I’ve got a two-part question for those willing to share their thoughts and knowledge on the topic of the direction of evolution.
The first question relates to the following quote from The Book by Allan Watts.
Mr. Watts concludes…
His question…
(italics throughout removed)
That aside, I’ve been wondering where evolution is headed. Certainly it will not stop with us. Now that survival has become less of a day to day struggle for our species as a whole in relation to our environment, which traits will become valued and critical enough to survive our bodily dissolution? This also brings up the question of purpose and intent in regards to evolution. It appears that there is a progression towards greater complexity. What lies beyond our current state of evolution? And how will it change the way we percieve the universe and our concepts of it.
From Bruce Sterling’s SF short story “Swarm”: Afriel, a human agent of the Solar System’s Shaper faction (specializing in gene-engineering), at war with the Mechanists (prosthetics and technology), has been sent to the Hive, a cluster of asteroids in a distant star system, where, in air-filled tunnels burrowed through the rock, live the Swarm, a race of nonsentient beings with many specialized castes. His mission is purportedly scientific study, but his real mission is to domesticate the Swarm, alter their genes to make them produce things the Shapers can use. At the end, his partner, the (real) scientist Mirny, vanishes, and Swarm of the soldier caste arrest him and take him before what appears to be a new caste, a Swarm with a giant brain, which has absorbed his partner’s mind and memories through a tentacle thrust into her head, so it can now speak her language. Afriel’s pheromonal experiments created a chemical imbalance which the Queen detected, triggering genetic patterns, causing the brain to be born to deal with the threat.
Evolution isn’t really headed anywhere…it simply is. There is no goal, no end product. The ‘best’ most adapted species after humans might be bacteria…or whatever other species has the best survival chance or is adapted best too the conditions at the time.
Well, I certainly couldn’t divine anything useful out of what looks to be a pretty bad novel. Maybe you could add some of your own thoughts to clarify?
As for the OP, the straightforward answer is that it is simply impossible to predict where life on earth will be in any substantial period of time from now, and anyone who says they know even an inkling of what the future holds in store is a fool or a liar.
As xtisme said, evolution doesn’t head anywhere. It’s just an explanation of why certain species prosper, not a sentient force that arranges things.
Certain characteristics are more suitable for various locations and some mutations will prosper according to what benefits they convey…
If the Earth was covered with water, every surviving species would have adapted to that.
If there’s a nuclear war, I understand cockroaches have some radiation resistance and will thus presumably ‘evolve’ to be the Masters of Earth.
It’s only a short story, and widely regarded by SF fans as a modern classic. As for its relevance: The Swarm (expressed through the brain replete, an emergency measure with a lifespan limited to a thousand years, and other fail-safes built in so it won’t try to take over the Hive) is content to be nonsentient. It just wants to go on living and living forever; having observed that in other races intelligence appears to lead to extinction, it does not want to evolve into any “higher” form, and places no value on intelligence for its own sake. A different POV from that usually found in SF, or in most thinking on the OP’s question, which usually assumes some sort of teleology is desirable.
Probably back to court the next time the Creationists attempt to insert their stealth Creationism under the guise of Intelligent Design into school curricula.
Most current niches are filled, so evolution isn’t going much of anywhere right now.
When the next catastrophe hits (asteroid? climate change? killer virus?) niches will reopen. Evolution will function as it always has: a million tiny experiments, some of which are successful because they are effective improvements, and some of which are successful because of blind luck. No one can predict what the new forms will be like. If humans are completely wiped out, for instance, there is nothing to suggest that our particular form of intelligence would reappear anytime soon. While it has been a successful adaption, it’s entirely likely that other adaptations would be just as successful.
The notion that evolution drives toward some sort of distant goal of faster/smarter/more complex/etc has no basis. Perhaps in the distant future most lifeforms on earth will be relatively simple, well adapted, very stupid bugs.
It might be more informative to speculate on what niches might open up, rather than where evolution is going. Evolution is a follower–not a leader. It’s descent with modification. While modification is an accidental leader, without the descent part, nothing changes, and the descent part is dependent on external circumstance–new niches, in particular, on average.
The concept of evolution of course isn’t sentient or purposeful in that way as noted by earlier posts. But if you meant where are humans headed in the future – which might be a complete misunderstanding of what you meant, in which case I apologize for going off thread – then I’d say I think we’ll move beyond our bodies into electrical, synaptic events in some computerized kind of way that will cause us to be less dependent on the physical world’s realities though obviously not completely so.
Right, except it’s only indirectly related to “surviving”. Reproducing, and passing your genes on to the next generation, is the key. There is often a correlation between those two things, but not always.
BTW, to the OP: Not to be snarky or anything, but you’re not the first to pose that question around here. It comes up several times a year. Join up and you’ll be able to search for past threads on that and other subjects.
Bingo. We see ourselves as the crowning product, the leading edge, of evolution because we’re the ones who are writing the story right now. But really, we’ve got no particular claim.
We’re clearly more successful in evolutionary terms than the other large predatory animals that have coexisted with us, in that we’re crowding out their niches, and their survival is dependent on our forbearance. But that’s about as much as can be said.
I believe it was right here, at the SD that they blew up that myth (can’t be bothered to search for link though). Cockroaches aren’t much better than humans wrt radiation resistance, which makes them the laughing stock of other insects.
This question - and the preceding explanatory paragraphs proposing that the external world didn’t really exist until there was a conscious entity to perceive it (like the metaphorical tree falling in the unvisited forest) - sounds quite profound. But is it really enlightening to suggest that history of whatever sort is extrapolated from the present-day universe? I’d say of course it is - retrospective deduction from the evidence currently at hand like fossil records, background cosmic radiation, or buried artefacts. And we can not only extrapolate the processes which have occurred in days gone by, but also the timeframe involved, regardless of the presence of an observer. Or am I missing something(s)?
From Mark Twain’s “Was the world made for man?” (1903)
As has been stated before, evolution is not end directed.
Nor is evolution always in the direction of increasing complexity. There are a huge variety of parasitic species, quite successful, thank you, that prosper despite reduction to almost bizzarely simple forms.
Evolution is headed for survival. Whether it gets there is pretty much random chance, with the outcome weighted by multiple individual iterations, over long periods of time.
I think there will be some major developments in hamster evolution over the coming millennia. I think we’ll see hamsters splitting into multiple species, with some varieties having even cuter and shorter tails, and others developing opposable thumbs and larger brains to better compete with pikas and guinea pigs. We may even see more aggressive, aquatic breeds like the killer rabbit that attacked Jimmy Carter.
Seriously, I’m at a loss as to why people who ask this question assume that the siginificant developments will be in human evolution, when we’re already successful enough that there are seven billion of us.
By sheer weight of numbers, or even weight of biomass, the bacteria are winning. Have been all along. They are lagging behind in art, and science, except medicine, where they are regaining a slight edge, after some setbacks last century.