Recently in Evolution Category

Today's muse, war, heat, energy, change. Looking at today's APOD showing Fermi Lab's recently discovered Gamma-ray Pulsars, I am reminded of how much motion/change is an integral part of our lives and the life of the entire universe.  When motion stops, we atrophy, just look at our bodies for example, if we lead sedentary, motionless lives.  Contrast this with mediators who sit in mindful quiet, paying attention to their breath and to their thoughts; and contrast this with today's childhood obesity epidemic, children it would appear, consumed by their electronic gadgets. 

What does it all mean, for example, is there a collective motion with some kind of meaning or intent?  Certainly one can image a war, like the mobilization of WW II, where from a motion standpoint, the world was highly agitated, almost frenetic, and change erupted.  Interestingly, as technology has advanced, it has allowed humans to move faster and faster, so fast, that we "spin" off the earth metaphorically, but also, as in our children, to move slower and slower.

Is there a coming social crisis of technology, where we as the human species will be confronted with a dialectic, either embracing wholeheartedly the motion that is the integration of technology into human evolution or repelling from it, into what, stillness?  Or to state this another way, will we allow biotechnology to morph into "techno-humanology", where the line between traditional evolutionary change and the merger with bio-tech enhancements becomes so blurred as to be indistinguishable, or, are we on the edge of a revolt and return to an "unenhanced" state, sort of a modern Luddite position.  

If we follow the high energy here, it seems almost inevitable that we are about to give new meaning to the term human evolution, in fact we may have already started, we just don't have a name for it yet.  What will we call this new species?  Will we become it, or battle it? 

Today's muse, we are building a gigantic repository of knowledge, and at the same time, building tools to manage that knowledge.  As our knowledge grows, our ability to change our environment in profound ways, also grows.

Just as we humans are the constraint in jet fighters, and are slowly being replaced, I wonder if humans are also a constraint in another more profound way.  Wisdom, or perhaps I should say the lack of growth of wisdom, seems to be equally constraining in this system (for which I don't really have a name).  Wisdom seems to be self-limited by the biological constraint of the human organism i.e., we have to learn and relearn wisdom in each one of our lives. As knowledge and power continues to grow exponentially across thousands of generations, wisdom continues to cycle, limited by our lifespan.  Unfortunately, wisdom does not seem to lend itself to growth as does knowledge, or at least I have not been able to see a clear trend of a growth in wisdom over the ages.

Perhaps this is natures way of limiting how destructive we can be, as our inability to grow wisdom almost guarantees our own self-destruction, or perhaps, we have in our future a way to learn wisdom.  Here's to the latter!

Today's muse, there is no real example in our natural world, of ourselves. We create machines to transport ourselves, we create memory enhancements, we mess with the reproductive systems of ourselves and other species, we have taken unto ourselves the role of "King/Queen" of the planet.  Aren't we quite the upstarts.

Individually, especially as we age, we seem to begin to understand that we are not "above" this system, we are part of it, no matter how much we think we are in control, even the largest ego has to come to the understanding it is not powerful enough to transcend the system of its birth.  So there is a natural ebb and flow of life, that we all come to grips with, and is written and talked about in countless ways, religious/spiritual, philosophical and scientific.

What interests me is that this system of individual gnosis that we are all forced to deal with by the end of our individual lives, seems strangely absent from the species i.e., the human collective, the human species ego, seems unbridled, almost out-of-control.  What is going on here? 

- Does our almost unique tool making ability foster this collective hubris? 

- Is there a collective human species evolution occurring, one that scientists have yet to quantify, and are we in the equivalent of adolescence? 

- Or, are we simply at the top of the food chain, and is this the result of having no real predators (other than ourselves of course)?

- Are we really out-of-control, or is this hyperkinetic human collective energy really a means to some unseen end or a part of some unseen evolutionary process?

One final thought, I try and monitor the latest goings on in human tool building, and I often look to the work of  MIT's Media Lab, they have something called the MIThril project:

The goal of the MIThril project is the development and prototyping of new techniques of human-computer interaction for body-worn applications. Through the application of human factors, machine learning, hardware engineering, and software engineering, the MIThril team is constructing a new kind of computing environment and developing prototype applications for health, communications, and just-in-time information delivery. 

Of course the researchers call themselves the MIT Borglab, but this does pose an interesting question, are we as a species being "accelerated" to create a new "species", in a non-traditional way because there is a some kind of planetary level need that we do not yet see.  We often think of our species as causing great pain to our planet, and perhaps even destroying it, but what if we are actually in the process of evolving, or creating, a species that may be able help?  Or maybe the earth is "hatching" itself, and we are the new born.

