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The Role of Humanity in the Future Evolution of Life
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“A major evolutionary transition is beginning to unfold on Earth. Individuals are emerging who are choosing to dedicate their lives to consciously advancing the evolutionary process. They see that their lives are an important part of the great evolutionary process that has produced the universe and the life within it. They realize that they have a significant role to play in evolution.”
http://www.evolutionarymanifesto.com
What is the role of humanity in the future evolution of life on Earth?
3 Responses
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John,
Very interesting question about evolution. I agree also with Eric who wrote
“2 ) Unpredictability: Evolution is not predictable. Yes there are overall trends but one of those trends is evolving into the adjacent possible. It is impossible to completely map the adjacent possible because it is discovered through creative processes. Evolution itself is about changing the rules. What isn’t possible one day, is the next. We may try to guide evolution but other organisms will have their say. They will act in ways we fail to predict; they will take advantage of opportunities we accidentally make. That is what the sentence ‘Evolution is an emergent process’ means. The only model of an evolving system that can be used to predict the behaviour of the system is a full scale model; i.e. the system itself. The fastest way to get the prediction is to watch the system and see what happens. In other words, you can’t get a prediction only a postdiction.”
I have undertaken a form a conscious evolution in myself that I would like to draw on as an analogy.
I have undertaken an adoption of an evolved diet and mimicking the type of activity patterns(fitness) of my ancestors. This has been done under the advice of Loren Cordain and Arthur DeVany(two extremely knowledgeable evolutionists). The new way of looking at simple food choices and activities has resulted in an increased intimacy between my thinking self and my body. This has in turn resulted in better signals and awareness between what my body wants/signals and what I should do to respond. I am also able to sometimes root out deception and false signals, and I am also able to tune out people that I am certain don’t know what they are talking about (like overweight politicians talking about how we should respond to economic problems).
As Michael says we are nature uncovering its own nature. Just as my own mind and others is discovering ways of responding to feedback from the body, human societies are learning to respond to feedback we get from the earth. Humanities conscious role will be to respond to the signals that we receive from the earth, and in turn try and influence our inputs so as to receive positive feedback. We are very new at this.
I am struck by the idea that it wasn’t until the early 1900’s that medicine began actually improving peoples chances of survival. Before that it was better to do nothing when you got sick. I asked my father in law, who is a forensic pathologist how many bodies he has autopsied and diagnosed the cause of death. He said over 5000. Then I asked “and how many environments have an environmental scientists observed? Perhaps a few.
I think I could sum it up by quoting Michael Shermer from The Science of Good and Evil “Intellect in driven by intuition, and intuition is directed by intellect” -
If the idea of Biospheric Communion interests you check out our website at: http://sites.google.com/site/biosphericcommu/ !
I just read over your manifesto and maybe I skimmed it too quickly (mostly because I found it so exciting that I wanted to absorb an overview of it as quickly as possible) but it seems to me that you missed a couple of the most important evolutionary trends:
1) Expansionism: You mention the idea that evolving biospheres will expand and eventually make contact and combine (an idea I call Biospheric Communion) but you don’t focus on it as a trend. For hundreds of millions of years life has been expanding into one previously uninhabited environment after another, Increasing the complexity of the communities in those newly colonised environments until they are changed into environments that never existed before. Forests and Coral Reefs are some of the best examples.
2) Unpredictability: Evolution is not predictable. Yes there are overall trends but one of those trends is evolving into the adjacent possible. It is impossible to completely map the adjacent possible because it is discovered through creative processes. Evolution itself is about changing the rules. What isn’t possible one day, is the next. We may try to guide evolution but other organisms will have their say. They will act in ways we fail to predict; they will take advantage of opportunities we accidentally make. That is what the sentence ‘Evolution is an emergent process’ means. The only model of an evolving system that can be used to predict the behaviour of the system is a full scale model; i.e. the system itself. The fastest way to get the prediction is to watch the system and see what happens. In other words, you can’t get a prediction only a postdiction.
3) Winners always lose eventually. Few species have stood the test of deep time. The dominant life forms of every age have come to an end.
So conscious evolution will not work exactly like you describe. I predict the following:
A) One of the greatest contributions of humanity to the evolution of the biosphere will be its expansion. Bacteria may spread from planet to planet via impact ejecta but no complex life form, yet evolved, could survive such a journey. (For example, travelling to Mars in thousands or millions of years by first being blasted into heliocentric orbit by an asteroid impact and then crashing down through the Martian atmosphere encased in a meteorite.) Humans are the first complex life form that has found travel to other planets or spatial bodies to be in the adjacent possible.
B) Once we help other life forms and ecosystems gain the ability to move between spatial bodies, they will expand through the solar system and on to other solar systems themselves. They will run out of our control and cease to be ‘guided by consciously evolving humans.’
C) Evolution occurring over the vast expanse of trillions of worlds will occur more quickly than humans consciously evolving as fast as they can. New forms will evolve that will out compete us and we will be left behind on the evolutionary scrap pile. These new forms may be consciously evolving by the time they usurp us. They may not even mean to usurp us but simply by moving ahead with their own agenda they may sweep us aside by accident.
If we are lucky, as we die off in their shadow, we will remember that they are our distant children. We will dwindle and disappear with the knowledge that our legacy has been successful. We will know that our disappearance makes room for new and better forms of ourselves.
I view this as gospel: good news. Imagine the universe we will have heralded into place. It will be filled with ever more complex, more intelligent and more organised life.
But I do not believe that we will gain a permanent guiding role or even a permanent role. To think otherwise seems arrogant in the face of deep time and evolution’s tendency to extinguish in one aeon what was its most successful experiment in the last aeon.
Cheers,
Eric