Sebastian Thurn, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, led the Stanford team that won the DARPA Grand Challenge for robotic cars. We’ll stop walking, and instead will use all kinds of motorized devices to get around.
Luigi "Luca" Cavalli-Sforza, professor emeritus of genetics, is a pioneer in “genetic geography,” a field that uses DNA to help understand human migration throughout history. An abridged version of his answer appeared in the print magazine. The most important of all the latest steps [in human evolution] is certainly the development of modern language, which is a cultural development that demanded genetic changes making the creation of sounds and their understanding possible. It may have been completed before 100,000 years ago. With it, human evolution has largely ceased being exclusively a biological process and has become more and more a cultural one: they are now indissolubly linked.
A next major step was the expansion to the world of what probably was a small East African tribe of a few thousand people, which started around 50,000 years ago. When it was almost complete, 10,000 years ago, it had multiplied the original numbers a thousand times. It, perhaps jointly with the end of the last glaciation shortly before, stimulated the transition to an agro-pastoral economy that spread from few places of origin and caused a further increase of population size (by another 1,000 fold, in the subsequent millennia). In the last 8,000-5,000 years, major cultural development like cities, statehood, writing, metals, further changed the world. Since that time, changes in transportation and, in the last few centuries, transmission of information are taking the lead in causing changes.
A major genetic change which started already some centuries ago, with the navigation of the oceans, and is becoming faster now, is globalization. This is having major genetic consequences. It will bring back greater unity of the species, by diluting and eventually canceling differences among ethnic groups existing today, that are largely if not exclusively the consequence of adaptation to environments that differ mostly climatically, to which modern humans spread in the last 50,000 years. This includes diets, which depend to a large extent on local flora and fauna. The genetic differentiation that has resulted is small, in terms of differences among populations, but conspicuous (e.g., skin color, body and face shape and size). But in the course of the world expansion, much adaptation to different environments became cultural, and the older biological adaptations to different environments are, in a sense, outdated. As some work we have just finished at Stanford shows, genetic differentiation among human groups (however we like to call them, races or other terms, there still is no acceptable definition of races, as was already noted by Darwin) is strictly proportional to geographic distance among the groups, and is largely due to chance. The spread to the whole world has caused some loss of genetic divergence among individuals within groups, and its recovery by globalization is in principle biologically advantageous. Evolution of higher organisms has generated a protective mechanism linked to receiving a double genome, one of paternal and one of maternal origin, called heterosis or advantage of heterozygotes. Globalization can return some of it that was lost in the course of the expansion from Africa, and because of other cultural practices. Moreover, directions of natural selection of humans are increasingly dictated by cultural, rather than by biological, evolution.
ALBERT BANDURA is the David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology.
Human forebears evolved into a sentient agentic species through the evolutionary emergence of language and abstract and deliberative cognitive capacities. This advanced symbolizing capacity enabled humans to transcend the dictates of their immediate environment and made them unique in their power to shape their life circumstances and the courses their lives take. Humans are not just reactive products of selection pressures served up by a one-sided evolutionism. They are not only prime players in the coevolution process, but are gaining primacy in this bidirectionality of influence. For example, humans have not evolved morphologically to fly but they are soaring through the air and even in the rarified atmosphere of outer space at breakneck speeds despite major biological constraint. Agentic inventiveness trumped biological design in getting them airborne. Humans are not only cutting and splicing nature’s genetic heritage but, through synthetic biology, they are even creating new types of genomes.
Were Darwin writing today, he would be underscoring the overwhelming human domination of the environment. Many of the species in our degrading planet have no evolutionary future. We are wiping them out and the ecosystems that support life at an accelerating pace. Unlike former mass extinctions by meteoric disasters, the current mass extinction of species is the product of human behavior. As the unrivaled ruling species atop the food chain, we are drafting the requiem for biodiversity. Let’s hope we do not outsmart ourselves into irreversible ecological crises.
HILARY PRICE ’91, creates the comic strip Rhymes with Orange
Good news! Our appendix will come out of retirement and regain its status as a major organ. It will control the secretions of our stupiditary gland, which heretofore has been wreaking havoc in Homo sapiens.
JOAN ROUGHGARDEN, professor of biological sciences, is the author of Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People.
I think the next step in human evolution is that racial categories will dissolve because of gene flow from immigration and intermarriage. Prejudice won’t disappear, however—it will merely attach to new categories with different biological markers, most likely traits that predispose people to various occupations. Biological stratification will grow between occupational groups that don’t mix, such as those with and without college educations, and inside and outside evangelist faiths. We will become a contemporary counterpart of India’s ancient system of castes that isolates people into groups where they can assume biological distinctiveness.
