People work less and less physically and more and more mentally. Evolution, if not tweaked, acts accordingly - it takes resources from the body and transfers them to the brain
The first erect hominids lived 4 million years ago, Homo erectus appeared after them rather quickly, after 2 million, Neanderthals spent only some 100,000 years on the birth, maturity and death of their species. And Homo sapiens, or modern man, jumped out onto the stage like a devil out of a snuffbox. It is no more than 50,000 years old, and the process of its formation (scientists believe that four single-line related groups participated in it: Homo sapiens africaensis - Africa, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis - Europe, Homo sapiens orientalensis - East and Southeast Asia, Homo sapiens altaiensis - North and Central Asia) was and remains by no means linear, as it seemed until recently.
Most of the time of modern man's existence is covered by the first of the cultures he created - the Upper Paleolithic culture, which ended 10,000 years ago. At that time hunting was the basis of life. This culture, according to some reports, resulted in the first ecological crisis associated with the large-scale destruction of large animals. The extermination of animals led to a decrease in the population. It was restored with the advent of animal husbandry and agriculture, this happened 8000-10000 years ago. This moment is also called the Neolithic revolution - the widespread transition from an appropriating economy (hunting and gathering) to a producing one. Thus, the time when a person himself produced the food consumed by him is 25% of the total duration of his existence. Even shorter is the period of technical civilization (fractions of a percent of the history of mankind) and the time of the scientific and technological revolution (STR), not exceeding hundredths of a percent.
Undoubtedly, the main role in the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens was played by climate change - so, according to many researchers, the onset and retreat of glaciers during the Pleistocene cooling period caused climate fluctuations in vast territories, and this each time posed new tasks for man and accelerated his evolution. The last big stage in the formation of mankind was passed during the Wurm glaciation, about 40,000 years ago.
SELECTION BY MIND
Evolution in the animal kingdom can in many cases be described by arithmetic progression. But a person has a geometric progression - the rate of change increases with each step. The fact is that its evolution since ancient times was determined not by natural adaptation to external conditions, but by the growing ability to change these conditions for itself. Genetic selection reinforced the qualities necessary for this: intelligence, memory, abstract thinking. The ancestors of man could not become stronger and more agile than other species, but they were able to "fit" the world for themselves: they began to build shelters from predators, cultivate fields in order to depend less on pasture, sew clothes to save themselves from the cold, form families to pass on to offspring accumulated knowledge. But this does not mean that in the last several tens of thousands of years, human biological evolution has stopped. It's just that her every step covers tens of generations and therefore is not too noticeable. It is helpful here to recall the statement of Jacques Lucien Monod, French biochemist and Nobel laureate: "The most curious aspect of the theory of evolution, everyone thinks they understand it." Therefore, we will confine ourselves to citing several indicative facts that testify in favor of the evolution that is still going on.
The race of northern Caucasians was formed relatively recently, at the last peak of glaciation, about 25,000 years ago. Homo sapiens had to adapt to the harsh conditions of the glacial regions of Europe. The strong protrusion of the nasal cavity lengthened the air path to the respiratory tract and contributed to its warming. The orthognathic nature (drowning of the jaws under the cheekbones) of the facial skeleton prevented the pharynx from cooling. Light skin created advantages of a biochemical nature: it accumulates vitamin D better when exposed to light (rickets does not develop in conditions of a lack of sun). Caucasians, who once made up a very small part of the world's population, have settled unusually widely over the past centuries. And now they are undergoing rapid cross-breeding, merging with other races. Blondes with blue eyes (and blondes) will be the first to disappearin just a few hundred years.
STAGE MUTATIONS
According to recent studies, the brain of the first Homo sapiens was 15-20% larger than the brain of modern humans. However, this does not mean that our ancestors were smarter. Rather, on the contrary: if morphological changes have occurred in the brain, which led to a better organization of the intracranial space, then it has become more efficient in general.
Moreover, six years ago, geneticist Bruce Lahn and colleagues at the University of Chicago found evidence that the evolution of the human brain is continuing. They studied two genes - mierocephalin and ASPM, on which, among other things, the development of the brain, its structure and size depend. Microcephaly mutated about 37,000 years ago, it was then that Cro-Magnons suddenly began to feel the urge to paint on the walls of caves and other forms of primitive art. The ASPM mutation, which happened about 6,000 years ago, stimulated the growth of the brain, and around the same time (this can be considered a coincidence), writing was born in people and they began to build cities. Mutations continue to accumulate in these genes. Where will they lead? “I can only assume that the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex will increase in the near future,and especially in that part of it, which is responsible for the analysis of visual information, as a result of which people will react much more adequately to the rapidly changing environment,”says Lan.
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Of course, the rate of human development has significantly decreased due to the fact that people have created islands on Earth with a stable environment, perfectly adapted to their needs. But in the last couple of hundred years, the situation has changed dramatically. The scientific and technological revolution began, and the habitat, as well as the diet, began to change at a catastrophic rate - theoretically, no living creature can adapt to them so quickly. Therefore, a person will have to supplement biological evolution, thereby further activating it, with special technical means.
