The Human Super Weapon
The human brain is a marvelous adaptation. More than that. It's our super weapon.
If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows. No wonder why it's such an energy suck: with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen.
Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking.
But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after generation by (unwittingly) sacrificing their weak. Unfit lines of genes ceased to be and fitter ones got to pass on their more successful traits in this purposeless random walk called evolution. By eliminating of those useless traits, the process recorded what did not work and only tried new traits in the next generation. In other words, evolving species developed a conscious-less memory, which was useful when the next generation faced the same fixed, predictable environment that had beaten their weakest in the past.
And iteration after iteration, Evolution randomly produced us. Then at some point 50,000 years ago, an upgrade occurred. Societal behavior spearheaded an explosion of human ingenuity, and our brains exploded in size, developing memory, and producing cognitive tools to record knowledge like language, and later on, the alphabet. We had finally developed our super-weapon. And thus we were able to record our experience in our fixed, predictable environment in our memories, and later on in our oral history through language, and then in books through the alphabet. And we built a human information bank that allowed us to better adapt to our fixed, predictable environment without the need to sacrifice the weakest of our species. Agriculture. Hygiene. Medicine. Science. Architecture. Industrial production... you name it. In doing this, we had finally one-upped evolution's natural selection process.
Thus, we have "human-formed" the planet for our service. Dams, canals, and the razing of entire continents to plant human-edible crops and let cattle roam to get fatter and then slaughtered at rates so incredibly fast they defy the human capacity of inspectors in charge of certifying the killing conditions aren't breeding grounds for the next pandemic. All in the name of profits and due to our insatiable demand for food. After all, our super-weapon needs to be fed good quality, complex protein.
But, turns out that, in one-upping evolution's natural selection, we have yielded our super-weapon to upend this process and supplant it with its new turbo-charged version: human selection. If natural selection was this randomized purpose-less process, human selection is entirely teleological. It only advances human objectives. The result is the survival a very select set of species that further human goals, and the wipe out of all the others that don't.
In one word: the Anthropocene,
Alas, if only this scenario was a stable one. You can't upend the mechanism that has for billions of years sustained life in this planet and expect the very environment that underpinned it to not change as well. If species counted on natural selection to get better at beating their fixed, predictable environment the next generation around, human selection has made that environment unfixed, and unfathomably unpredictable.
We've yielded our weapon at the hand that has fed us for millions of years. And now we're about to find out how hard that hand can hit back.
If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows. No wonder why it's such an energy suck: with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen.
Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking.
But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after generation by (unwittingly) sacrificing their weak. Unfit lines of genes ceased to be and fitter ones got to pass on their more successful traits in this purposeless random walk called evolution. By eliminating of those useless traits, the process recorded what did not work and only tried new traits in the next generation. In other words, evolving species developed a conscious-less memory, which was useful when the next generation faced the same fixed, predictable environment that had beaten their weakest in the past.
And iteration after iteration, Evolution randomly produced us. Then at some point 50,000 years ago, an upgrade occurred. Societal behavior spearheaded an explosion of human ingenuity, and our brains exploded in size, developing memory, and producing cognitive tools to record knowledge like language, and later on, the alphabet. We had finally developed our super-weapon. And thus we were able to record our experience in our fixed, predictable environment in our memories, and later on in our oral history through language, and then in books through the alphabet. And we built a human information bank that allowed us to better adapt to our fixed, predictable environment without the need to sacrifice the weakest of our species. Agriculture. Hygiene. Medicine. Science. Architecture. Industrial production... you name it. In doing this, we had finally one-upped evolution's natural selection process.
Thus, we have "human-formed" the planet for our service. Dams, canals, and the razing of entire continents to plant human-edible crops and let cattle roam to get fatter and then slaughtered at rates so incredibly fast they defy the human capacity of inspectors in charge of certifying the killing conditions aren't breeding grounds for the next pandemic. All in the name of profits and due to our insatiable demand for food. After all, our super-weapon needs to be fed good quality, complex protein.
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| U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. Each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land dedicated to the label. Here, plots are lumped by label. More info here. |
But, turns out that, in one-upping evolution's natural selection, we have yielded our super-weapon to upend this process and supplant it with its new turbo-charged version: human selection. If natural selection was this randomized purpose-less process, human selection is entirely teleological. It only advances human objectives. The result is the survival a very select set of species that further human goals, and the wipe out of all the others that don't.
In one word: the Anthropocene,
Alas, if only this scenario was a stable one. You can't upend the mechanism that has for billions of years sustained life in this planet and expect the very environment that underpinned it to not change as well. If species counted on natural selection to get better at beating their fixed, predictable environment the next generation around, human selection has made that environment unfixed, and unfathomably unpredictable.
We've yielded our weapon at the hand that has fed us for millions of years. And now we're about to find out how hard that hand can hit back.
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