- Look, here’s the thing. We humans are a living population just like any other, and we are subject to evolution and genetic drift just like any other. If for some reason you can’t accept that, you and your upbringing are part of the problem, fuck off, we can’t have a grown-up conversation.
- Because this is true, humans are vulnerable to all sorts of ill-fates, including extinction, just like every other living population.
- But unique to humans is the ability to rationally forecast the future, judge it as good or bad, and take steps to change it in our favour.
- This (and communal action) gives us the ability to reduce misery and increase the happiness of our collective selves in a way that no other living population has ever been able to even contemplate.
- But…we do not all agree on what it means to be happy. As one simple example, some people like a bookish existence in modern comfort and maximize lifespan and health, while others prefer to party hardy and “die young and leave an ugly corpse.” Neither is fundamentally right or wrong.
- And…we are not gods with perfect knowledge, so even if we could all agree on what our future should look like, we cannot with any certainty know what actions will shape our species to meet it. Eliminate sociopaths and you might find the Neanderthals died out because they lacked enough sociopaths—who tend to be the risk takers, just one example.
- And…we are bastards whom power corrupts, and I for one do not trust anyone willing to hold the reigns of power to use it to decide what direction our biological evolution should take—which is exactly what eugenics is. Eugenics is the use of artificial selection to supplant or replace the slower process of natural selection, as applied to the human species.
- But on the other hand, if left to the masses, we are likely to splinter into ludicrously overspecialized (and biologically doomed) subgroups even more prone to infighting than is already true. Imagine a world in which incels modify their offspring toward the superficial traits they think to define chads, white supremacists toward the superficial traits they think define “alpha males,” and academics toward increased academic ability, perhaps with a resultant increase in introversion. H.G. Wells gave us the Eloi and the Morlocks. Herbert a world of genetic castes. They may both have been wildly optimistic.
Yet, this is an issue that we absolutely must and will face, one way or another. We have good evidence that the human brain may have shrunk a few percent in the few thousand years since the dawn of agriculture. Some optimists suggest this is a continued optimization, but honestly, there’s little reason to think so, as there’s no obvious survival advantage to be gained from such optimization. It’s far more likely that, enjoying the fruits of communal living, technical specialization, and enormous advances in food production and storage, we have domesticated ourselves by removing the natural selective pressures that made us human to begin with.
I for one am convinced that’s the case, and it leaves a clear reality before us: we will either find a way to take control of our biological evolution, or we will have what control we now have over our collective well-being wrested away by nature, eventually losing the ability to maintain our technical civilization and returning to natural selection and likely cycles or misery and advancement until we finally go extinct.
But I’m not without hope. We are a clever bunch, and while there are people today who would waste our technical prowess by giving themselves maladaptive fangs or boosting their kid’s intelligence at the expense of mental instability, we have also driven back the grinding veil of ubiquitous infectious disease and are now making strides against cancer and more, and most of our debates over medical ethics are really just the thrashing of obsolete and fading worldviews against the grindstone of discovery.
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- C. Stuart Hardwick!
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