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The basic premis of this book is that humanity (and all life on Earth) is very much a work-in-progress. There is nothing static or finished about the human design. It evolved to get where it is today, and it will continue to evolve with each generation to get better at fitting the world it lives in.
Also, the world we live in has changed dramatically. The world humans live in, has changed dramatically with the introduction of civilization. This means that the evolutionary pressures on mankind have changed direction dramatically. (I will talk more about this in the book.)
The neat part about using Evolution as the tool for guiding human development is that it can solve "unsolvable" problems -- problems that are so complex or so dynamic that they are hard to even formulate as questions, much less find any logical way to solve. Here is an example of one such complex question that I noticed as a boy growing up...
When I was young we had cats as pets. Some of those cats would have kittens, and I would watch them grow. The kittens would suckle off their mother, but mom's teats were not all equal: the ones at the back were bigger, and I suspect they gave a bit more milk. What I saw was the kittens did not treat the teats equally and they quickly developed a pecking order and got used to getting "their" teat. So, if you were a young kitten competing against brothers and sisters for the best teat, size and strength were valuable traits. This meant that it was a good thing to invest your milk energy in growing bigger and stronger. However... these same kittens would often contract an eye fungus disease just as their eyes opened. If this disease was left untreated, they would go blind. So, size and strength were important things to invest energy in, but so was the immune system. This means that kittens must balance how they invest their milk energy. They can invest in growing bigger, or they can invest in growing more disease resistant. They must do both, but how much should go into each? And, there is an additional feedback loop in this tradeoff: if a young kitten is big and strong it gets more milk, so it has more to invest in both size and strength and the immune system. The question facing the cat "designer" is: how do you balance these competing investments? How much energy do you give to growth and how much do you give to immune system?
The answer is... I, as a human, don't know! I can hardly formulate the parameters for such a messy problem, much less solve it! But Mother Nature as designer has simply tried this experiment millions and billions of times to come up with the correct answer. And... she is still trying the experiment every time a new litter of kittens is born! The "right way" gets encoded in the DNA that is passed down to future generations of kittens, and all the "wrong ways" don't. This is now Mother Nature, Design Engineer, solves all the interlocking problems of life: try, try again.
The solutions Evolution comes up with are "sufficient" solutions -- they solve the problem. The solution may be elegant, it may be brilliant, but it is for sure sufficient. If it is sufficient it will be passed on, if it is not, it won't. Keep in mind that "sufficient" is judged in the context of a messy real world that changes from day-to-day and place-to-place. It's a world that is filled with a changing physical environment as well as a changing biological environment. Sufficient must be judged in the harsh light of all this complexity.
If you feel that mankind is a finished product. If you feel that mankind was created once and simply produces more of that same creation with each generation, then the rest of this book is going to be dull reading. The presumption of this book is that mankind is very much a work in progress, and that mankind is changing with each generation.
If mankind is changing, then it is valuable to ask the question, "Changing into what?" and that is the question that is at the heart of this book.
I'm writing these because in telling us about our past and present, I'm giving us information to predict our future. Evolution presumes that humanity is a work in progress and as the environment we live in changes, we should expect the human form to adapt to those changes. Evolution presumes that there is a fairly tight relation between the environment an organism lives in and the form of the organism. The organism is constantly being tested and stressed by the environment, so it cannot deviate much in form and stay successful... unless it's environment changes.
As mankind has civilized his environment has changed dramatically. For instance, most civilized humans live in housing of some sort, not in caves or trees or sleeping under the stars. This is changing the evolutionary pressure on the human body. The stresses caused by sleeping in caves or trees or under the stars that strongly controlled the design of our bodies are no longer there. (One example of such a stress is waking up cold in the morning after spending a night sleeping on cold hard ground.) Without that "constraint" the design of successful humans can change, and will. This is something that the Evolution model recognizes and can deal with.
Likewise, the social conditions of humans have changed, and this dramatically affects what are successful ways of thinking. Stone Age humans live in tribes of fifty to two hundred people. Civilized humans live in numerous different groups with organization sizes ranging from dozens to millions. Successful ways of thinking are going to be different in the civilized environment.
What this discussion lets us do is explore how the human body and human mind will change with future generations. This is important because, as I just pointed out, mankind is now mostly Civilized, not Stone Age. This means that for the next ten generations there will be very different pressures on the human form than there were for the previous thousand generations -- the generations when mankind lived as Stone Age Man in a world that was in a warm episode between two Ice Ages.
With apologies to Sherlock Holmes, "Great changes are a foot!" and with the concepts I outline in this discussion, we can work on predicting those changes.
-- The End --
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