Humans are the most sophisticated, intelligent species on the planet today, perched atop Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’. We have beaten all odds, prevailed over countless existential threats to conquer and colonize earth. We have proved ourselves the ‘fittest’ in the game of survival by taming nature to serve us. Slowly, with the intellectual prowess of our highly evolved brains, we are grabbing even more control from nature. Soon we may be able to we might beat it at its own game!
Scientists say that evolution is an ongoing process, constantly in action. Even if effects usually take thousands of years to become discernible. So if the survival problem is now behind us, what is our genome evolving towards from here?
What is the next evolutionary goal-post? The new horizon?
The cheerleaders of science will tell you that nature’s plan for us is irrelevant now and can be dismissed. That is because technology has taken over the responsibility of evolution out of nature’s hands. It will lead us to an eternal, trans-human heaven. Ask futurist Ray Kurzweil. He says that the job of nature is now going to be much more effectively handled by the Gods of technology. New evolutionary horizons will be now be reached by new levels of technological sophistication. On that alone. The tremendous power of our modern technologies is giving us God-like powers and we hope to become masters of the universe.
However, can technology evolve enough to make us the master of our lives? Can it eliminate our sufferings, erase our unhappiness, solve the problems of our human condition for good? Can it deliver us from existential angst? Will it help fulfill us?
We are using our tremendous mental capabilities to evolve technology, but this evolution is external only. Could we use our tremendous mental capabilities to evolve further biologically? Who says we humans have evolved to the peak of our biological potential.What if there was more to go?
What if we have unestimated the goal post of our specie evolution? Not external, no, but of our inherent biology?
The grand narrative of the Darwinian ‘Theory of Evolution’ is falling short on most measures.This evolution theory formulated 150 years ago is the mainstay worldview among intelligentsia and commoners, to date, notwithstanding its oversimplified logic. Random mutations by natural selection seems like a reasonable idea, but it has remained just that, an idea. A suggestion. A plausible theory. There is no strong working mechanism which clearly outlines the process of formation of complex structures from simple ones through random mutations. There is no strong interrogation of ‘why’ evolution happens. Of what its impetus, its driving force maybe. The gap in fossil records takes away credence from the idea of evolution marching forward in slow, piecemeal mutations. Chemistry has tried hard in the laboratory, but failed to re-produce the simplest structure of the DNA code from simple proteins. Junk DNA has no explanation for itself in the Darwinian theory of evolution. Even the bio-geographical distribution of all species cannot be explained by evolution.
This is not to claim that the theory is false, but that that it is incomplete.
Fortunately, or unfortunately for the theory of evolution, tremendous insight has come in from the exciting new field of epigenetics. Fortunate because it has been able to tackle some serious puzzles unsolvable in this model of biological evolution. Unfortunate because it debunks some basic assumptions of the theory.