HEAD ON LEGS
So the future is preparing a lot of interesting things. And, most likely, this future will come much earlier than we think. Let's start with a simple one - with the usual biological changes. In the late 1950s, the Soviet evolutionist Alexei Bystrov (by the way, a friend of the prominent paleontologist and science fiction scientist Ivan Efremov, bred under the name of Shatrov in the story "Starships") represented the evolution of modern Homo sapiens to Homo sapientissimus over the next tens of thousands of years so: the most reasonable person will have a huge brain, an extremely weak and toothless jaw apparatus, close shoulder girdle and pelvis and, as a result, a significantly shortened gastrointestinal tract. In addition, the number of ribs will decrease, and the hand will become three-fingered, devoid of the ring and little finger. For many decades, an eerie picture of a skeleton wandering somewhere with a huge skull and a rickety skeleton was present in half of futuristic articles. For example, in the Strugatskys' story “Lame Destiny”, the protagonist talks about the man of the future as follows: “It would be interesting to imagine how a super homo is born today … True, it is difficult to imagine this super: a huge bald skull, frail hands -foot, impotent - banal. But actually something like that should be. Anyway, a shift in needs. "it's hard to imagine this super: a huge bald skull, frail little arms-legs, impotent - banal. But actually something like that should be. Anyway, a shift in needs. "it's hard to imagine this super: a huge bald skull, frail little arms-legs, impotent - banal. But actually something like that should be. Anyway, a shift in needs."
Demand bias is the key word. We have already said that it is impossible to build a simple progression from the current parameters of a person, as Bystrov did. It is not necessary to grow a giant skull; it is enough to optimize the structure of the brain to use its hidden capabilities.
But, for example, a person really needs teeth less and less. “We will not really need the eighth teeth in the future - wisdom teeth - on each side of the jaw,” says Lev Etingen, a professor at the Moscow Medical Academy. Indeed, we rarely have to chew on something. And already now there are people whose G8s have not grown. In addition, the teeth of our ancestors were much stronger and less prone to caries. They began to deteriorate only in the 16th century, when cane sugar appeared in the diet. But their size has been decreasing for a long time - by about 1% every thousand years. That is, over the past 100,000 years, the human tooth has lost about half in size.
EVOLUTION BY ORDER
Should we conclude from this that people will have 20-22 small teeth instead of the current 32 large ones? Not. Rather, a person will have as many teeth and sizes as he wants. Biological evolution would continue to change our appearance at its own discretion, if humanity was thrown into the Stone Age and lost the ability to influence the environment. And so we will fight serious environmental pollution not by growing additional hair in the nose or by improving the nasal apparatus, but by purely technological methods. Moreover, such as it is impossible to imagine now.
The fact that science (and the accumulation of scientific knowledge) is developing exponentially was written back in the 19th century by Friedrich Engels and a little later by Vladimir Vernadsky. Here we come to the now fashionable concept of technological singularity - this is a point on the time axis at which scientific and technological progress will become so rapid and complex that it will be beyond the comprehension of modern man. At the same time, artificial intelligence and self-reproducing machines will appear, a person will be integrated with computer systems, biotechnology will provide an abrupt growth of our thinking abilities, it will be possible to freely transfer consciousness to other carriers, and perhaps even a person will completely abandon the body.
ENDLESS ACCELERATION
The concept of technological singularity was presented by the American mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge back in 1993, and in 2004 at the State Astronomical Institute named after P. K. Sternberg, a report was made (physicist Alexander Panova. A. the author compared the time intervals between qualitative leaps in the development of the biosphere and society and showed that in both cases these intervals are reduced in accordance with a simple inverse power dependence. And from some moment (he and called the point of singularity) the intervals between the jumps become practically equal to zero, that is, the number of jumps per unit of time approaches infinity. It hardly makes sense to talk about an infinitely fast technological progress, but it will certainly look like that from the point of view of a modern person. the same startling conclusion,which Panov makes: mankind will reach the singularity point not in millions, thousands, or at least hundreds of years, but already in the middle of this century. Australian biologist and sociologist Graham Snooks obtained similar results independently and at approximately the same time, so the steeply upward curve describing scientific and technological progress was called the "Snooks-Panov vertical."
OUTPUT ENERGY
But if the theory turns out to be erroneous and no super-acceleration of evolution and progress occurs, then the future of humanity, developing according to the "normal" laws of biological evolution, only slightly corrected by us, is not too happy. After Homo sapiens reigned on the planet and created the first communities, he followed the path of removing conflicting individuals from them. That is, people who were ready for compromises and joint work for the common good had competitive advantages and more chances for procreation. But when taken to the extreme, pluses often become minuses. In particular, the described algorithm leads to the gradual ousting from the population of not only the most aggressive, but in general everyone who stands out from the crowd. Thus, mediocrity has the highest chances of survival and procreation in the modern world. The reduction in the number of gifted people is, according to the head of the laboratory for the development of the nervous system of the Institute of Human Morphology of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Sergei Savelyev, intellectual self-destruction.
The only possible way out of such an evolutionary impasse is the development of new spaces outside the Earth, where society could push all kinds of adventurers and restless people in general. Remaining a part of humanity, they, even though in the process of adapting to new conditions and having acquired other lungs, eyes, etc., will evolutionarily pull us upward with them.
Around the World November 2011