Today's muse, we humans think we are in control, that we are the ones "inventing", but are we really the preeminent tool creators and users that we think we are?  Perhaps we are the tools, but to what purpose?

A friend pointed me to an article the other day that takes a geophysical perspective of calling the earth a "living super-organism".   While this was strictly a geophysical view, if this view was to be expanded to include biology, I suspect we might be able to step back and see the geophysical life cycle, and planetary biological life cycle operating in unison, and symmetry.  The challenge of integration here is both scale and impact.  Most biological time frames, even when figured on a macro-level e.g., mammals rather than humans etc..., are dwarfed by geophysical life cycles.  And second, as much as we see human/biological planetary impact, this impact is dwarfed by the impact of geophysical life cycles.

Certainly human/biological planetary engineering skills are growing, and it does cause one to wonder if there is some grand design here, will the "planet" need these human tools at some point in the future?  I am reminded of all the symbiosis we see in nature, particularly underwater.  Perhaps we should worry less about our ability to destroy our own planet, and worry more about what our planet has in store for us.

Today's muse.  What if the individual is the most unimportant concept of the whole? What if there is some complex evolutionary dance going on, that carefully mixes the individual into the whole of the present?  That the type and mix of "minds" on the planet at any give time is a careful calibration, and that the study historical studies of who was whose contemporary is more that just the social milieu of of a person's experience at the time, but also a biological milieu, with much more interconnectedness than we assume.

So rather than attribution of creation, be it artistic or intellectual, to the individual, it is interesting to think of attribution of creation to the particular biological mix, or even brain mix, on the planet at any particular time.  This concept manifests, tangentially at least, in common thought as the same idea being "discovered" by different people, far removed from each other, at roughly the same time. 

It would be interesting to develop a language of describing the characteristics of what might be called the "global personality" at any given time in history.  While this personality could of course include non-human conditions at any give time, I would propose that it would be most interesting to think about this personality in collective human terms and come up with some attributes for this "global personality" which, one would hope, be described as changing over time.  Would this "global personality" have an attribute of age, i.e., maturity?  Could it be described in truly universal cross-cultural terms, how about even cross-species terms?

This language will be challenging because we are so predisposed to the individual and to individual attribution.  But if we look at ideas and tools as coming out of the perspective of the human collective, rather than the human individual, it may enhance our understanding of current trends, like what appears to be the incredibly rapid and powerful trend of the building of human networking tools.

Today's muse, the question "what are we [humans] building?" continues to resonate, or perhaps reverberate, for me, in fact, it was the masthead subtitle here at the beginning.  I have been writing around the edges of this idea for the past month, but I would like to try and be more direct about my "working assumptions" in this piece. I suspect they will govern my writing/thinking here for a number of years, if not decades.  Here they are, and I am sure I will be refining them over the coming months:

1. While tool use has been seen in other species, there appears to be no evolutionary precedent for tool use on anything like the scale of human capabilities, this makes us special, on earth at least.

2. This special capability was "given" to us to build something greater than the species, that perhaps transcends life on this planet, and perhaps, even the biological paradigm we arose from. I know this sounds like sci-fi, at least for now I am using "given" in an evolutionary sense, not in a higher consciousness sense.

3. We as individuals are akin to cells, just as I can imagine how hard it would be for a cell to "know" the larger organism it is part of, or part of a process of, we individual human "cells" will find it difficult to "know" the the larger "organism" or "organic process" that we are a part of.  Use of the biological term here is strictly by way of analogy, I do not intend to imply that the larger process is actually organic, or not.

4. There is a lot of talk about what is commonly called the Gaia hypothesis, frequently described as the view of the Earth as a single organism, my working assumption is that "the building" transcends this concept.  If there is a single organism, it may be serving the role of "petri dish". I may be guilty of species self-centeredness, I would like to plead Nolo contendere as I am also saying that we as individuals are like cells, or maybe ants...

5. There is also a lot of popular discussion about whether or not we are creating some kind of networked "super mind".  Jamais Cascio has a nice survey piece titled Get Smarter in the July/August 2009 Atlantic, though the author also throws in lot's of lower level stuff too.  One of my operating beliefs on this quest, is that anything that is high on our individual "cellular" consciousness is probably only a portion of the building, or in this case, another tool, though certainly a collective one.  If we are really "brain" cells, look how fast we are growing in this graphic, Human Population through History 1 A.D. to 2020.  (Reminds me more of cancer than anything else, but I digress.)

There is something humbling in the idea that we as individuals are the equivalent of cells being used to build something that, almost by definition, we cannot know.  For me it is looking around the edges of life, the edges of consciousness, that may illuminating as to what we are being used to build.  I find it intriguing, and not at all surprising, that it is physicists who are starting to see parallels between collective human behavior and the atom.

