Disappearing Species

I read an article today about manatees and how their numbers are thinning. We humans seem to spend a lot of time worrying about species going extinct. We probably feel responsible, since many of the species that do disappear are destroyed due to human activity such as farming or hunting.

How many species have gone extinct over the last 10,000 years, which is more or less the time span human civilization has existed? Probalby hundreds of thousands. Many other millions of species have disappeared before humans even evolved. It is a cycle, with new ones showing up on an ongoing basis, and others going extinct. Our scientific community has not been around long enough to observe the process, but I doubt anyone can dismiss the fact species are appearing and disappearing continuously.

While we should certainly pay attention to what we do to our environment and how much change we introduce in it, I think we need to take a step back and assess what we are doing with some of the animals we suspect will go extinct. In the case of manatees for example, we breed them in captivity and later release them into the wild. This looks a lot more like genetical engineering and population control to me that many of the stuff that goes on inside labs and about which there is always a lot of public uproar. Are we not playing god? Are we not introducing change where we should perhaps not interfere? Protecting the environment and keeping our virus-like species from invading the planet host is one thing, but attempting to control it and decide which species should survive and which not is another. It is a fine, blurry line that may well be too easy to cross.

The Big Brother

The US needs a competitor. With the fall of the Soviet Union, there is currently no large power in the world to compete with the United States, at least not technologically. This, in turn, poses a serious threat to technological progress. Most advances in the past have been made under pressure from other countries, in a "who gets there first" race. Probably the best example is the race to the Moon. The effort that was made was enormous in scale and breadth, covering dozens of fields that all benefited from the reasearch put into landing a man on the Moon. In only a decade, the United States went from 15-minute suborbital flights with questionable chances of success to landing a craft on the Moon and bringing its pilots back to Earth safely.

Without the Soviet Union pushing for the same goal, it is doubtful that we would have gone to the Moon, let alone in a single decade of tireless effort. Today, with the US being the only technological superpower in the world, such leaps in progress are unlikely. The technology exists to fly to Mars and beyond, but without competition, the interest is simply not there, at least not the political interest. And without the politicians on board, there is little hope for a mission to Mars to materialize soon.

It's probably a simple matter of economics, or even biology. Without commercial or evolutionary pressure, organizations and organisms get to be "good enough" and stagnate in their development. Without a close competitor, the US gets to just play big brother and bully other countries, instead of racing for some elusive goal.

Things may change soon however. Out of the competitional void that was created after the fall of the Soviet Union, at least two technological powers will emerge: China and India. When they do so, it may well be that the US will be caught off-guard, unsuspecting of the tremendous steps forward these two countries will have taken. China is already preparing to put a man in orbit, and India will undoubtedly follow suit. Perhaps soon thereafter we will witness a second race to the moon, this time between countries that would have never appeared worthy of attention in 1969 and that are still not granted the attention they deserve. And who knows, maybe in the 2020s, the decade during which we currently expect the US to have its first mission to Mars, the first flag to fly on the Red Planet may be red.

Have Humans Stopped Evolving?

The tempting answer is "yes." After all, natural selection seems to have come to a halt. Modern society provides for all its individuals, regardless of phsyiscal or mental abilities. There is no evolutionary pressure that would favor some traits over others and induce natural selection.

However, the answer may not be that simple. The most socially successful individuals, such as career women and men who achieve leadership positions, tend to have less children, on average, than the lower income population. In other words, those among us who have (arguably) the better genes and (arguably) better intellectual capabilities get to reproduce less. This sounds like a politically very incorrect statement. After all, who is to say those in the upper classes are smarter or better?

Nobody. In addition, it is fairly obvious that a number of individuals with excellent abilities are born in the lower classes. Nevertheless, from a social perspective the concept that the low income, low education segment of the population is constantly growing seems troubling.

I grew up under a communist regime that indoctrinated me throughout childhood with the idea that all humans are equal, and that there can be no distinction between us based on our social origin. I now live in a capitalist economy that teaches one how wrong this concept is, while at the same time reinfocing the "American Dream" idea that anyone can reach higher. There is no question we can overcome our origins and step up, but that is not to say we all do. Perhaps a very small percentage of us actually get there. If that is the case, I am worried about our society, and the evolutionary trend we seem to have adopted...