Deliberate Evolution: Humanity’s challenging path to abandon Darwinism

A caterpillar crawls and embarks on the journey of life, a tumultuous path of survival, until one day, the six-legged insect begins complete metamorphosis. In just days, an utterly unrecognizable creature emerges and unfolds its wings. For the butterfly, however, this isn’t the beginning of a new life of adventure. It has all but one day to find a partner. Mother nature’s intricate effort was only to grant the adult butterfly a few days of life to mate and lay a couple of hundred eggs, of which only about eight will survive. Then, the butterfly has concluded its purpose- its job is done. There is no lingering. Once the strictly programmed cycle of life is complete, the butterfly is no longer. 

We, humans, having established our superiority to other inhabitants on Earth, tend to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of evolution. Many of us, especially those fortunate to live in free, modern societies, incessantly aspire to move closer to our idea of a “perfect” lifestyle. However, as we casually consume the products and creations of society’s genius in everyday life in pursuit of comfort and enjoyable experiences, we inevitably succumb to illness and are vexed by constantly attaining basic needs. In the fleeting moments of precious life, we come to terms with being trapped in the ticking time bomb of our bodies, even if we, unlike many other living beings like the butterfly, have some control over our life cycle and reproduction. 

Meanwhile, we keep moving forward with a constant hope of a better future - for this is our inherent motivation. Not long ago, many of our parents and friends lived in a world without mobile phones, public wi-fi, and GPS. Today, we have the ability to study interstellar space from a floating vessel beyond the solar system. We use telescopes deep in space to search for other life forms, and yet reversely, we interfere. We split atoms and transmit AI-powered nanobots inside our bodies. Never have we been able to know this much, do so much, be this connected, and live this long. 

We have immensely accelerated the rate of our progress only within the last few centuries: written by the Persian Polymath Avicenna, “The Canon of Medicine” served as a definitive medical textbook from its publication in 1025 through the beginning of the 18th century. Comparably in today’s world, our clinical knowledge capacity doubles every 18 months. In 1982, Engineer and Inventor R. Buckminster estimated that up until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II, general knowledge doubled every 25 years. Today, on average, humanity’s knowledge doubles every 13 months. 

Despite this wealth of knowledge and these staggering capabilities, scientists still debate on such existential topics as the exact nature of the origins of our universe and the core theories that frame our life on Earth. We barely know anything about vast cosmic structures, such as the mysterious substance we call dark matter or spacetime regions that we so eloquently refer to as black holes. 

The truth is that there may be much beyond what our brain can comprehend, at least in its current form. Like all living beings, we are designed to survive and reproduce, passing on our genes indefinitely. We may not be so different from the caterpillar at its larva stage. Nature tells us this in peculiar ways. We eat, sleep, and go through physiological processes that push us to procreate and be done. Remember the butterfly… It is the in-between that differentiates us from the insect. We have more than just days to figure it out; while we have evolved in inconceivable ways, our health dependencies and basic needs remain the same. 

Our life is fragile and, at all times, circumstantial. Given extreme conditions, a human can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Our planet Earth where we have our home is a small blue dot relative to the vastness of the Universe. It hosts life only on its certain parts –  away from the poles and just at the right altitude. We require air, with around 21% oxygen concentration to breathe and acceptable atmospheric pressure, measured by our geographical relation to the sea level - to not pass out.  We don’t organize life underground because there’s no light and enough oxygen to live. We can’t live at altitudes higher than around 4500 meters. Our internal body temperature has to be maintained at around 36.6C degrees centigrade. More than a few degrees of variation, either way, indicates an illness, slightly more, and it is fatal. The body heat of 42C proves lethal, while at 21C, the body freezes to death. 

We depend entirely on specific settings within a program we cannot break into, at least not yet. These pre-programmed settings can be described as our biological fragility - an umbrella term for what puts our survival under conditions. It drives us to move through life with our fingers crossed, hoping for approximately 80 years of a relatively active life while we manage our needs.   

