zhisou (old blog)

I´ve been meaning to add to the argument I started in The End of the World is Nigh a month or so back.  What I said then, in response to increasing statistical evidence that the Earth´s environment is getting to the tipping point from which we won´t be able to recover, is that man is basically fatally flawed and can never get past this to a higher level of society (or evolution, see upcoming arguments).

This is what I call The Evolution Paradox.

It goes something like this: Any animal which is able to evolve into intelligent life is fundamentally unsuitable to do so.

The logic behind this is based on a few basic priciples, that any animal able to evolve must exhibit certain characteristics, each of which has a price tag, culminating in an animal totally unsuitable to organised society and totally unable to evolve to a point whereby they can take the leap beyond something like today´s society.

Those characteristics are:

The animal cannot be a specialist feeder, it must be a scavenger.  Specialist feeders simply hang around all day, muching on their chosen tipple, and if the environment changes and the food source disappears, so does the animal.  It cannot adapt.  Look at a koala, cute as anything – but what happens when the eucalyptus dies out?  The koala dies out?  It´s not going to evolve into a super bear and invent the wheel, is it?    A scavenger, however, will react to loss of food source with ingenuity, meaning always there´s a pressure culminating in evolutionary reward for the brainiest.

Next, the animal must be gregarious.  Solitary animals will never achieve what pack animals do – not only can you get more done, you can also pool resources like child minding to free up others to hunt etc.  Plus, the demands of a pack or tribe mean additional brain is needed to survive the complexities of group culture.

However, groups always mean heirarchies with top dogs and underdogs – the ones who dominate the tribe and get to do the most mating are going to be the ones with the strongest competitive streaks and the most ruthless.  Nice guys finish last may not always be true for us, but it is in monkey world.

As intelligence increases, it is also necessary to have a lengthy childhood – this means a massive burden for breeders in terms of time and effort spent rearing their young.  This again demands a group to help share the load and free others for hunting and gathering tasks – whilst pair bonding became the human way, which meant an increased need for cooperation between males, and the loss of body hair, to make sex more fun, this isn´t necessary.  There´s no reason why groups cannot raise the young and the biological fathers remain unknown.  The consequence of the pair bond is families, which by their nature think first of protecting their own, this means that the world is made up of lots and lots of people who are all putting themselves and their family´s short-term interests ahead of anything else.

Thus, the intelligent animal that evolves will be a competitive tribal animal, government by the battle for status, and totally focussed on their own (and their family´s) immediate needs.  Such an animal is simply unable to make the sacrifices and the long-term decisions required to protect the environment, aid the poorest countries, and make the investments required to reap future rewards.