Evolution in the 21st century: Are you up in the ladder?

 

When Charles Darwin had first proposed the theory of evolution, he received much flak from the Christian conservative society. He proposed in a general sense that, humans are not the divine creatures which society believed to be the truth, rather, we are just another biological species fighting for our existence. We are a product of constant genetic mutations and we have inherited our current biological structure from primates who were successful enough to survive and procreate. In fact, we are not distant from our closest relative chimpanzee: humans share 98-99% of DNA with them. Such a revelation was considered blasphemy at that time and even disputable but today (many religious theorists propose their version of the question about the origins of human beings), we have sufficient proof to conclude that evolution has played a considerable role in creating us biologically and psychologically. We have trodden upon a gritty road for millions of years before reaching here. He also stated that evolution is an incessant process. Our body encounters the environment around it and adapts accordingly, also our procreation process supports random mutations at the time of formation of zygote. This is nature’s method of determining the next strongest biology that will survive and propagate its species. With each generation, human beings are changing at a biological level, even if that is a minuscule change. It also means that it is operating at every moment even now without error. It is even an active factor while you are breathing your every single breath and at every blink of your eye. However, evolution, as we know it, has two components broadly:

1. It is based on random mutations.
2. It is facilitated by humans interacting with their surroundings and adapting accordingly.

Our body is invariably interacting with the environment around it and actively adapting accordingly. Although our biology is efficacious in responding to external factors, we must not forget that it has acquired such a structure over thousands of years. Evolution is an arduous, slow process, and also contains some element of erraticism. Hence, it becomes imperative to understand how this dynamic is operating in our times. To encapsulate my argument, “How can we identify the attributes which mark that a human being has evolved the most when it comes to present-day circumstances?”. Since our body’s purpose is to forward a better version of genetic information than it currently possesses, I believe that it is our biological obligation to end up improving ourselves at the end of the day. The rule of the thumb is: Survival of the fittest, so, who is the fittest human today? This is not just physically, but also how he/she responds to a rapidly changing society, technology, economy, and the whole environment. We are in an unprecedented time because our environment around us is changing faster than our biological mechanism can comprehend or is designed to comprehend. Hence, I believe that we must make it a conscious goal to deliberately evolve ourselves because that is in some sense the goal of our biology too. Being driven by a thought that we need to grow at the end of the day or to improve ourselves is a powerful thought in itself. But, this post is not just about some trivial motivational toffy, rather expand our perspective about evolution and how to align it with the current environment variables.

Let’s decipher the modus operandi of the concept we call “evolution”. I believe that evolution is a result of our body responding to the environment to help it survive, sustain, and procreate. Hence, I approach the quandary by answering these three questions concerning the existing environment. It is because we are not living in a jungle now, we have erected a technologically advanced civilisation. Our body, however, is not able to change much in this period. Hence, we need to answer, “What are the new attributes which can explain that a human being is situated at the top of the evolutionary ladder?” Let us attempt to answer it using the template using which we explained the concept of evolution before. I don’t think that the dynamics working in the evolutionary process aren’t radically different than the way it functions or we know how it does; the way evolutionary biologists describe the process. However, there is just one add-on: the technological advancements have rendered our environment change considerably.

A new competitor to human beings called artificial intelligence has arrived. Although it is in a nascent stage, some alarming effects of it are visible. Complex algorithms which are comprehending everything they are programmed to are greatly efficient at performing intricate tasks that even the most skilled human might take days in. It can challenge humans at even new grounds that we are not even aware of. For example, a complex AI machine can distort the electromagnetic waves in our body and it can be lethal although, we might not even know what happened to us or forestall it. Various games have now come up and we just don’t know how to play them. If you have watched The Social Dilemma then you can understand how social media is capacious in bringing about irreparable changes upon humans. We have sufficient technology that powerful people can engender civil wars, shroud truth, change public discourse, win elections by making something an Internet trend just before the election date. Our systems could not evolve at the same pace as the society around us has changed. Human beings need to account for this too if they want to evolve.