Excerpted from Why the West Rules—For Now by Ian Morris, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. (us.macmillan.com/whythewestrulesfornow) Copyright 2010 by Ian Morris. All rights reserved.
Looked at in a really long perspective, the threats that so scare us today seem to have a lot in common with the kinds of forces that have repeatedly pushed evolution into high gear in the past. Time after time, relatively sudden changes in the environment have created conditions in which mutations flourish, transforming the gene pool. About 1.8 million years ago the drying out of East Africa's forests apparently allowed freaks with big brains to fare better than Homo habilis. A brutal phase in the Ice Age about a hundred thousand years ago may have given Homo sapiens an equivalent opportunity to shine. And now, in the twenty-first century, something similar is perhaps happening again.
Mass extinctions are already under way, with one species of plant or land animal disappearing every twenty minutes or so. A 2004 study estimated that the cheeriest possible outcome is that 9 percent of the world's 10 million species of plants and land animals will face extinction by 2050, and plenty of biologists expect biodiversity to shrink by as much as one-third or one-half. Some even speak of a sixth mass extinction, with two-thirds of Earth's species dying out by 2100. Humans may be among them; but rather than simply wiping Homo off the planet, the harsh conditions of the twenty-first century might act like those 1.8 million or a hundred thousand years ago, creating an opportunity for organisms with new kinds of brains—in this case, brains that merge man and machine—to replace older beings. Far from trampling us, the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse might serve to turn our baby steps toward a Singularity into a new great leap. . . .
When historians (if such things still exist) look back from 2103 on the shift from carbon- to silicon-based intelligence, it may strike them as inevitable—as inevitable, in fact, as I have claimed that the earlier shifts from foraging to farming, villages to cities, and agriculture to industry were. It may seem just as obvious that the regional traditions that had grown from the original agricultural cores since the end of the Ice Age were bound to emerge into a single posthuman world civilization. The early twenty-first century's anxiety over why the West ruled and whether it would keep on doing so might look a little ridiculous.
