Why The Internet Is Destroying Civilization
The combination of human mental hardwiring with modern technologies ensures our doom
When biologists want to study the mechanisms of evolution, they necessarily select model species that are short-lived. Only in this way can a sufficient number of generations be born, live, mate, and die within the span of an RO1 grant. Fruit flies and nematode worms consequently star in a great many research papers that elucidate how adaptations arise and spread across populations.
With the advent of powerful cheap computing technologies, some biologists — as well as physicists and mathematicians — have made efforts to study fundamental evolutionary mechanisms by means of creating simplified virtual species that, in addition to being able to move around and reproduce, also interact in basic ways with their environment. In this way, rather than being constrained by the lifespans of real living creatures, models can run millions of generations in a matter of hours. Such models have, from time to time, revealed quite unexpected results.
Far less commented upon, however, is the fact that we are running a second sort of evolutionary study thanks to ubiquitous computing and telecommunications technologies. Arguably one of the largest ecosystems in the world is now the Internet, and…