FRANCINE "PENNY" PATTERSON, PhD ’79, is president and director of research of The Gorilla Foundation/Koko.org. An abridged version of her answer appeared in the print magazine. First, a short, perhaps illustrative story about the conversational gorilla Koko’s new puppy, Rikki. During her first few months with us, Rikki was routinely tethered to stations in the house by a 3- to 4-foot “house leash.” Now reliably toilet trained, Rikki is free to move about the house with the short leash trailing behind her. Strangely, she often stands across a room and barks for attention. Calling her does not cause her to come to us; she just continues barking as if an invisible attachment has her trapped in that position.
Homo sapiens is subject to a more complex (and dangerous) version of this—we are generally unaware of the shackles of the conditioning of our thoughts, emotions and behavior. Predominantly lost in thought, and as a result, trapped in psychological time (i.e., our own stories of past and future), we are effectively absent from the here and now. The consequences of this evolutionary stage are becoming increasingly apparent: conflict, violence, destruction of the environment and other beings. One astute reporter observed that the war in the Middle East is the result of “an inability to accommodate a competing narrative.”
Although the forces of natural selection continue to operate, the next step in evolution is also something we can give conscious agency. Without this, there may be no next step—the human condition (self-identification with thinking) may cause our extinction. The next, and perhaps most critical, stage in human evolution at this time is “conscious evolution,” evolution directed by human self-reflective consciousness to go beyond thought into an alert state of awareness of the beauty, wisdom and unity of the universe exactly as it is now. This doesn’t mean we don’t change things, it just means that when we do, our actions come from a deeper and more peaceful place.
There are a number of ways to move beyond thought; one is to break identification with thoughts by becoming aware of the self as an impartial observer of those thoughts. Another way is acceptance of the present moment. As a result of these practices, the mind loses its compulsive quality and the baggage of conditioning is dropped. Acceptance of ourselves and others as they are brings an openness and clear space into our lives that allows our penchant for judgment, labeling and negativity to be transcended by peace. Crisis or great loss can also hush the incessant noise of thinking.
These ideas are not new, they date back thousands of years. In recent times, the concept of unconditional acceptance has formed the basis of humanistic psychology, client-centered therapy and my father’s proposed universal system of psychotherapy (Patterson, 1995, 2000). Acceptance is recognized as a necessary condition for positive change. Darwin described the biological bases for this next step in The Descent of Man. He observed that not only humans but also other animals show the virtue of self-transcendence, for example, in risking one’s life to save another, not necessarily of the same species (Loye, 2000). Darwin postulated a drive toward goodness, and he and Koko agree on this point: “People have goodness” in Koko’s words, and she includes herself in the category “people.”
Recently a physiological basis for empathy has been found in the form of “mirror cells” in the brains of animals that fire when another’s action is observed (Gallese, et al., 2004). These neurons, like the “point-of-view gun” in the recent film version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, could be fodder for natural selection in view of our newfound ability to quickly wipe other species and our own off the planet.
The shift from being lost in thought to being present in the here and now may be facilitated by observing not only ourselves, but also our fellow animals. Koko provided the space of acceptance and love for her first kitten, All Ball, in spite of his unruly behavior. What we have found through educational outreach with Project Koko is that when kids observe Koko in videos or books, they have an experience that is beyond thought (a sense of awe). Then when the thoughts come, there comes with them space for open discussion. Might we show our children early in their schooling how observing their own thoughts allows them to realize that they have the freedom to move past them?
Moving beyond thought is how creative geniuses such as Einstein have experienced flashes of insight that have opened new realms of understanding. With the above techniques, these experiences can be readily accessible to everyone for the benefit of all.
This next step in evolution is something we cannot afford to wait for the forces of nature to shape. We have access to the next step now—we just need to consciously decide to take it, both as individuals and as a species.
Note: Much of what is presented here is drawn from the works of Eckhart Tolle, including The Power of Now (New World Library, 1999), coupled with my own experience closely interacting with another, less thought-bound species for more than three decades.
References:
Patterson, C. H. A universal system of psychotherapy. The Person-Centered Journal, Volume 2, Issue 1, 1995.
Patterson, C.H. Understanding psychotherapy: Fifty years of client-centered theory and practice. Ross-on-Rye, UK: PCCS Books, 2000.
Loye, D. Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love. toExcel press, 2000.
Gallese, V., Keysers, C., and Rizzolatti, G. A unifying view of the basis of social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 8, Number 9, 2004.
