Evolution

I seem to think about evolution quite often. It sometimes seems fantastic we’re all around, and we got here by a stochastic process of mutation and selection starting from inorganic molecules. I mean, I totally believe in it, but when you really think about it it’s fascinating. The probabilities affecting the events that needed to take place, and the timeframes involved, are just too tiny/huge for human experience to be able to reliably have intuitions about them.

My interest in evolution may have to do to some extent with my interest in the nature of consciousness. Theory of consciousness seems to be a mine field — but really I’ve only read a few papers about it and a lot of Wikipedia articles. I should read up more on it. And in turn theory of consciousness is related with the topic of knowledge, and why we search for it — why we search for meaning in the void, and we try to build it into anythiing we create with inert mass when don’t find it already there. I sometimes wonder if humanity’s goal, if it can have one, is not (or should not be) to spread consciousness throughout the universe; and evolution’s goal, if it can have one, may be the same.

I very often resort to evolution I think about why people, or indeed animals, behave the ways they behave. It seems as if we’re somehow burdened by behaviours that were evolutionarily successful at some point, but are now outdated — or perhaps just co-evolved with positive traits and sort of stuck around so far. Violence, in my mind, is one of these traits or behaviours. It seems obvious to me that a humanity without violence would be a better humanity; in particular if traits that may be correlated with the capacity for violence, like drive and innovation, are somehow left unchanged by whatever process is used to erradicate the associated ills. I have a (fuzzy) idea for an article about this topic that I may write at some point; about how violence pervades society and may be just a disease in our genes that needs to be handled more effectively than we’re doing so far. I’m thinking of this also in relation to things like #MeToo, which is a reaction to the sexual violence that seems to permeate the current world, and victimizes mainly women.