Today's muse, I take it to be self-evident that other intelligent life has existed, or will exist, on other planets. I also take it as equally self-evident that the chances of an intersection of two or more "intelligents" is so small, as to make the search not worth doing, except strictly as an exercise, i.e., we must exercise our "searching skills" to stay healthy as a species.

What I find more interesting is whether or not there exists what might be called, universal principles of evolution, that makes the all but theoretical impossibility of an intersection intentional, at least evolutionarily.  Or to state this another way, why is the scale of intelligent life on earth so small in size and time, as compared to the scale of the universe around us?  It is this scale contrast that makes the intersection so unlikely.  Where did the this scale, that defines our intelligent life, come from? 

There is a possibility that would increase the odds of a meet, that is, of course, that the "other" intelligent life does live on a universal scale.  However, if this is the case, and we have not found them already, then it is their intention not to be found, because they surely must be aware of us, the noisy, often rude and sometime violent adolescences down the road. :-)

Tangentially, speaking of scale, why is the fastest thing we know, light, so slow?  If makes no sense, given the scale of the universe.  Unless of course, it is not the fastest thing.... 

Today's muse, perhaps it is our incredibly large "species ego", but we humans seem to place such a high value on knowledge and consciousness, while at the same time, denying the extent to which we are controlled by our unconscious, or to put in another way, controlled by forces far larger than we are, both as individuals and as a species.

If there is anything that appears to drive this species, other than war, it is this quest for knowledge.  Perhaps our "denial" is simply a tool to keep us from being overwhelmed.  I was struck this morning by today's photo on APOD, we as a species seem driven by this quest, and defined by it, as though it might even be an evolutionary aberration.

In choosing which or our primary traits to appreciate, I choose to marvel at our species pursuit of knowledge, and how unique this trait appears to be, at least in our world.  And as the power of this trait unfolds, to marvel, with knowledge and consciousness, at the grandness, symmetry, and its own way, the perfection, of the universe we find ourselves to be so much a part of.

Is not evolution defined by successful aberrations?

Today's muse, war.  There certainly is tremendous violence in our universe.  Are our vicious internecine wars simply an expression of some universal congruence?  A species skill used to annihilate all species competition, but then turned upon ourselves.  Perhaps evolution doing an "oops", that mix was a bit too strong, let's try again.  It would be unsettling to think that our species is just a failed evolutionary experiment that will soon implode.

Is war the remnants of our own evolutionary big bang?

This is the first sentence I wrote on this topic, and I was surprised to see it come out of my own hand.  I debated deleting it because it seems so ridiculous, but a sculptor acquaintance of mine told me a story about how he stopped destroying what he thought were his mistakes, because much to his surprise, others often thought that his mistakes were his best work. We truly don't seem to know what we are making most of the time.  So it stays here, unadorned making no sense to me, at least for now.

Today's muse, so much of our personal lives, and I suspect our species lives, are endless, mostly unconscious, behavioral repetition.  Perhaps it is, in part, the deeply embedded species drive to procreate, to sustain itself, that leads to this repetition i.e., that it is vital to increase the odds of "success" on an evolutionary level.  Certainly modern day humans have an almost pathological need to discount and minimize this drive.  This, what I will call "repetition awareness", is also made all the more challenging by the fact that much of our repetition transcends our own life e.g., that we are often unconsciously repeating multi-generational patterns, and maybe even multi-evolutionary patterns.

Looking at behavioral repetition in my own life, and in looking outwards at more macro-scale cultural repetition e.g., the human tendency towards tribalism, I tend to pay more attention to, and focus on, behavior that looks like it may be new, or, if not new, behavior that is new to my experience, or to the experience of the species.  It is in this light that I find the topic of technology fascinating.  At least as near as I can tell, though maybe we should ask the dophins to be sure, I can find no precedent for the rapid rise in technology, and its application, over say, the last 1,000 years of human history.  And 1,000 years in any evolutionary time frame, is but a blink of an eye.

A couple of simple points based on the above.  First, the rise of technology may have placed our species into a profound state of stress as we maybe exhibiting behavior that may not be evolutionarily "sane" (jury is definitely still out on that one), the byline might read, "Human Species Pleads Insanity".  Second, since we appear to have driven (pun intended) off the edge of the evolutionary road map, we need to be somewhat cautious about how we approach technology, especially as it relates to its impact on our species.  I have worked in various areas of technology for many years, and I am profoundly, profoundly surprised at how unconscious we generally are about the impact of technology on our species.  We pay little heed to its impacts until we are almost literally hit over the head.  As much as, some days, I might want to be a Luddite, this genie is well and truly out of the bottle.