Technology makes our lives more comfortable, but it takes away the incentive to achieve something. Instincts make people use knowledge and technology for evil, destroying the planet. Do people have a chance to save themselves from themselves?
Stanislav Drobyshevsky is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, scientific editor of the Anthropogenesis.ru portal.
“The cities of the Earth have turned into “genetic garbage dumps”
– How does our brain change with the evolution of … gadgets? Within a few years, a person will be surrounded by digital assistants who will be ready to fulfill our every request. Will this not lead us to degradation?
– This has practically no effect on human evolution – for the simple reason that all these electronic assistants cover a very small part of people – the urban population. And now these are not at all those people who without exception “bear and multiply” and pass on their genes to offspring. The cities of the Earth have turned into “genetic garbage dumps”, where the death rate is higher than the birth rate. Residents of rural areas breed, and they are just not particularly covered by electronization. This happens both in our country and in the world as a whole. The highest birth rate is in Africa and the Middle East, and with computerization there, on average, it’s not that good. Something I strongly doubt that the one who points his finger more at the smartphone leaves more offspring.
– It turns out that the future of the planet is poor illiterate Africans?
– Not. The question is not so much how many children they had, but how many of these children survived to reproductive age and had their own. If out of ten children, eight died in infancy due to unsanitary conditions, high birth rates do not matter. In African countries, this is still very bad. And most importantly: in those cases when they do reduce mortality – they solve the problems of hunger and epidemics, they do not do it on their own. This is achieved by the efforts of European and American scientists. Some Dutch people produce the same food in abundance and send it to, say, Somalia. And if this assistance stops, the surge in numbers will disappear. They will give birth exactly the same amount, they will simply die, as before.
– But the development of gadgets cannot but influence the cultural evolution.
– That’s another matter. With the help of all these electronic bells and whistles, we are able to handle a much larger amount of information than we could before. Previously, one had to go to libraries, take notes on books. And now there is no point in this: I downloaded a book from the Internet and can open it at any time. It turns out that we save strength and energy, and progress is incredibly accelerated. Now any smartphone has more power than a NASA computer when they sent a man to the moon.
And where will this lead humanity?
– This is a difficult question. Indeed, thanks to technology, it has become easier to collect huge databases, draw reasonable conclusions, develop new technologies, medicines, and make calculations in order to send a mission to, say, Mars. But how do people use these opportunities? At the end of the XNUMXth and beginning of the XNUMXth century, there were several hundred scientists all over the world, each of them studied some problem for decades and wrote thick books. And now any unfinished student can download the database, calculate quickly using the program and write an article. No one wants to go deep into questions. And the scientific system itself is built in such a way that this is not expected. A book is rarely considered a scientific publication, usually only articles in a journal are considered. What is an article? It will soon disappear, and no one will be interested in its contents. There is a devaluation of scientific activity, and although there are many technical possibilities, they are being used by the devil. It turns out a bunch of informational garbage, and then the next generation of scientists has to spend an unmeasured amount of time to understand what makes sense and what is just nonsense. The same is happening in other areas.
– Still, it seems that humanity is slightly degrading.
— There is also a cultural problem here: people have no goal, they have nowhere to strive. Therefore, they do not take advantage of all these opportunities. Previously, some built communism, others built capitalism; everyone competed who would send farther, faster and better; designed the largest planes and so on. And now everyone is full, happy, warm – at least those who have the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of civilization. Those who do not have them can dream about them and know that you just need to get to Germany, where you will be fed. There is another important point: with the advent of a gigantic amount of easily accessible information, many schoolchildren and students (and they, whatever one may say, are the future of mankind) have a false conviction that everything is already known and nothing more needs to be learned, it is enough to open Wikipedia and read it there truth. Why do anything at all if everything is already on the Internet? This applies not only to science, but also, for example, art. Why paint a picture? Throw in a search engine: you need a drawing of this and that, and in the right genre, from realistic to cartoon.
“These same teenagers, who are the future of humanity, according to their parents and teachers, are increasingly lying on the couch and simply do not want anything.
