Cylons who look, act and feel human - the 'evolution' of which the titles speak. Although nit-picky and irrelevant to the story, this statement is what set me thinking about this whole thing. The Cylons didn't evolve on any level - they simply manufactured human like versions of themselves!

A less obsessive and more general example is one I touched on above - 'the next evolutionary stage of mankind', something that's sometimes talked about in documentaries and suggested as something we need to 'work towards' and 'embrace'. Well, when 'we' get there and 'we' are the next evolutionary step, 'we' will be a new species and won't be 'us' at all. It's a misleading way to think and one that seems to suggest a sense of attachment and continuation of our species once we've evolved into somethings else. Consider that apes are no more connected to the 'next evolutionary stage of apekind' (ie, humans) than we will be to ours! The best we can hope for is that homo sapiens continues to co-exist with whatever species evolve from us.

There is an interesting argument that our species now has the power to direct our own evolution through technology and science, and I guess this is what science fiction and documentaries latch on to when they hint at 'working towards the next stage'. This isn't evolution as I understand it, though. It's design, or engineering. The blindness of biological evolution is taken away and what once was directed by the raw, automatic order-out-of-chaos that is 'natural selection' is replaced by a something intentional - 'guided selection'. This is a far less elegant and beautiful system and one that seems to be mankind doing what we do best: trying to cheat death, this time on the grandest of all scales, by steering ourselves towards a new species and away from extinction. God is no longer a sufficient top-end answer to mortality.

Similarly, there is the high percentage of our brains that we don't use. Perhaps this is untapped power that we will evolve to make use of, eh? Perhaps this will give rise to telepathy and telekenisis, and the unused brain matter evolved in the first place so that we could grow into it? Perhaps not. How could a blind force that is built on accident and immediate efficiency build something that is meant to be used in the future? Again that suggests forward thinking. Also, evolutionary change is dictated by the 'cost' to the animal, and evolving a massive brain would cost hugely and detrimentally when compared to the issues far more important to the survival of early humans, like manual dexterity and communication.

Evolution is used out of context so often in order to authenticate an out there theory because it has become a household name - it gives automatic, scientific credit to an idea. However, I'm not trying to suggest that evolution is a theory of definitive, irrefutable, cold, hard fact that can't be built upon or honed as new facts come to light. But what I've talked about here isn't a honing or tweaking of a theory, its simply getting a theory wrong. Perhaps a more interesting and timely book/documetnary/series could examine this 'new' evolution - renaming it, setting it in its own context and looking at the implications. Perhaps evolution itself is about to be extinct.