There is a very interesting Doctor Who story, from the 80′s, “Full Circle“. I had read it as a child and for some reason I thought about the story today. With the help of Google, I was able to identify the name of the episode and the book that I had read. The story revolves around the planet Alzarius where the Doctor and his companions found themselves stranded.

The planet (or rather the area) is inhabited by a humanoid civilization which crashed their spaceship 40,000 generations ago. They were trying to fix their spaceship, “Starliner” all this time. The complete story is not relevant to the point I am trying to make today. But the Doctor discovers that the spaceship was repaired centuries ago. The problem was, there was no one who knew how to pilot the ship. The leadership team, consisting of 3 self-elected “Deciders”, had over the centuries kept up the charade of repairing the ship, rather than admit that couldn’t fly even though the ship was fixed.

Imagine people replacing each part of the spaceship over and over, generations upon generations, with no clue about their fate. Think about what you do at your job. Are you fixing a problem only to repeat it 6 months into the future? Is it your fault or has the top-level management lost track of its objectives? Think about what is happening in your country and all around the world. Are we repeating the mistakes of our previous generations?

The human race has the ability to learn from its mistake, we should, considering we can put 1 and 2 together and call it 3 instead of 12. We have backtracked our history to 3500 BC and beyond to a certain degree. Watching the documentaries of Michael Wood, I would say there are people who understand the mistakes of the past civilizations. Are our world leaders so short-sighted that they can see only 5 years into the future? Are the “wise old men”, The Elders, of the world sitting back on their chair sighing at the mistakes of the present generations?

“Strong leadership has never been more needed than it is today”.

Out of context, but true. Source

Do a favor to your grandchildren. Let us not force them to do the same thing that we are doing. Don’t wait for someone to change the world, but ask for a change. It starts from one, becomes the need of many, until it becomes the need of the nation and the civilization.

• The Elders are an independent group of global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who offer their collective influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering, and promote the shared interests of humanity.
• The Elders are Martti Ahtisaari, Kofi Annan, Ela Bhatt, Lakhdar Brahimi, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jimmy Carter, Graça Machel, Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu (Chair). Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi are honorary Elders.

 

I have written a few posts about evolution in the past, and I had blamed us humans for standing in the way of evolution.

• I blamed humans of killing evolution by inventing the institution of marriage.
• I also blamed us for changing the rules of the game, from survival of the fittest to survival of the richest.
• Then I went ahead and blamed us for protecting the weak thereby contaminating the gene-pool.
• What about the time when I said humans bangaloored evolution by inventing tools to overcome their limitation.

I had however put a disclaimer at the bottom of almost all of those posts and am I glad I had done that. I knew there were too many things I didn’t know. But yesterday when I was at work I realized that why evolution came to a sudden standstill, and this time, I can’t blame us humans for it; at least not directly. We come across many people with some unique abilities. Maybe, calling it an ability is misleading, because it is more like a quirk, in a good way. There are people with some strange mental, physical and spiritual quirks. Why is it that others don’t have such abilities? You may have guessed it, it is genetic.

In some cases it might get passed on to the next generation, sometimes it might skip a few, but these quirks are always around. I am sure most of us would like to have some of these rare talents, but it never becomes a trait of human beings. Evolution works based on need, and in most cases we have learnt to overcome our limitations. These needs become a necessity for survival and that is when it manifests in most people.

It is well-known that life originated in the ocean, and the earliest life form ‘breathed’ just like fish do. Possibly, some of these tried to stay outside water, but I am guessing, just like whales, they had to get back to water to get their blood vessels replenished with oxygen. In due course, they might have evolved so that they can stay outside water for longer period of time to a state where they didn’t have to go back to water. We are not talking about millions of creatures waking up one morning to leave the ocean behind. It would be a few at first who were able to stay out for a few hours, and they might have reproduced and with Nature’s survival of the fittest policy, the ones that progressed faster got rewarded. Who knows, they might have found better food, or they might have escaped from predatory creatures in the ocean.

Unfortunately for humans, at present our population is so high that any sort of evolution would be difficult to impossible. There goes my hope of one day having telepathic ability or even existence without a body. I am sure the Geeks among us will be able to understand how I feel.

And if you are not a geek then you might want to watch this video. If you don’t have enough time, feel free to skip ahead to 1 min and 30 seconds.

