I just happened to be thinking about the movie Lawnmower Man (you should all rent the director’s cut version, which is infinitely superior to the heinous theatrical cut), and one line pointed up to me a basic false assumption about evolution.The title character, who’s been injected with experimental drugs that made him supersmart, suddenly develops telepathy (and later, telekinesis). He tells the scientist this, and the scientist gets all excited, saying, “This could be the next step in human evolution!”
Having the preoccupations that I do, this got me musing on the attempts of eugenicists and Nazis to help evolution along, the pseudo-scientific attempts to “prove” that Jews or blacks were “still in the ape stage”, and various casual remarks I’ve heard people make to the effect that people with personality traits the speaker didn’t like were “less evolved” than people without those traits.
The faulty assumption here is that evolution is a process by which nature makes species better. It isn’t. Evolution makes species survive. When we dream of humans evolving into some kind of Ubermensch we consider better, something with a larger brain or with psychic powers or without our tendency to violence and irrationality and other such pesky things, this is our own fantasy. There’s an implicit assumption that there’s a predetermined goal that humans will inevitably reach eventually of some demigodlike state.
Evolution isn’t striving to create the most perfect human possible, it’s just trying to pay the bills, as it were. It jury-rigs creatures into the minimum needed to keep the survival of the species going and not one bit more. Roaches have been around for millions of years because they’re good at surviving, not because they are the highest possible insect. We’ll evolve into something smarter, nicer and with ESP if survival requires it, not just so that Nature can sit back and be proud of her accomplishment. It’s actually just as likely that, if future circumstances force us to evolve into something different, that something will be, say, meaner, or with fangs, and possibly even stupider.
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