We Are Not Men, We Are Devo!

Can I tell you something?

Charles Darwin only got it half right. His brilliant, if a bit controversial at the time, theory of natural selection assumed that man appeared as another link in the chain of human evolution which began when this was the planet of the apes, and that we would continue to adapt to our environment and improve in ways he could not predict. But it never crossed his mind that our species at some point would reach the apotheosis of physical beauty and health, or in particular mental health, and begin to devolve into unrecognizable beasts.

I should point out that biologically speaking there is no such thing as devolution. The term scientists use is regressive or degenerative evolution and describes a species simply morphing into a simpler form.

Beyond that, belief in devolution assumes that the goal of evolution is to attain perfection, a process known as orthogenesis, and there’s no evidence to support that assumption. Whatever your beliefs, I make the a posteriori argument that mental, physical, political, social, and cultural devolution are absolutely a thing, and in fact accelerating.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

The dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years ago when an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest smashed into Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, extinguishing nearly all life forms on the planet and ruining spring break in Cancun. A bunch of microbes and single-celled creatures survived the event along with some amphibians, and miraculously a few shrew-like mammals.

The thought we humans are somehow descendants of shrews is kind of mind blowing, yet the existence of Mariah Carey is proof positive we are.

Hominids, of which we are the most recent model off the showroom floor, descended from apelike creatures during the Middle to Late Miocene Epoch, rather sloppily estimated as having happened between 16 and 5 million years ago – roughly the average window of time quoted for a cable service call. Our distant hominid ancestors, Homo Habilis, appeared during the Pliocene Epoch over 2 million years ago, and they were replaced by Homo Erectus who debuted during the Pleistocene Epoch about 1 million years ago. The mere thought of a Homo Erectus made primitive conservatives uncomfortable, so upgrades were installed, and the Neanderthals – this is of course the name of an actual garage rock band – took the stage some 430,000 years ago and played a long set lasting almost 400,000 years including three encore jams.

Neanderthals, although still quite hairy and uncouth, were truly the modern stone-age family, marked by bipedalism or walking upright on two feet, dexterity featuring opposable thumbs, and the use of a complex language. Grunting is a low bar to jump over, but everything’s relative.

There is physical evidence that Neanderthals formed small societies and exhibited human characteristics such as sharing food and resources, caring for the young and the sick, creating a community structure of sorts, and opening the original Starbucks. DNA testing has not been able to identify the remains of Fred and Wilma, Barney, Betty, or Pebbles and Bam-Bam, but the search for the ancient city of Bedrock continues.

Roughly 300,000 years ago Homo Sapiens, the human species, first appeared in Africa, and sometime later began taking European holidays where they encountered Neanderthals. These travelers were the early predecessors of obnoxious American tourists.

We are not the same bloodline as the Neanderthals, but since there was no Tinder at that time and finding Mr. Right was a challenge for the local ladies, Homo Sapiens started gettin’ jiggy wit Neanderthals. So much so, in fact, that the majority of humans alive today have anywhere from 1-3% Neanderthal DNA, and some a lot more than that. He refuses to release his 23andMe certificate, but it’s believed that Hulk Hogan has 100%.

What we call ‘modern man’ dates back to the Holocene Epoch some 11,000 years ago when the last ice age called it quits, and after warming up a bit they began making plans to deplete the planet of all its natural resources, befoul the environment with toxic waste and noxious gases, and use increasingly efficient and lethal methods to kill each other. Recorded history shows that despite brief spasms of self-awareness, self-preservation, amity, charity, and sanity, we’ve done a pretty darn good job working the plan.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

I’m not going to argue with biologists and claim I have empirical proof we as a species are devolving. I’m sure they’re right that technically it doesn’t exist, but anecdotally, if you don’t think humans are devolving as a species then you’ve never ridden mass transportation.

Inbreeding, not just intrafamilial but intracommunal, results in the high probability children will inherit regressive genes and exhibit harmful traits from birth defects and antisocial behavior like racism and violence to eating nothing but Big Macs.

Aside from the shallow end of the gene pool getting crowded, other factors are contributing to our degenerative evolution, most notably increasing dependence on technology and artificial intelligence. Scientific evidence has demonstrated that too much screen time leads to obesity, neck and back pain, poor posture, eye strain and blurred vision, hand and thumb pain, mood swings, depression, anxiety, sleep trouble, lack of focus, impaired social skills and stunted brain development in children.

In layman’s terms we are outsourcing our brain function. IQ levels have been falling since 1975, and for the first time in recorded history our brains are actually shrinking. Correspondingly our skulls are getting thicker, and one need look no further than today’s Republican party for evidence of that.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

Back in 1993, an American astrophysicist and crackpot philosopher named J. Richard Gott published his controversial ‘Doomsday Argument’ which predicted a 95% chance that human beings will be extinct somewhere between 5,100 and 7,800,000 years from then. Why it was controversial is a mystery to me because it had the same immediacy and precision as cosmologists saying the sun will burn itself out sometime in the next 7-8 billion years, but it was at least in part based on Gott’s assumption that we would continue to regress politically, socially, culturally, and even biologically. And aside from natural devolution of our species, many IT experts, including the morons who developed AI, now think there’s a 10% chance that it will destroy mankind within the next 5-10 years. So who really gives a shit about Gott’s argument anymore?

I don’t want to toot my own horn, but coincidentally in 1993, I made a much bolder and more precise prediction that the Chicago Cubs would finally win another World Series between five and 50,000 years from then, and I nailed it.

But before J. Richard and I shook the world with our prognostications, Kurt Vonnegut published a novel in 1985 called Galapagos. It was prescient in the sense that the plot called for a small group of mismatched humans to be marooned on a tropical island following a global financial disaster – Kurt only missed that by 23 years – and shortly thereafter a global pandemic – only 35 off that one – renders everyone on the planet infertile except for Gilligan, the Skipper, Ginger, and Mary Ann. The arc of the story then spans a million years of natural selection which renders the last specimens of humankind as fat, furry creatures with flippers and a tapered snout with teeth resembling sea lions. Picture Ted Cruz with a salmon in his mouth and you get the idea.

The book is bizarre and funny in true Vonnegut fashion painting a bleak vision of the future with biting satire. At its core, however, is his premise that big brains are the cause of all our problems, and Kurt envisions a race of people with much smaller ones. We certainly seem to be headed that way, and the only thing he got wrong, in my opinion, is that instead of flippers we’ll have huge thumbs.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.­­­