Since our genetically installed code and mission is to create the next generation, we are not made to last. Thanks to evolution, we, however, have slowly increased our intelligence and adaptability. Modern medicine has extended our active lives by decades, and we don’t need to be “replaced” as quickly as our predecessors that lived in eras with a life expectancy of fewer than 50 years. Yet, we are more and more devoted and dependent on specific postures, while getting them, in turn, creates new vulnerabilities: We need a facelift to maintain a youthful physique, a doctor to cure our burnout or depression, a gym to eliminate the consequence of a sedentary lifestyle or a special diet to be healthy. We have become very dependent on the structures we built to uphold the lifestyles we sought. But if something disruptive were to occur on the planet, we would likely experience a complete failure in our ability to survive. 

While we go about managing our biological fragility, we also inevitably interact with the environment. Since ancient times, when people understood the rudiments of farming, we’ve been transforming the environment. We continuously take the resources we need from the air, soil, rivers and seas, even deep beneath the earth’s crust, and alter the natural landscape. As we rapidly grow beyond eight billion in population, so does the scope of our use of the environment. This greater impact brings bigger conflicts and global issues, forcing us to look for ways to minimize them. 

All our conflicts have the same bottom line: how shall we distribute the finite oil, gas, drinking water, and arable land? Scarcity is framed as the most significant issue we have ever had, and it is everywhere, from languishing villages to the most ostentatious suburban villas.  

We finally understand that there is a dire need for change. To resolve growing concerns in particular areas, we have invented advanced tools and altered our lifestyles to work around scarcity. We are launching big waste-free infrastructure projects, producing and consuming much more electricity, genetically modifying food for faster growth to feed larger populations, investing in desalination technology to use seawater for drinking, and producing more and more medicine for our seemingly endless ailments.   

While we hoard more resources and create redundancies to ensure that we are better off in case a calamity hits, our solutions to scarcity remain linear, straightforward, and increasingly costly. Even in the best-case scenario, where we can manufacture a gigantic supply of fresh water, food, and oil or stop emitting poisonous gasses and other pollutants, the fundamentals of the human condition will remain unchanged.   

Here is what we miss at the core: all the essentials required for our survival, even air and sunlight, are ultimately finite, and everything on our planet, including the planet itself, has an expiration date. We could go to live elsewhere, which has already been on our minds; however, we are designed to only survive on Earth or in an equivalent environment. Scarcity on Earth and, more precisely, the idea of it exists because of our design - our complete dependency on our surroundings. If our needs didn’t drive us to use the planet's resources, scarcity wouldn't matter to us. It simply wouldn’t exist. So, can it be that the issue is internal? 

Our main existential problem is not scarcity. It is how we still repeat the same pre-programmed pattern of our need-based, fragile, biology-driven survival. Throughout the history of the planet and our species to date, it is evolution that has driven improvements in human design. However, we have not been waiting for evolution to catch up. Throughout time, we have invented tools and found ways to influence evolution. Our drive to fight scarcity has been continuously used to overcome our biological fragility. Fast forward to our days, recent inventions in science and technology have led to rapid leaps toward confronting our limitations, and the speed of this progress continues to increase. 

While we have mainly applied technology for external use in the past, we are shifting the focus to improving our biological makeup – changing DNA to enable coordination of our body’s own inner ‘control panel’ without external devices. Considering the rate at which modern medicine is developing and AI becoming a force multiplier, we may soon have cures or vaccines for almost every disease and go beyond. 

Ultimately, instead of the natural evolutionary urge of passing on genetic material, we could utilize technology to crack the code, unlocking such opportunities for us as ageless living and leading us to a self-designed, deliberate evolution. 

We might be on the brink of these otherworldly transformations. We already experiment with gene editing to stop the processes of aging. Scientists and thinkers are theorizing how we can borrow essential traits of durability found in nature and animals to later apply technology and allow us new abilities, enabling a new level of human enhancement. We could soon be able to fly, breathe underwater or survive in extreme conditions. 

Moving through multiple stages of advancement, we should be able to gradually achieve complete independence from the environment allowing us to live even outside the Earth’s atmosphere. Needless to say, this will also free us from the paradigm of considering the fight against scarcity and its temporary reduction as an essential civilizational achievement. 

It’s evident that our current bodily functions only serve our survival rather than define us. So, it is yet to be understood and determined what we will keep, add and discard at the following stages of humanity’s development. Whatever the answer, when this happens, the new species will take flight, leaving issues such as scarcity of resources behind as a memento from the current biological human.