I don’t necessarily believe that evolution has any purpose so I will not call this a theory as much as it is a hypothesis but if mankind does have a purpose I think it would simply be to recharge the atmosphere with available carbon.
“Recharge”?
Your “hypothesis” raises a lot more questions than it answers. The chief one being, “what is the overall purpose of the biosphere that this purpose for mankind serves?”
The biosphere was doing perfectly well maintaining equilibrium carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere for a long time. The main effect of humans in recent centuries is to take carbon that has been sequestered and unavailable for millions of years and putting it into the atmosphere, causing extremely sudden climate changes and other drastic changes to the biosphere.
Are you thinking in terms of 100 years? 1,000,000 years or a billion years?
What terms are you thinking of?
Really, your “hypothesis” makes no sense whatsoever, regardless of the time frame you are talking about.
“Recharge”?
Your “hypothesis” raises a lot more questions than it answers. The chief one being, “what is the overall purpose of the biosphere that this purpose for mankind serves?”
Well if you are thinking long term like a billion years or so I doubt man will play much a part in things that far down the future, But any very slight imbalance in available carbon would require some adjustment periodically to reach the long term goals of evolution which might be billions of years away.
What is your “hypothesis” for these long term goals?
As you said in your OP, evolution has no long term goals. So I still have no idea what you are talking about.
CO2 levels have changed greatly at various times over the past 500 million years. Life has carried on evolving regardless, although sometimes abrupt changes have been disruptive to the biosphere. Thanks to human disruption of the CO2 balance, we are in the midst of one of these disruptive changes that is likely to result in the extinction of many species and shifts in major biomes.
“Man kinds purpose”? Science and nature are not sentient beings that give purpose to that which exists.
On occasion I ponder whether or not we do have a creator at some level. The only way I know how to do that obviously is to take what I know or think I know and look for patterns that might suggest that evolution might actually be going somewhere, that it has taken on some direction. No other animal has had the direct impact that mankind has had so I find myself looking for possible reasons that such a disruptive creature might be allowed to exist. Carbon is the only reason I can come up with. I have no clue what long term goals might be making the assumption that they actually exist.
I’ll add to the consensus that evolution does not create purposes.
But not fighting the premise, I’d say that if humanity has a purpose beyond just existing, it’s to act as a means to distribute terrestrial lifeforms off the planet.
Excellent synopsis in a nutshell – that’s exactly the crux of the climate problem. The following graph (and the inset graph) illustrates this dramatically. In fact, CO2 levels are rising so fast that it’s hard for the published graphs to keep up – the main graph here is already way out of date – annually averaged CO2 levels are now nearly 410 ppm. On a scale of half a million years, post-industrial CO2 rise is a spike that goes almost straight up, and is larger in magnitude than the difference between ice age and interglacial maxima.
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Nature doesn’t have “reasons”. We do. Animals do. But asking whether mankind has a purposeful reason for existence is like asking what the purpose of last night’s windstorm was. There wasn’t any. Looking for purpose in nature is just anthropomorphizing nature, something we’ve been doing since the times of ancient mythologies, but it has no factual validity. As for evolution, it’s governed purely by success in survival.
Mankind is so disruptive because we’ve acquired the technological capabilities to disrupt many aspects of the natural world in the pursuit of our interests. Unfortunately, we seem to have acquired technological powers faster than we’ve acquired the wisdom to know how to use them. We are like children playing with vast and powerful machinery.
The most disruptive effect of humans is our effect on carbon levels. So the reason a disruptive creature is allowed to exist is to cause even more disruption?
I’m really not following you. You seem to believe that sometime in the future humans will “adjust” carbon levels in some way that will be beneficial to the biosphere, when exactly the reverse is what is currently going on.
No, not at all, my hypothesis is that once humans have recharged the atmosphere there " purpose" is pretty much done and evolution will continue on for another billion years or so.
Humans are not “recharging” the atmosphere. We are overcharging the atmosphere. Evolution will continue, with us or without us, until the Earth becomes unsuitable for life.
You keep saying you understand evolution doesn’t have a purpose, and then trying to identify some purpose for humans. This makes no sense.
Of course it makes sense, just because I don’t believe we have a purpose doesn’t mean I will quit looking for one.
Ok, I’m done here.
I have often said about certain specific individuals:
Everyone is good for something. That guy is good for a bad example.
I also sometimes use that line self-deprecatingly: Me? I’m a bad example.
In that same non-serious spirit I propose that humanity’s purpose is to be a bad example to the rest of the biosphere. In a Twitshell:
See that? Don’t be like that!
The whales are not amused. While the chimps and orangs are biding their time and learning to sharpen their sticks.
One of my college roommates was a very “interesting” character and scary smart. His personal take on this issue was trenchant as well:
According to Jim M: Humanity is God’s idea of a practical joke.
Switching to a serious vein …
Those are great graphs. Thank you.
For a different take on the same data and its geophysical consequences by an eminent authority on data presentation, see this xkcd. This particular episode doesn’t render well in Discourse’s onebox thingy so you’ll just have to click to see it.
Evolution has no purpose.
Evolution will continue as long as changes can happen within a population.
Personally I think cockroaches will ‘inherit’ the Earth.