Biological Evolution from Within

Beyond Darwin's Horizon

We often overlook or give little consideration to the question of whether humans are the ultimate step of evolution or, eventually, our species might transcend itself. I rarely hear evolutionary biologists pondering this question. While it has become a widespread fashion to predict a transhumanist future where humans will hybridize into a mix of flesh and machine, nobody seems to be interested in what Nature might hold in reserve for us. I always perceived this as a cognitive dissonance. Didn’t science tell us, for about one and half a century, that natural Darwinian evolution is true? Of course, it is. Right? So, why do we perceive it so difficult to think in terms of the future natural evolution of mankind?

The following are the kind of objections and counterarguments I got from smart and scientifically-minded people.

Several of them would tell you that predicting the future of human evolution is highly speculative and uncertain, it's difficult to predict the specific direction and outcomes of such changes.

I pushed back on this saying that this misses the point. We know that evolution is influenced by various unpredictable factors, including genetic, environmental, and cultural factors, but the question is not what exact future is waiting for us, but rather if evolution has stopped with the human being or if we will, as every other species, be able to go beyond ourselves?

Then, once this has been clarified, the following arguments begin to surface: Advancements in technology, such as gene engineering, medicine, AI, brain implants, etc., could potentially lead to intentional modifications in the human genome, our body, and our cognitive abilities. Thus, we will take up our evolutionary fate, Nature will soon have no say and it makes no sense to ask questions about our natural evolutionary destiny.

Might be. But wherefrom comes this overconfident belief that we will be able to do so? Despite all the hopes and hype surrounding biotechnologies, medicine, AI, stem cells, transplants, etc., we are not only light years away from being able to realize any of those transhumanist dreams, but things seem to become increasingly complicated and out of reach the more science progresses.

For example, after the mapping of the human genome, we thought that this would automatically pave the way to the development of personalized medicine that could treat genetic diseases. But this turned out to be a vain chimera. Genetic engineering has long been hailed as a revolutionary technology with immense potential. However, despite the initial excitement and high expectations, even though genetic engineering has also had some significant successes, it has been disappointing with a number of failed promises. Reality has proven to be far more complex than expected. Most of the predictions scientists made a few decades ago have not lived up to their initial promises. The complexity of biological systems, and the limitations of current technology, have made it clear that there is a huge gap between what we initially envisioned and what can be realistically achieved.

I think that we aren’t aware of the bottomless complexity of Nature. There is still a large movement of intellectuals who truly believes that a science of self-organizing complex system, supplemented by mathematics, chaos theory, network theory, computer simulations, and God knows what, is going to lead us toward a paradigm shift. While these theories might furnish us with some insights into the workings of dynamical systems, I find this, however, a very naïve expectation. Nature is much more complicated than we believe and can imagine. It is not willing to be apprehended and comprehended in terms of the simplistic human one-dimensional thinking patterns and reductionist materialistic processes. I contend that it is beyond the human cognitive faculties.

Anyway, the ability to alter the genome of living organisms to create new species with higher cognitive abilities and physical skills remains something we will continue to see only in sci-fi films for a very long time, perhaps forever. Whatever the pervasive sensational announcements coming from the media might tell us, we are nowhere near being able to alter the direction of our natural evolution.

Perhaps, a deeper reason why scientists and philosophers look at the future of humanity only in terms of technological progress, and only rarely in terms of mental, spiritual, and biological natural evolution, is that the evolutionary changes occur gradually over very long periods of time. We are talking not of thousands but possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Therefore, according to this line of reasoning, it makes no sense to ponder about what will happen to humanity in the years 100,000 AD, let us leave that to posterity.

This is, indeed, in my view, a more serious objection. It is a fact that evolution is a slow process compared to a human lifespan. According to modern evolutionary biology, our species, the homo sapiens, emerged about 250,000 years ago in some African savanna. Since then, we made some cultural and technological progress, but one might legitimately doubt that we evolved much since then. There has been prevalently technological and material advancement but, from the psychological perspective, we are to a large degree still an ‘animal-like’ species that is scarcely able to detach from its instinctive nature. Greed, violence, wars, injustice, selfishness, etc., are the hallmarks that characterized our history. And, from the scientific biological perspective, there hasn’t been much of a genetic and phenotypic change either. Accordingly, if we will transcend ourselves, that might happen in about 100,000 years, or even more.

While this reasoning seems to be plausible and is in line with what modern science suggests, it relies, again, on-premises we rarely question.