– There is an optimistic explanation here – this is not a trend, we just pay more attention to such people now. Roughly speaking, under Lomonosov, too, 90% were Emels and lay on the stove, and one Mikhailo made his way to Moscow with a convoy and became a scientist. Now the same thing – we have billions of people, of which one percent becomes someone significant – scientists, composers, writers, and the remaining 99% also lie on the stove. But then they were lying on the stove somewhere in the Kostroma province and no one knew about them, and now they can also post their photo on VKontakte and insert their valuable five kopecks for any reason. I post scientific news, and experts immediately come running who cannot write the word “anthropogenesis” without errors, but everyone knows about me and about the origin of man. Now they have the opportunity to voice it, but before it was not. So maybe not everything is like that.
“Man did not arise to defend a dissertation”
– In general, according to what signs is natural selection going on in the human environment now?
“No one knows, because it will become obvious only after millions of years. Now we can only roughly estimate based on statistics. Who was less a generation ago, in the 1990s, and now it has become more in percentage terms? This is where the selection goes. If we take purely biological characteristics, I can say that for the last 100-200 years there has been a selection of asthenics with underdeveloped muscles and reduced fat deposition. But whether a particular sign contributes to the survival of the individual depends on the specific conditions. During the siege of Leningrad, it was precisely people with increased fat deposition who survived the siege of Leningrad, who spent much more economical nutrients in the body. But in peacetime, they had an increased percentage of diabetes and heart disease. That is, in peacetime, such features seem to be harmful, but in wartime they are useful. In our body, there are no unambiguously beneficial and unambiguously harmful signs. While I’m doing interviews, my glasses can be useful – they make me smarter in the perception of other people. And if I go hunting for saigas, then, probably, poor eyesight will be a minus: I won’t be able to see this saiga. Since our humanity is now extremely diverse, lives in very different conditions, there is no single trend here and cannot be. And which of the existing trends is decisive, it will become clear only later.
– Is the current trend for thin people a hint of evolution?
No, it’s purely a social thing. In general, it is wrong to say that evolution directs something there, decides: this one will survive, and this one will die. It’s just survival statistics – there are fewer of them, there are more of them, that’s all, the mathematics of deaths and births. Over the past few hundred years, the fashion for fat and thin has changed several times. The statistics say that asthenia is underway. But in the last 30–50 years, the reverse trend has also increased – the obesity epidemic. There are more, there is an infinite amount of food, and it is not the best. In the next 50 years, it will become clear where this will lead. If the obesity epidemic leads to an increased incidence of atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, etc., if especially obese people die more often and leave fewer offspring on average, then selection has begun. And if they successfully breed and invent drugs that will allow them to live and reproduce quite successfully with a weight of 130 kg, then in these new conditions – with drugs – this is not a harmful, but at least a neutral sign.
“Recently, education has brought obvious advantages in reproduction: knowledge gave a good job, and a good job allowed you to feed a large family. Now we see rather the opposite.
— The situation is different in different countries. For example, in the United States, education is directly correlated with income, and income is directly correlated with the number of children who survived to adulthood, these are statistics. The higher the level of education, the higher the income and the more children. And in our country, the level of education is negatively related to family income. The more educated a person is, the less money he has … There is another point: it is not a fact that the level of education and income in modern realities generally leads to an increase in survival. Man as a species did not arise in the conditions when it was necessary to defend candidate dissertations. There was no such thing that those who were not very smart and could not quickly count, for example, died out (and now science is the ability to quickly calculate, for the most part). Among Pithecanthropes and Cro-Magnons, survival also depended on intelligence, but in the wrong direction: they thought practically. And, which is typical, practical-minded people still feel quite successful now. Their level of education may be lower, but at the same time they are more adequate in the current situation.
– The question arises: what to teach children to increase their evolutionary potential? Formal education is clearly not the main thing here. Practical thinking, what else?
– It is necessary to distinguish between the concept of education as a diploma with beautiful squiggles and education as a system of knowledge in the head. It’s not the same thing. A person who has not received a diploma can be much more educated than a holder of a red diploma. I see students all over the place who are not at all intellectual – but they still have excellent grades. And there are those who study somehow, and then work quite fruitfully. There is still a positive correlation between academic grades in this sense, but these are statistics, and at the individual level it does not work in any way. As for advice: study, study and study again. Engage your brains. And in what direction – it is individual.
How does religion affect survival? Do religious societies, whose members are ordered to be fruitful and multiply, surely have an advantage in the evolutionary race over secular ones?
