Evolution - or devolution...

Inspiration is a two edged sword. The more I have been inspired by Prof Alice Roberts, in every sense, the more I have found myself wondering if her discipline of Anatomy and her developed skill in Anthropology is not spoiling my downtime. You see she has set me off on a puzzle about evolution and the idea that it might have come to an end point. And it is not comfortable.


I am not saying this is what she believes and still less that it is my wholly considered view either. But the problem is that we are in a totally new environment today compared to any that has gone before. For the very first time in all of organic history we live in a period when the norm has been changed. Until now, or at least until quite recently in geological terms, every replicating organism mindlessley, accidentally, relentlessly experienced the environment without any ability to direct it or change it intentionally. But not now. We, the human organism, can and do change our environment deliberately or at least we think we do. Certainly, we make changes with intent.


Consider the world of the single cell organism. Evolution tells us, or at least we accept that it implies, these creatures will only survive if their requirements for life and replication suit or are suited to the environment in which they exist. Some will die, some will live and some will prosper. The relative numbers will be determined by the environment. If it changes the proportions will change. Thus it may be that very few survive after a change but those that do are unusually well adapted and prosper. If their adaptation allows inter-replication with another successful organism then a new organism, cross-bred, will occur. Evolution moves on. Meanwhile of course the implication is that one or other of the contributing organisms may perish. Indeed, both may perish that the new one survive.


Move on in time and the dinosaurs may have eaten themselves out of hearth and home. Or they may have been victims of an enormous cataclysm. Either way, however, something did survive and somehow we are the beneficiaries of that - along, we understand, with the birds, sharks and a few others. The point is however that so far as we can make out these dinosaurs did not deliberately eat themselves into oblivion nor did they go out of their way to invite a solar catastrophe to annhilate tham. Indeed, taking yet another theory they did not intentionally fart their way to extinction. It just happened.


Consider then the human condition. At first it is possible to consider that early man merely slashed and burned his way from forest to savannah in the pursuit of agriculture. He did not set out to change the world although he certainly did. More recently we did not intentionally begin to pillage the mineral and organic and fossil resources of our planet with the intention of running them down to a dangerous zero point. We just did it in the name of survivial.


But now? Well you see faced with the probability that there are simply too many of use we have to act. Aware that we have run our resources close to empty we need to do something. Given that we cannot grow enough to feed ourselves we must have a plan. Shocked at the fact that we have simply begun to run out of water, air, space, energy, food we know only too well that salvation lies in our own hands. And so we begin to rescue ourselves from, well, from oblivion.


But what we change in this process, I fear to suggest, is evolution itself. That we change the way it happens or would have happened and that we do so without even knowing we are. 


I believe that man is not an end of the process of evolution nor ever would be. Nor indeed is there any creature or organism on the planet today that is an end of the process of evolution. Indeed I happen to think that the real end of evolution should have been entropy - that there would have come a time when the very last Lonesome George crawled, or fluttered, or strode or flapped, or merely dribbled across a desolate landscape in a fruitless search for anything - anything at all - with which to replicate.


Were it not for man I believe that this event would be different from what may now be the case. That in a vacuum, evolution would have been different from evolution in a human environment. That the arrival of the human being, with our thought, imagination, deliberation, means that nothing, not even evolution, can be the same again. Ever.


PS - Yeah, I'm back.