We have already seen how biology is not really the ‘science of life’, but only the science of the material manifestation of life. Modern biology still conceives evolution as something guided by purely material processes (natural selection, genetic variation, inheritance, etc.) and the impact of the environment on the adapting organism (environmental conditions influencing survival and reproduction chances, etc.)–that is, it is a process that acts from the outside to the inside of the organism.

What modern biology doesn’t see–or, more precisely, ignores–because it believes having no or only negligible effects, is how the organism affects its own evolution from the inside out. We are not just reactive automatons to the stimuli of the environment. There are psychological forces in us that drive our behavior, choices, and actions. The underlying assumption has always been that these don’t affect the biological, cognitive, and spiritual evolution of a species. Whatever we think, feel, desire and ultimately do, has no connection to what we will become. At least not on the morphological and biological levels. It's up only to genes, the environment, and more or less random physical events.

But what if also inner forces of psychological nature would determine our evolutionary destiny? What if these forces would not only define an evolutionary path but would also mold our biology?

This is not entirely a new idea. For example, French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck conjectured that the skills acquired due to the use of an organ could be passed by inheritance to the offspring. In this sense, also the behavior in one lifetime could influence the direction of evolution. Modern biology didn’t find any evidence for this and ignored Lamarck’s ideas for a long time. While, more recently, it partially reevaluated this view with the discovery of epigenetic changes due to psychological factors, so far, the orthodox view prevails: Inheritance is a matter of genetics, the environment, and chance.

But the hypothesis that also inner psychological forces drive evolution isn’t something we must necessarily find confirmed only in a macromolecule, like the DNA. For example, the fact that ancient civilizations were driven solely by material necessities is questionable. True is that if certain environmental conditions aren’t met, these will determine new behaviors. The first humans may have been forced to migrate due to environmental changes from the African continent to the rest of the world. But the migration of Homo Sapiens may have been conditioned also by curiosity and an innate desire to know what is behind the visible horizon. There is a polar interplay between what we can do and what we like to do, between material obstacles and our desire to overcome them, and between the limitations of the body and the will of the mind. This dichotomy didn’t change much until our days.

You might object that this is too much focused on a single lifetime. On periods of hundreds of generations, population genetics has the say. I doubt that.

Consider further how, if we take a first-person perspective, one could make sense of aspects of evolution that, otherwise, remain unexplained. For example, its strange property of making sudden ‘jumps’, what in biology is called ‘saltations,’–that is, sudden and large mutational changes in a few generations–followed by long periods of stasis where, apparently, nothing happens in evolutionary terms. These abrupt phenomena have been observed over and over again in the natural history of our planet and were recognized by the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould with his hypothesis of ‘punctuated equilibria.’ While scientists are convinced that, sooner or later, this will be explained away by genetic, molecular, or other physiological mechanisms, to date saltation remains controversial.

To see how this might relate also to our inner psychological dimensions, take a first-person perspective and ask yourself whether your life history was a linear and gradual experience, where changes occurred incrementally and changed your everyday life step by step, or if it was rather affected by sudden changes followed by less dramatic periods where, eventually, life might have been felt a bit monotone, grey, and seemingly unchangeable? I guess that, unless you don’t have a life that resembles that of Indiana Jones, you would probably opt for the second case.

We could also step out of such binary thinking, and take a point of view that comprehends both the first- and third perspective, seeing both options being true: The outer and inner changes do not always (perhaps never) go hand in hand. Of course, physical limitations, such as illnesses, pandemics, financial issues, and the present material and technological contingencies define the ups and downs of our life. Nonetheless, there are (more or less conscious or unconscious) inner changes in our psychological dimension that do not necessarily erupt in appreciable changes in our material life. It is our inner will, mental state, mindset, aims, purposes, goals, desires, inner drives, etc. that determine how we behave and what choices we will make, without necessarily being completely determined by outer conditions.

The fact is that we know from our everyday experience how our life isn’t ruled by exclusively outer conditions but is an interplay of mutually dependent and bidirectionally interacting forces acting from the outside environmental conditions on our internal psychological status, and the other way around, starting from internal psychological drives acting on the external world. While sometimes, there might be long periods where seemingly not many changes occur neither outwardly nor inwardly. But even these periods might be only an apparent stagnation where a lot is going on subconsciously and subliminally without manifesting at the level of our surface awareness but preparing for the future unexpected visible transformation.

This is how we know our life unfolds. Thus, there is no reason to believe that the natural biological evolution of life did and does work differently limited to an unidirectional process that makes us slaves to the environment or to egoistic genes. Evolution is pretty much dependent on our inner mental, emotional, and spiritual state of development. And this internal evolution may determine a breakthrough on a material level–that is, specify a change in phenotypic traits–in an extremely short time, despite the outer environmental conditions do not manifest any sign of such an abrupt revolution.

