Monkeys at the Wheel: The Unfolding of Human Evolution
My friend David lives with Spastic Quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy. This disease causes unexpected jerking motions, immobile joints, and muscle spasms. David is confined to a wheelchair and struggles with mobility and speech. David is also an engaging conversationalist, a brilliant writer, and a bit of a comedian. Had he been born not too many years ago in an African Savannah or the Amazon rain forest, he most likely would have been dead within minutes, dying from exposure, starvation, dehydration, predation, or any of a number of the biological threats nature visits upon the most vulnerable members of species. But because of electric wheelchairs, ramps, medical advances, and changing social views, David thrives within a human constructed habitat. In this constructed world he can contribute, create, and continue to develop his humanity. His survival is still a evolutionary interplay between environmental pressures and adaptations, but his habitat changed. David isn’t threatened by roaming carnivores or finding access to water holes. Survival in his human constructed habitat isn’t contingent upon strength, speed, or agility, but on David’s abilities to develop mobility and access and sustain social connections. Environmental pressures in David’s world favor the development of a different skill set, namely communication, intelligence and creativity.
David’s experiences exemplify how human evolutionary pressures have shifted from a biological to a constructed habitat. Abstract constructs, tools like civilization, morality, and culture that facilitate David’s development, are so ingrained into our environment that we lose sight of the fact that their origin was mere functionary tools developed to perform a task. It’s relatively easy to spot physical tools, such as wheelchairs and ramps. It’s more difficult to see psycho-social constructs such as social roles, perspectives, systems, gender, ethnicity, and morality as simply human constructions designed to perform a function, interpret data, or give expression to ideas.
Humans now exist in a habitat built from these tools, both physical and conceptual. Interrelated concepts create self-validating systems, giving an illusion of permanency and reality. For example, the construct of culture is built in part off of the construct of values, which in turn is built off of the construct of morality — each referring to the other as support of their legitimacy. Conceptual tools, lacking tangibility in a material world, exist solely in the human mind and depend upon humans lending them credence. Amoral functionary conceptual tools work only to the level humans believe their own ideas, empower them meaning, and integrate them into reality. As a result, our conceptual constructions are perceived as permanent and immutable. In fact, humans often integrate abstract concepts to the point where they often self-identify by their constructs. For example, people will define themselves by their job title or social position, saying “I am a janitor” or “I am a bus driver.” Of course, it would seem silly to identify oneself as a “hammer.” Nevertheless, the role of “janitor” is simply another tool, an amoral human construct designed to accomplish a task. As Thoreau has observed, “Men have become the tool of their tools.”
The skills required to survive in this relatively new world of systems, concepts, and constructions differ significantly from those evolved in a biological habitat. Adaptation to a constructed environment based in sociability and intellect has resulted in the emergence of drives and propensities specific to the human construct of civilization and socialization, drives such as generosity, empathy, and courage. These drives often conflict with vestigial emotional drives better suited for a biological environment such as anger, ego-centrism, and fear. Both sets of drives evolved to facilitate survival within different habitats. In humans, these drives manifest not as a binary, but more as a spectrum, varying in strength and degree based on different factors such as level of personal development, culture, experience, situation, and genetics. In other words, some people skew towards biological drives such as competition, fear, anger, and ego-centrism. Other individuals express courage, cooperation, and generosity — characteristics that are advantageous in a constructed habitat of civilization.
Humans have wrestled evolution from the hands of nature and are now responsible for the direction of our own evolution. We are increasingly adapting to artificial forces in a largely uncontrolled and unprincipled experiment of our own creation, dominated by a hybrid nature that is partially brutish and partially transcendent. Creationists believe that we are angels fallen to the level of animals, Evolutionists believe we are animals striving to be angels. Regardless of the position adopted, humans are composite creatures without direction at the helm of their own development.