One thought on “Another sad anniversary”

1. Only when Homo sapiens sapiens is extinct. Homo sapiens sapiens? Methinks some of specifiers of the modern human species label protest too much. There is little to nothing that is truly wise about us.

   The faults, by modern moral and scientific analyses, are in our genes and their epigenetic expression as much as they are in our various cultural baggage trains. The evolution process put the somatic “faults” there. The psychological too is strongly somatically and neurologically conditioned albeit learning, enculuration and conditioning can modify this aspect to a significant but still rather limited degree.

   For most of the course of human evolution to date, these “faults” were not net faults in the sense that we still reproduced and survived under natural selection pressures. However, many of our inherited traits are now being thrown into a new relief where they appear fraught, existentially dangerous and indeed extinction-inducing. Conditions have changed and are changing ever more rapidly. Our evolved traits no longer serve us well. Can we undergo a saltation event? “Saltation (biology) – a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation.”

   One generation seems improbable for humans but a 2 to 5 generations saltation event may be possible and perhaps even probable during a mass death, extinction bottleneck event which does not result in extinction proper. That may be the only way forward for humans or a human descended newly speciated self-consciously thinking species.

   I am not advocating this, simply saying it just might happen. The last thing we should try to do is consciously create and direct such a eugenics project and process. We would make matters greatly worse for sure.