But what exactly does in us cause that external physical change? From the scientific perspective, the simple answer is that we don’t know. Biology even denies this to be possible. But, as I see it, we don’t need peer-reviewed scientific papers or particularly complicated experiments to know this. If we interrogate our first-person knowledge, we can see that our being is, roughly speaking dependent on physical, emotional, mental, and subconscious factors. Eventually, for those who believe in it, our essence is represented by an immortal soul, even though this is something we might be less certain about. The idea that also what we think and feel might influence the very physical aspects of evolution remains anathema. According to modern biology, there is no evidence supporting this conjecture. Perhaps because there is no effort, and interest to look for such evidence. The assumption that only physical factors determine our evolutionary path, while emotional, mental, and, perhaps, ‘soul-factors’ play no role, is a widespread belief that has become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Since scientists don’t believe this to be possible, they don’t search for any possible evidence and, when asked, then declare that there is none.

Whereas, if we assume evolution is driven also by these internal factors, the sudden changes, the ‘saltations’ in human and natural history begin to make much more sense. The idea of a gradual change can be harmonized with that of a sudden change: Our inside nature develops gradually and the outer ‘vessel’–that is, our body, the genetics, its biology, and morphology–may follow later, but then, eventually, express that inner shift by an outer physical transformation that, in evolutionary and geological terms, appears almost instantaneously.

Now, turning back to the question of the future evolution of humankind, in my opinion, there are good reasons to believe that this evolutionary shift is already taking place. But I don’t envisage it in a technological ‘singularity.’ Many describe having attained higher states of consciousness, a more intuitive vision of reality that goes beyond a mere intellectual understanding, and openly speak of a ‘spiritual transformation.’ This also is the evolution of consciousness, and that might well contribute, behind the veil of appearances, to the acceleration towards a  physical transformation. We might not need to wait passively another 100.000 years to see this evolution taking place.

And the most important aspect is the power we call the ‘analytic mind’ or ‘reason.’ Its great power isn’t so much to predict, create, organize, calculate, and build spspaceships but, on the contrary, that it can learn to know what it doesn’t know. If it is honest with itself and doesn’t retire in forms of denialism, it can become aware of its own ignorance. This can give it the power to ascend the ladder of evolution, by finally transcending itself. Contrary to other non-human animals, we are the first species that can participate willingly and with an inner effort in the evolutionary process. This is the first time in terrestrial natural history that a species can become aware of the existence of an evolutionary process and assent to accelerate its own evolution not only with technology but sanctioning the call that comes from within.

I guess that the next evolutionary step expressed by the new species that will go beyond the human, first by an inner trans-mental, trans-emotional transformation, and inner ‘soul-change’ is already taking place. The physical aspect may still be blind and deaf to this inner transformation but may well follow with a sudden unexpected physical transformation. Perhaps even earlier than the transhumanists' dream could become a reality. Paradoxically, while our technological marvels seem to us changing our lives so fast, and the pace of Nature too slow, reality might surprise us by putting things upside down. In evolutionary terms, this inside-out transmutation might be just behind the corner, say a few centuries or a millennia?

Whatever the case, try to see for a moment evolution not as a mere organismal change but as the expression of the evolution of consciousness in the organism. Would our present dreams of guiding evolution by genetic engineering, or by other transhumanist dreams still make sense? In my view, they appear as naïve attempts of an ignorant species that doesn’t know itself, and can’t conceive reality beyond the superficial appearances, and especially itself, other than a clump of neurons with bipedal locomotion. It is this stubbornly physicalist worldview, that has led us to the unaware assumption that the rational mind and the power of reason are the ultimate tools of knowledge. Somehow, science or it might be more correct to speak of scientism, posits implicitly that if something can’t be explained by reason it can’t be true. But this is yet another anthropocentric and primitive way of understanding evolution and the natural history of this planet. Mind, reason, and even science as it is in its present format are transitory means of a transitional being, that will be transcended by an inner evolution, the adventure of consciousness in the manifestation, leading us to trans-rational forms of life and cognition.

If we view things from this perspective, we can see how a much brighter, and, frankly, much more interesting future awaits us, than that predicted by the current physically obsessed hype which is utterly unable to look beyond its own limited scope and, where all problems must be fixed by some external world-saving hyper-technology. Nature will not allow us to cage it and ourselves into a sort of Star-Trek Borg civilization.