From: gardner@cs.monash.edu.au ()
Subject: Re: Role of the Mind in Human Evolution
Organization: Computer Science, Monash University, Australia
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 06:14:46 GMT

gt8554a@prism.gatech.EDU (JANAKIRAMAN,SHANKER) writes:


>		ROLE OF THE MIND IN HUMAN EVOLUTION


>It is a convincing fact that human being has evolved from certain
>other life form over the millennia. So the logical question at this
>juncture is , are we capable of evolving further? or is it the end
>of road of evolution?

Like you, I am suspicious of a line of thought that intelligence
is in some sense the crowning glory of the evolutionary process.
The evidence to the contrary is pretty compelling. However it does not
suggest the conclusions which you reach.

The favoured theory at this time concerning the extinction of the dinosaurs
is the cometary/asteroidal impact theory - in which a large body strikes the
Earth, blowing trillions of tons of dust into the atmosphere. The sun is blocked
out (or partially so) for several years (perhaps longer), causing a mass 
extinction of plant and animal life. Cold blooded reptiles would be 
particularly vulnerable.

The point of all this is that the dinosaurs were the dominant life form on the
planet for something like 100 million years. And their extinction looks like
an *accident*. A very unlucky accident. At best, human intelligence has been
around only a thousandth of the time that the dinosaurs were - so it looks like
being a dumb dinosaur is certainly as good as and probably a far better solution
to the evolutionary problem of being a life form on this planet than being a
smart human.

[The above argument, I am aware, equivocates on the meaning of "dominant":
in what sense were the dinosaurs (or are we) dominant on the planet? There are
interesting arguments that, for instance, insects ought to be regarded as the
planet's "dominant" life-form. I suspect that a clearer perspective is 
achieved if one drops altogether the insistence that there *be* a dominant
life-form, and just view the planet as an ecosystem with a lot of interacting
non-rigid hierarchies.]

>If we want to participate in the evolutionary process we should use
>our faculties as other life forms use. The distinguishing faculty
>for a human being is the mind. I strongly believe that mind can
>help us evolve.  Evolve to what? Evolve to subtler existence of
>purity, wisdom and transcendence which is beyond mind itself... An
>interesting analogy comes to mind. That of a multistage rocket,
>after each stage burns off, the engine which helped attain that
>orbit itself is discarded) So it seems that once the subtler level
>of existence is achieved the mind itself is to be discarded.  

The metaphor you use here is extremely unfortunate: Nature rarely discards
*anything*. In fact, Nature has a five billion year history of using and
reusing whetever (phenotypical) resources are available. Thus the panda's
thumb is originally a wrist-bone, the bat's wing originally just webbing
between the fingers, the elephant's nose doubles as a tentacle and so on.
If the human species is to continue evolving, we can be certain that an
organ as fantastically useful and as complex as the brain will not be
discarded. 

There is a sense in which in might be true that there is evolutionary pressure
of our species to become "wiser, purer, transcendant" - if we are so stupid
and incapable of co-operation as to render ourselves extinct, Nature may well
try again. The are two important difficulties with this idea. Firstly, 
it would be very difficult to entirely wipe out the human species; we have
penetrated every possible niche in the planet's environment. Even the worst
global nuclear disaster is likely to leave isolated pockets of surviving 
humanity. And there is no reason at all to think that the survivors (and
more particularly their descendants) would have learnt anything from this.
Secondly, if humanity *does* become utterly extinct, there is no reason at all
to think that Nature's next evolutionary experiment should resemble the one
that produced ourselves. In short, intelligence is a neat trick if you can do
it - but the rest of the creatures in Nature's Zoo seem to get along
pretty well without it.

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* __  ___  ___ \    /  ___  |  * "We have no choice. We must believe in free  *
*|__   |  |__   \  /  |__   |  *  will."                                      *
*___|  |  |___   \/   |___  o  *           Isaac Bashevis Singer              *
*gardner@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au*                                              *
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