Homo sapien’s brain has ensured it will never evolve

As I’ve written before, an underlying assumption clung to by most human beings is that our evolution is a positive process of gradually increasing intelligence and understanding. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. Evolution is normally a reaction to environmental change. Abnormally, it can be a freak response to isolation.

Thus, we have big brains because we came down from trees, and needed more cranial oxygen to run from predators. And Madagascar is an interesting place to visit, because it spent a few million years on its own before boats and planes were invented.

However, being creative, big-brain humans, we seem keen to control climate change….and invent ways to ensure we will never be isolated.

We began with the wheel to make carts. Then boats, to make shore. Then ships, to cross oceans. Next came bicycles, cars, airships, aeroplanes, and rockets. Telephones, television, and mobile phones. Computers, laptops, emails and skype. The last thing a contemporary human can ever be is alone.

Along the way, we got Green. A lot of Green – recycling nasty crap and reusing rather than buying more crap – is good. But an amount of at least equal size – half-baked theories and Armaggedon predictions about atmospheric damage and greenhouse gases – is looking increasingly like it might just be bollocks.

The bottom line is that, when it comes to finding isolation – or allowing the climate to change – we seem determined to make both impossible on Planet Earth.

This ensures that our evolution into a new species can never happen on this planet. Even if a major natural disaster or massive war separated parts of our species, it wouldn’t be long (knowing what we already know) before we were reunited again.

We are a dead end. As a geneticist said to me seven years ago over a Christmas lunch, the only answer would be for us to increase our gene pool by mating with another species. And as yet (thank God) nobody knows how to do that.

However, there is one other possibility. If a global pandemic targeted every adult – leaving only adolescents and infants in a kind of global Lord of the Flies – the breakdown of communications, reversion to daily survival, and loss of learning might mean (say) Australians having 400,000 years to become something different.

But would any other change in the climate, food available, or predators make that a change for good, or bad….or indeed, at all? Nobody can tell.

The only thing we can say for certain is that Homo sapiens is the only species on earth that has ever faced such a dilemma based entirely on creative intelligence.

It is beyond ironic. In fact, it is almost spooky.