I wanted to share this TED talk by Janine Benyus. It’s about how engineers are drawing design inspiration from nature, whom one presumes is a better engineer than anyone we’ve got. It starts out slightly hokey, but the examples Benyus points out get more and more incredible as her lecture goes on. It’s easily my favorite TED talk since I started watching them. If you’re in any way involved with engineering, design, or even environmentalism, it’s a must watch:

Looking at the effects humans have had on their ecosystems since the Industrial Revolution, it’s easy to feel like we’re turning this planet into a wasteland and wonder just where the hell we think we’re going to live when it’s all destroyed. Hearing about some of the methods engineers are finding to accomplish great things while being able to maintain a natural balance with the world gives a welcome sense of optimism that we just might be able to stay here for the long haul.

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When you consider the notion that humans are still evolving to this day, you can only naturally be expected to wonder what we will evolve into in the future. We’ll almost certainly be prettier, maybe we won’t be as strong, one hopes we will be smarter, etc.

But the thing is, that’s not how evolution works. Species do not turn into something new. If they did, there wouldn’t still be monkeys in the same geographical areas as humans, as creationists are so wont to point out.

The rise of a new species is marked by the point at which a one subset of a species can no longer interbreed with another. It is a split, not a switch. Parallel, not serial. In our case, such an event results in two separate species of human. This has happened several times in the past, and historically, one species has eventually died out in favor of the other (neanderthals are a fairly recent example, having survived alongside our own species until about 25,000 years ago).

Do you see the scary bit here? The same thing is going to happen to us someday. We will not evolve. Instead, a smarter, more attractive version of us will become reproductively incompatible with us, and we will either die out or become geologically sequestered from the new homo supersapiens like our prehensile-tailed ancestors.

Trippy, eh?

Ever get the feeling that this is already happening?

Philosophizing Add Comment »