À Rebours: The Path of Humanity

My hypothesis: wherever there is reason, evolution ceases.

That, then, is the path of humanity - to stand outside evolution, against it, in fact. Humans are, it seems, unique in this aspect, that we solve the problem of "how to be?" through reason. While every other organism on this planet goes about its existence eternally subservient to the environment it finds itself in, the human species turns the problem on its head and simply changes the environment to one it has evolved to inhabit. A cynical view would be to claim that humans are a biological homo-terraforming mechanism. And this has been enormously successful so far - we (and our livestock) account for 98% of ALL living stuff on Earth. While this might not be a measure of evolutionary fitness, it does say this - by standing against evolution, humanity has spared itself immeasurable suffering. Take vaccines, for example. Natural selection would dictate that children die from diseases like smallpox until a mutation occurs that enables resisting the virus and then spreading the gene in the population. The trouble with this 100% certified natural scenario is that:

A) No guarantee that the mutation will occur before the virus (or something else with it) kills everyone, i.e. protracted extinction.

B) Until the mutation occurs (and we are talking several thousand years here) all infected suffer and/or die.

C) When the mutation occurs, it is picked by natural selection, meaning, it must only provide the bare minimum - survival until offspring is produced. There is plenty of opportunity for the mutation to allow resisting the virus, but shorten the lifespan, not to mention leave scars, damage joints, blindness etc. 

So, you see, human lives on individual and species level go stellarly better if we can avoid contracting smallpox altogether. Stated more generally - not everything that can happen, should happen. Or, even crudely - of all possibilities, practically all are horrible. Not trying to be a downer here, but one must realize the fact of the matter that we lead a pampered existence here on Earth, tucked away safely in a gravity well just far enough from a nuclear fusion reactor and there is an infinite amount of things that can go wrong and they probably, naturally will. Which is why, again, humans will only do good by standing against nature.

There are problems, however. We suck at standing against nature! This is, of course, not entirely our fault. After all, what reason we have, we got from the very thing we seek to master - nature. And it is plain that our reasoning capacity was selected naturally - just the sufficient minimum, not cutting edge quality. So we have, essentially, an arms race. On one side nature that has all the time in the world and works with absolute ignorance, also known as Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning (here I point towards Dennett's brilliant intro on this point); and on the other defiant primates with meager lives, rudimentary reason and staggering capacity for suffering (we don't stand a chance, lol). And this is how it's going to be forever and ever. We did not evolve (notice the simple past) to have our needs met and to feel bliss. Every milligram (I'd say ounce, but we do not use Imperial units here) of stuff that we call good has come about not because we lived in accordance with nature, but because we have had the reason to tell the natural order of things to go fuck itself. Understand this - nature and humanity can not and will not, ever, be lovers. Nature works on ignorance and successful reproduction, while humanity thrives on exactly the opposite - intelligence and contraception (yup, read). But back to the point, we do suck at reasoning so bad it makes baby Jesus cry (Christmas joke). All the failures in our campaign against nature can be ascribed to poor reasoning - pollution, war, famine, bad governance and staggering religiosity. It's not that we couldn't run fast enough, or lift something heavier or be awake for longer, no - when we fail it's because reasoning was off duty. And while I do agree that reasoning without love would be pointless, this argument is moot, because reasoning is a higher brain function - people that can reason most definitely love.

So how do we advance the war on nature? We don't. What we need is a cold war to get our shit together. And by shit I mean two things - reasoning and creation (not creativity). Reasoning is self-explanatory - first we must understand our enemy, nature, to fight it properly. Creation is a longer story though. It's 2011 and we are in dire straits here, a billion people starve, oil is set to "drip", markets shake and wobble, EU considers keeling over, global warming robs us of white winters and we still have no clue how to generate the electricity we need without shooting ourselves in the foot, chest and ass and an ever increasing amount of people roll over the face of the Earth, rather than walk (yes, that was a fat joke). The reason is consumption. Or, rather, consumerism - the idea that the measure of well-being is how much goods and services are consumed. Don't get me wrong, having stuff to consume is definitely better than not having, but an ideology (yes, the I word) like that misses a central point - production or creation. We need to shift the attention from consumerism to creationism (lol, this wording will make people rage) and keep an eye on measures like production efficiency (not max output) and fine-tuning ratio (I just came up with that just now). Here is what I mean - there are two types of production on this planet: inefficient and grossly inefficient. This is no joke - every production activity loses energy and materials in the process. Nature working with absolute ignorance (the idiot trees) can keep waste to a minimum, most human industry works with waste 50 times nature's benchmark. So the way to beat nature in our tug of war is simple - produce energy and use materials more efficiently than nature. We need nature 2.0, made better through reason. We need to fix those laryngeal nerves, appendices, vitamin C metabolism, testicular development - and that's just the human body. We could then fine-tune photo-synthesis to allow maximal absorption of solar radiation, or go the technological path and develop PV panels that are much more efficient that plants (as far as I know, green plants convert 2% of radiation into chemical energy).

That is what I mean by creation. We have to stop destroying the naturally tuned systems already in place in our war against nature and first replace them with better, intelligently designed improvements.

I leave you with a quote from Mr. Nietzsche which, in turn, I got from the brilliant game Alfa Centauri:

"Companions, the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks - those who write new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for harvest."