Stardate 20020204.1222

(On Screen): Scott sends this link to an article about the claim by certain biologists that human evolution in the technological west has come to an end. The theory is that technology has reached the point where we can compensate for negative characteristics, and thus they are no longer selected against.

'If you want to know what Utopia is like, just look around - this is it,' said Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, who is to present his argument at a Royal Society Edinburgh debate, 'Is Evolution Over?', next week. 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'

About the only meaningful response to this is "So what?"

It's totally misguided. In the long run, Darwinian evolution sounds like a good idea. But like adventure, it's better read about than experienced, because the only way it can really happen rapidly is with a high death rate.

It's also wrong. For instance, there's good reason to believe that the overall genetic makeup of northern Europe shifted quite a bit as a result of the Black Death. As new diseases develop, or as they begin to spread broadly because of modern transportation technology, once in a while one will come along which is a major killer, and once the dust has settled and all the graves have been dug, we'll have genetically changed again. Do that a thousand times over the course of a hundred thousand years, and we'll look like a new species.

But evolution as an ongoing process is largely irrelevant, to us. Even if it were still going on, we wouldn't notice it (unless we had that high death rate). The process is extremely slow. I don't know what word to use to describe its speed. We can't call it "glacial" because glaciers are blazingly fast by comparison. (They actually change over the course of one human lifetime.)

But the idea that things have stopped getting better is foolish, because it misses the point of the great advance humans brought to the evolutionary table: culture. We are the first known species which has the ability to accumulate huge amounts of useful (and useless) information and pass it on to our descendants.

And unlike biological evolution, cultural evolution is Lamarckian -- and Lamarckian cultural evolution is vastly faster and more efficient than Darwinian biological evolution, because it can spread sideways. If a human develops a new mutation, it can only be passed on to her descendants. But if a human develops a new useful idea, every human alive can learn it and use it. That is exceedingly powerful, and it's the reason why we've exploded in the world over the course of the last ten thousand years.

Take a naked human and put him in an arena with a hungry lion; who wins? (The crowd of Romans, of course, who get to see that poor bastard get eaten.) Ah, but take that same human and give him an M-16, and put him inside a car. Now who wins?

We are genetically the same as those Romans. Take a 40-man platoon from the First Infantry Division and put it up against a Roman Legion of about ten thousand men. Who wins?

Of course things haven't stopped getting better. When my ancestors 300 years ago wanted to send a message a thousand miles away, they hired a man with a horse to carry it. To do the same thing, I pick up a telephone.

We don't need biological change any more because we now have the ability to enhance ourselves artificially. One man on a construction site now can do more digging in a day than a hundred men could a hundred years ago. He's no stronger than they were. But he's got a back-hoe capable of moving tons of soil ever minute.

Biological evolution is undirected, but cultural evolution is deliberate. Biological evolution is slow and haphazard, but cultural evolution is directed and blazingly fast. And biological evolution requires pain and suffering from most of the population, where cultural evolution's benefits are far more widespread.

If biological evolution has indeed ended for us, then good riddance.