Now that a naturally induced evolution seems so out of reach, I should start thinking how we can force our genes to evolve. I am sure some learnt people are already working on it, but as usual I would like to put a few points, even if it just a wish list.

Stay tuned!

I read somewhere that even if 2% of over 80,000 parts in a Formula 1 car was not working properly, the car will not start. But the human brain can function even if 99% of the body was not working.

No two human beings think alike. I guess we should be glad about that. Thankfully, even if we do not think alike, we are still able to reach a mutually agreeable conclusion, more often than not.

There are however instances where some people or a group will reach a completely different conclusion which defies logic. Everyone has a tendency to do that to a certain degree. Call it instinct, conviction or what ever you like, but there is a limit where it ceases to be brilliant and becomes insane. There are also people who will listen to all logical arguments and yet come up with an illogical conclusion. There really is a short-circuit in every human being’s brain. Yes, you, me and everyone around us has a short circuited brain.

If we were not short circuited, we would be like Dalek from Doctor Who. The brain of Dalek’s are wired like a computer. All of them will come to the same conclusion provided all of them have the same facts. I guess, it is a good thing we are not like that.

It I strange that nature would design such a flaw in the creature which is supposed to be the most superior of all. Human beings are definitely not the epitome of nature’s creation, but the process of evolution that nature seems to be experimenting with has invested very heavily in humans, and I do not believe such a flaw is accidental. In fact, the way each human brain work, appears to be similar with the rest of natures experiment. It has created a wide variety of species to see how they will evolve. Similarly, it is experimenting with human thought process to see which thought process will provide the best result.

Logic has set humans apart from the rest of animals, but there is also the instinct which has not been weeded out of human beings. I guess nature tried instinct and probably found that it was not yielding the right result.

Probably after a few million years, nature might succeed in separating instinct and logic and probably mankind will be able to function in a more organized manner.

But at the same time, I bet nature is experimenting with other thought process, like collective intelligence. The ability of certain creatures to communicate over vast distance with practically no means of communication seems to indicate that. But I guess those experiments are in its nascent stage for us to comment on what it is or what the outcome will be.

If my “logic” is correct, then logic might prevent us from evolving there by stalemating nature in its experiment. Do I have short-circuit?

Human race is doomed. This assumption has been made based on two facts.

1. Humans marry.

2. Humans invent.

We call this the height of human evolution.

That is the problem with it. Since we have evolved as much as we can as a species, now all we can do is grow. As much as I would like to have the powers of X-Men, I am afraid that the best (or the worst) we can hope for now, is less hair. The future Humans will not fly or read each others mind; they will have less and less hair and the one with the least amount of hair will be considered the most eligible.

Marriage is major difference between man and any other species when it comes to social groups. Evolution depends on male and female choosing the best available. It is a formula that has worked since the Big Bang and we are the living proof. The choice was simple; the strongest man got his choice. I am not an expert and I am not going to delve into the qualities that men found attractive. In the end, the strongest survived and got to multiply. Now that most people got medical insurance, the focus has shifted away from strongest man and fertile woman.

There are many species that mate for life, but the contract of marriage does not guarantee monogamy. All it does it give a legal right to the assets of one’s spouse on his/her death. Unfortunately it goes much deeper than that. It gives man an almost guaranteed offspring of his own without necessarily being monogamous. The social pressure to marry gives everyone an opportunity to marry someone and have a child. The society protects the weaklings and the process is repeated.

The good news is, humans will find new heights to conquer intellectually, culturally and artistically. The bad news, nature has to get out of human life.

Invention, the intellectual ability of humans to grow beyond the limitations imposed by nature. Unfortunately, it has made evolution impossible. Evolution happens only when a species is not able to cope with its surroundings, but when man is able to increase or reduce heat, fly over mountains and communicate over distance, how can we evolve? Humans have effectively Bangalored evolution.

It is now up to the nature to nurture a new species to take the place of humans as the dominant species on Earth.

**This is not a science blog and I do not have any advanced knowledge in science, evolution or any other particular stream. Everything mentioned here is just the product of overactive imagination and excess of free time.

*Evolution does not quite follow the same path as human thought. There are the so called Junk DNA, Non-coding DNA, Introns, Inactive DNAs which might prove to be useful in the future when a need arises. So we are probably safe.

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