extinction | RobertLovesPi.net

[My first post on this subject appeared here.]

In the future, the human race, homo sapiens, will do what all living organisms do when circumstances change, as they always do, sooner or later. We will adapt, migrate, and/or die. Since this is a post about speciation, I’m mentally setting that part of my brain which worries about extinction happening relatively soon to “hopeful,” for the duration of writing this post.

For speciation to happen, two things must happen first: reproductive isolation, and the passage of a lot of time. Migration (to off-earth colonies, for example) can produce reproductive isolation, but so can other things. As for adaptation, this is done in many ways by our species, consciously, as well as unconsciously. Evolution is always happening, but it is the slowest of all human adaptive processes. It is estimated that it has taken us (and everything else) 3.85 billion years to evolve, after all, and that’s roughly the most recent third of the time since the Big Bang.

Extra-terrestrial colonies would definitely be a huge “push” toward speciation, especially colonies with low gravity, relative to that experienced by other people. As well-described in Robert Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, return to a high-gravity environment, after many years in a low-gravity environment, would carry significant health effects, with serious risks of sever complications, up to, and including, death. If we ever establish colonies outside the solar system, this isolation will become even more extreme, simply due to the enormous distances and travel-times involved.

However, we will speciate, as will all other species, if we stay alive long enough, even if no more of us leave low-Earth orbit.

In my previous post on this subject, I speculated about the emergence of fully-speciated homo lunaris, homo literaticus, homo illiteraticus, artificially-genetically-modified humans (whom I did not name then, but homo techogeneticus would do nicely), and homo cyberneticus. An increase in the number of infertile offspring between two groups, combined with a falling birthrate between them, persisting over millennia, would be an early warning signal that speciation might be happening — that’s how long this evolutionary process takes.

Given enough time, and increased reproductive isolation from non-“Aspies,” another group which could speciate is the population with Asperger’s, to form homo aspergerus, primarily because of the difficulties each group of people have communicating with the other group. However, I’ve written several posts already which seek to help Aspies and non-Aspies understand, and bridge, the communication-gap. What’s going on here? Simple: evolution is simply a process which happens. It has no ethics. It is neither good nor evil. More to the point, just because I can discern a possible future does not mean I want that possibility to become real.

In what other ways could speciation happen? A widenining gap between the rich and poor certainly seems possible as a “push” towards speciation, at least currently, which could create homo plutocraticus and homo povertus. It is easily possible to imagine this happening along with the emergence of homo cyberneticus.

Another interesting possibility would occur if humanity survived in the North and Southern hemispheres, near the poles, but extreme global warming made tropical regions uninhabitable, and the equator untraversable, or at least very rarely crossed. In this case, it is hard to imagine what direction the changes would take, for they could go in many directions. Names for such Northern and Southern humans could be homo borealis and homo australis, from our point of view. In theirs, of course, as in many of these scenarios, the likely terms each group will use for the other will translate, roughly, as “us” and “them,” unless they somehow manage to shed the primate characteristic of forming rival groups, one which long predates humanity.

How could the maximum number of new species emerge in the least time possible? This is known: a mass extinction would be needed, one which leaves a small (but large enough) percentage of humanity alive, and fertile. This would open numerous ecological niches which we, and other extant species, would rapidly fill, by rapid speciation, into an amazing variety of forms. Again, this simply happens — that does not mean it is to be desired, and I am certainly not hoping for it to happen soon. I simply realize that it has happened before, and we have no reason to think it will not happen again.

You may already know I am an atheist, and may be unaware that some of us have favorite passages from the Bible which were not selected for purposes of ridicule, nor of criticism of the Bible, nor because of dislike of any religion. This is my favorite passage because it contains excellent advice. I do not need “faith,” as that word is commonly understood, nor a literal belief in the devil, to recognize, and appreciate, good advice.

What’s not to like about self-control? Or being alert? Those things can keep us all alive. They are important. I used to only cite the first sentence here as my favorite part of the Bible, but have decided to include two complete verses, for context, and elaboration through metaphor, as I interpret this passage. I see no reason not to.

Atheists (only capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, by the way) don’t have denominations, nor creeds, and there are as many different types of atheist as there are atheists. Atheism isn’t a religion — the word simply describes existence without religion. Everyone is born an atheist, albeit an unconscious one. Also, those who remain, or return to, atheism, change, during the course of our lives, just as theists do. The only people who do not change are the dead.

In defiance of stereotype, we are not all angry and bitter, although some of us, it must be admitted, are. (I used to be far more bitter than I am now, although I am working hard to change that.) Many of us even believe in non-theistic ideas which make absolutely no sense, such as, for example, 9/11 conspiracy theories. We only have one thing in common: we lack belief in deities. You almost certainly lack belief in at least some deities, ones which others fervently believe in. If you are a theist, well, atheists just take things a bit further than you — that’s all. We don’t all hate theists, and (thankfully) not all theists hate us. The ability to respectfully disagree is at least one of the keys to peaceful coexistence. Universal agreement among humans simply will not happen (and would be horribly boring, anyway), until the death of the penultimate person, at least. Even if there is a “last person alive” scenario in the (hopefully very distant) future, this unknown last human being will still have internal disagreements, and will almost certainly disagree with remembered ideas of the dead. In fact, given human nature, and history, such a disagreement might even be the cause of the next-to-last person’s death, at the hands of the last man, or woman, ever to live.

I do not want homo sapiens to end this way. I’d like us to continue, for many generations, until evolution, and speciation, replace us with successor species, a long time from now — still people, but different, in ways we cannot now know, and, hopefully, people who have long ago learned to live without constantly killing each other. Isn’t it about time we left this nasty habit called “war” behind, along with murder, rape, and the rest of the litany of human horror?

I’m a big fan of John Lennon, but I’d far rather imagine no war than “imagine no religion,” and I no longer accept the idea, common among atheists, that the second is a prerequisite for the first.

Since we have, as a species, figured out several ways to self-destruct, we cannot afford to wait for evolution to “teach” us how to coexist peacefully. Evolution is far more efficient at destruction than creation, after all, being a random process. Far more species have gone extinct than exist today, and the process of evolution simply does not care whether we live or die. Entropy happens. It took 3.85 billion years of natural selection to get here, and we will not get a second chance to get it right.

We must figure out effective ways to live with our differences now. I do not mean that we should somehow erase our differences, for I have no desire to live in a world of clones of myself, and I doubt you want to live in your version of such a world, either. We do, however, need to come to terms, as a world-wide society, with the inescapable fact that people are different. We have a right to be different, it’s good that we are, and the fact that we vary so much is certainly is no excuse for killing, nor even hating, anyone.

There is another part of human nature that is on our side in our struggle for survival, and this is the hopeful part of this essay. We are good at figuring things out. We actually enjoy trying our best to solve puzzles. We pay hard-earned money for them constantly! Some of us absolutely obsess over single problems, for days — or years — at a time. Well, this is the best, most important problem we have ever faced, with the highest stakes imaginable: how to avoid our own extinction. The world isn’t a casino with no exit, though. It has been mostly a game of chance, so far — and we’ve been lucky to have made it to the present. However, it doesn’t have to be the way it has been, with us stumbling through history, like drunk monkeys in a minefield — which we pretty much are, right now.

We have minds, and it’s time to use them. We can stop playing roulette, especially the Russian variety, and sit down at the table to play chess, instead. We can figure this out.

If this Big Problem isn’t solved soon, though, there may not be a long wait for extinction. It could very well be later than you think. Therefore, I encourage everyone to, in the words of the Bible, “Be self-controlled and alert.” That’s a good place to start.