“In fact, no one has an advantage because of religion. Richard Dawkins (famous British ethologist. -) cites statistics: the more religious the country, the poorer it is on average. The only exception is the countries of the Arabian Peninsula: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman – because they are sitting on oil. But what have they achieved? There is no science, no art – no theaters, no museums, they just spend money. And in the whole world, I repeat, the more religious the country, the worse it lives.
Why not?
– There are many reasons, this is a complex phenomenon. But the main one is the lack of critical thinking. “Believe” means not to double-check the information. And consequently, it is more likely to make mistakes or neglect the necessary calculations. This works at any level, including at the household level. You can thoughtlessly grab loans from the bank, they say, somehow get out, and then be surprised – oh, Christmas trees, my salary is not enough. And you can sit down and calculate: my salary is like this, which means that I can take this loan or I can’t, and I will live a little worse, but in my apartment, which will not be taken away for debts. This affects the economy as well. It turns out that it is easier not to think, especially when there is a complex society around that will save you and help you at any moment. And the brain cannot stop working at all, it must be busy with something. Well, it begins: someone strikes into religion, someone into mysticism, someone is looking for aliens, someone catches snow people.
“Every living thing destroys its habitat”
– Does the state somehow influence the increase in the evolutionary chances of citizens to spread their genes? For example, can fertility programs help?
– The state is trying to increase the birth rate, and this is important. But there is also a more serious problem. If we fill up the neighborhood with landfills, people will get sick and die. The cost of treating patients will be high, the mortality rate will be high, the reproductive capacity will be low, and there will be no productivity. The state will weaken, neighbors will come running and seize everything. Therefore, it is beneficial for the state that the country be clean, beautiful, with a healthy population. Another thing is that not every official is aware of this. If officials were tested for consciousness, life would be a fairy tale.
Why are we destroying our own habitat? This is the opposite of survival.
– Any living creature – from bacteria to us – destroys its habitat with its vital activity. This is a fact, a natural phenomenon. Our branch-hopping ancestors didn’t care where their leftovers and poop went. The monkey is sitting in the crown of a tree, and what is going on down there, she does not care about a light bulb. And most modern people behave exactly the same way. I have neighbors in the stairwell smoking and throwing cigarette butts on the floor. They live here, every day they walk along the same stairs, there is a beautiful repair. But there is no way to convince them, this is such monkey behavior. And people are normal, ordinary people, but nonetheless.
– And what can be done about it? Raise environmental awareness?
– Here you can only get into the head with some kind of genetic modification, put some kind of blocker so that a person cannot physically throw a cigarette butt on the floor. Or to develop conditioned reflexes. I advocate genetic modification, but I’m afraid we won’t live to see it. Because the advocates of ethics say: you can’t change genes, because you can’t. Well, then we’re all going to die.
“But on a global scale, states are trying to do something.
— Of course, there are agreements on emissions, but any large economy may not sign them. Or they push the problem onto someone else: Germany or Holland take their waste somewhere to the Philippines and then tell everyone how to protect nature. But there is only one planet. Now, of course, the lawns in Germany are greener than the sea in the Philippines, but how long will this last? The planet is not rubber, and everything comes around through the atmosphere, water and much more. In August, I went to an astronomy school in Arkhyz, and experts said that today there is such an amazing problem – space pollution. We have launched a lot of satellites into orbit, many have already collapsed. And all of them – both satellites and debris – fly in approximately the same orbit, the most stable. Another 20 years at this pace, and we will not be able to put anything new into this orbit, because it is impossible to remove garbage at all. Now smart people are thinking how to do it, but so far there is no method. The only thing we can do now is try to count them, the wreckage. To survive, humanity has at most 200-300 years. Most likely less.
– Maybe something can still be done to prolong the life of mankind?
– Everyone should try not to spoil himself and try to encourage others to do this. But adequately, because there is a risk of going too far, starting to protect nature in such a way that it would be better not to do this. Ecology is now beginning to be used for their own political purposes – remember Greta Thunberg. Again, developing critical thinking is not only about garbage. If you can walk – do not burn gasoline. If everyone on the planet did this consciously and simultaneously, it would save us. I do not really believe that this can be, but you can try.
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