FULL STOP????

Humans- Homo Sapiens- by far the most intelligent species on the planet. True so far. The pinnacle of evolution, the most important species on the planet. Absolutely not!!!! That is just our anthrocentric arrogance speaking. Blasphemy, say you? Surely human beings are unique, you ask? Of course we are. After all, we have, perched between our ears, the most complicated machine on the planet. But, complexity is not the goal of evolution. Every species on the planet is unique in its own way. Uniqueness is, if anything, a commodity in oversupply. The story of a briefly abundant hairless primate originating in Africa is but a footnote in the history of life, but in the history of the hairless primate, it is central.

Human beings are an ecological success, no doubt about that. They are probably the most abundant large animal on the planet. Moreover, human beings has shown a remarkable ability to adapt to various habitats, cold or hot, dry or wet, marine or desert. No doubt, this ecological success of ours comes at a high price and we are doomed to catastrophe soon enough; for a successful species, we are remarkably pessimistic about the future. For now, we are a success.

Yet, the truth is that we come from a long line of failures. We are apes, a group that almost went extinct 15 million years ago in competition with the better designed monkeys. We are primates, a group of mammals that almost went extinct 45 million years ago in competition with the better designed rodents. We are synapsid tetrapods, a group of reptiles that almost went extinct 200 million years ago in competition with the dinosaurs. We are descended from limbed fishes, which almost went extinct 360 million years ago in competition with the better designed ray finned fishes. We are chordates, a phylum that survived the Cambrian era 500 million years ago by the skin of its teeth in competition with the brilliantly successful arthropods. Our success has come against humbling odds.

How did we survive? At all times, the specter of natural selection was waiting to claim us, and yet it was him who gave us the proverbial boost up the ladder, the ability to evolve, to compete, to carve out our own little niche. And yet, today, the same forces are kept at bay by us, consciously. The sheer arrogance of it all is overwhelming. Our superior medical technology implies that almost no-one dies before they reach reproductive age. This causes ‘bad genes’, which otherwise would have been weeded out to return to the pool. Obviously, the alternative to this is not acceptable in our society any longer. Merely considering it would make us as bad as the Francis Galton with his eugenic principles or perhaps the Nazis. Ethically, we have an obligation to save those who we can. Agreed. This now leaves mutation as the only source for variation in the pool. And yet, in out society, mutants of any kind, physical, physiological or psychological are just not given equal standing. They are shunned, perhaps not consciously, but shunned nevertheless.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, our parasites are becoming more and more streamlined. With an absurdly low generation time, they can evolve around and over anything we throw at them in absolutely no time at all. In the war between us and the parasites, right now, we are losing!!

Some say, human evolution is not at a standstill, it is merely very slow. They tell us not to worry, that as and when the attack becomes more serious, natural selection will swing back into action. Is that really what it will take?? A pandemic?? Isn’t that too much of a risk? Will any of us survive?

The average lifetime for a species is about 10 million years. We have been around perhaps half that time, and have yet not spawned a daughter species. Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic, but the more I think about it, the more I am certain that unless we change soon, the doom of our species awaits. And I weep, not for our species, for we always knew we were but ephemeral, not for life, for it will go on, with or without us, but for intelligence and perception. And, in this, I have no comforting shoulder to weep upon!!!

*(This post borrows heavily from Matt Ridley’s “Genome”, a must read for any student of life-sciences)