A Different Kind Of Evolution

How humans could split into two distinct species thanks to our use of modern technologies

Until extremely recently, all of nature experienced the same basic forces of evolution. Organisms adapt to enable themselves to cope slightly better with the challenges posed by the environment in which they live. Over generations, random mutations are sorted by means of natural selection so that any mutations that confer a slight additional benefit are on average conserved while mutations that diminish adaptiveness are on average prone to falling out of the gene pool. Extinctions happen when external changes are so rapid and so significant that creatures don’t have sufficient time for this lengthy process to operate. For nearly four billion years this is how life evolved.

Then along came humans.

Since the largely accidental development of agriculture at the end of the last Ice Age some 13,000 years ago (that was made possible by changes in the genes of certain grasses) we humans have been extricating ourselves from many of the selection pressures operating on all other organisms and substituting home-made selection pressures in their place. As the pace of technological advancement has dramatically accelerated over the last few hundred years, we’re reaching the point where most of the selection pressures operating on our species are hardwired behaviors resulting from eons of natural selection that are being amplified by the technologies created by a tiny fraction of humanity capable of sustained and reasonably coherent conscious thought.

Usually, technologies merely enable us to do what we’ve always done, but on a larger scale. Modern weapons systems enable us to slaughter each other in numbers far greater than anything Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan could have dreamed of. Modern entertainment devices permit us to watch a wider range of amusements than could have been displayed around a camp fire 7,000 years ago. But at root our hardwired human behaviors are unchanged and the greatest danger most humans face is always another human who wants to come along and take whatever it is we have.

All our group behaviors, whether in corporations or military organizations or political Parties, remain as they always have been…