Essays and Theories
Essays and Theories
I was talking with a group of friends the other night about where we as a species came from and where we are going. I made the point that for our ancestors and us to have survived, we all had to observe one inviolate rule of evolution: Every living organism must adapt to its local environment. Jumping off from that point, I put all my fellow humans on the planet into an imaginary blending machine (I'm sure you do this all the time) and put them through the worst possible tests. The hope was to see exactly how we evolved. In the prehistoric past as well as in the present, survival meant traversing many rigorous situations, including earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, monsoons, lightning, forest fires, floods, famine, pestilence, predators, bitter cold and blizzards, blazing heat and drought, persecutions, inquisitions, sexual harassment, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, viruses, plagues, torture, burning at the stake, hanging, sodomy, muggings, thefts, manipulations, mutilations, domestic violence, verbal abuse, employer abuse, unemployment, bankruptcies, depression, inflation, deflation, impotency (this was written prior to Viagra's debut), infertility, marriage, divorce, spousal loss, child rearing, child molestations, mortgage payments, car payments, automobile accidents, heart disease, mad cow disease, cholesterol, price gouging, revolutions, civil wars, rush hour traffic, the battle of the sexes, impossible relationships, race riots, prejudice, bigotry, social and prescription drugs, gangland violence, the cold war, civil strife, WW I, WW II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear testing, angst over nuclear and meteor extinction, tooth decay, puberty, and acne (God REALLY hates us, doesn't he? (note the male notation with the word hate). -- perhaps, if we could be objective, it appears that God is male when mean and terrible things happen, but then, God transforms to the feminine when empathy and compassion are required to complete the circle of the endless cycle of life and death; the Ying and the Yang; the Positives and the Negatives; the One's and the Zero's -- flow through all things).
As is evident from my off-the-cuff list, it is not hard to understand that humankind's evolutionary voyage is an endless search for solutions and adaptations to problems and the creation of opportunities from those adaptations. Our ability to solve these problems increased dramatically with the evolution of our cerebral cortex, which opened the world of conceptualization. Without these conceptual abilities, we would still be in the savanna, trying to avoid being chewed on by cats with very big teeth. With the evolutionary addition of these new thought processes, however, we were able to enrich our lives by creating what we call culture. Culture, of course, is made up of the values, dreams, and artifacts that we think highly enough of to pass from generation to generation. But alongside the creation of culture came the problem of cultural segregation. The innate human drive for survival began to cause clashes as cultures collided and each culture attempted to dominate others. This clash continues, and only looms larger as population expands and we are forced closer together.
Despite this gloomy overview, however, I see only the prospect of breaking through these difficult times by the advancement of evolutionary psychology. This new science opens up the final mysteries of human behavior because it really makes common sense. If we evolved, then, what is here today was there before in a prior form. What we evolutionary psychologists do is to attempt back track from our behaviors today and speculate on our ancestors behavior, which in turn, shows the true nature of today's behavior. When many colleagues agree on the speculations, that then forms an informed opinion. When, through evolutionary psychology, we finally reach an understanding of ourselves on a global scale, we will realize that our evolutionary march has been merely a voyage of problem-solving and creating new opportunities from those solved problems: of finding food, shelter, safety, and a mate. When we reach this understanding, we then will realize that all human history is just an embellishment of these simple objectives. The complex algorithmic behaviors of the present day will no longer be a mystery, and their solution will once again change our evolutionary course. We will truly understand that we all spring from the same genetic origins; we will begin to view everyone and everything on the planet as belonging to the same family. Perhaps, we may even love each other as ourselves. One person can hope.
With today's technology, I know that we can easily feed every person on this planet, provide minimal shelter with inexpensive materials made from our vast mountains of waste, and with the new-found knowledge of our behavioral mechanisms, provide at least minimal safety by limiting aggressive attitudes towards our fellow humans. The so-called "battle of the sexes" will at last be understood and will evolve into a co-evolutionary voyage of both men and women.
Evolutionary theories of the past have taught that natural selection was the natural order of things; that the future belonged to the strong, the swift, the young, and the intelligent. These theories were based on the empirical knowledge that resource accumulation was paramount in increasing and spreading one's own genetic and cultural heritage. In prehistory, and even up to the present day, successes based on the strength and stamina of the male were the norm. But as we learn to enhance survivability for all, the physical element of survival will be replaced by the non-physical strength of information gathering. The flood of electronic information today is simply an elaboration of prehistoric efforts to find a new food source, a more comfortable place to sleep, and a safe place to spend the night. Once these three stables have been provided, we then tend to focus on mate selection and building a family in which to pass our genes and begin to build our own little empires within our local environments.
When we reach the final chapter in the tale of our origins, we will be at the end of our first evolutionary voyage. When we reach this new destination, we will, like passengers, disembark, and begin a new evolutionary transformation. It will constitute a metamorphosis based entirely on the contents and direction of our planet's collective consciousness. I am not talking science fiction here--all the early indications and patterns agree. The most striking of these, of course, has come to pass in less than a decade: the internet and the world wide web. The internet, the speed of data transmissions, the rising populations growing us together at an exponential rate--all bring to the fore one fact: we will survive in peace with each other on this planet or we will perish. We will perish unless we understand. I know we will survive.
William A. Spriggs
Origin: October, 96.
Updated, November, 2000
Copyright, Evolution's Voyage 1995 - 2008