The Evolution of Man

[Rodion Romanovich]

I'm quite certain Chimpanzees, rabbits, and cows don't have visionaries among them. And if humans blow up the world they'll be blown up too, poor things. Only the cockroaches (it's always the cockroaches) will survive. Probably.

Quite right, visionaries only cause trouble. And I think even if humans self-destruct, the other animals will have greater survival chances. We don't yet know the manner of our (likely) future self-destruction yet. The probability is not 1.0 that we will destroy ourselves in a way that destroys all other life.

In any case, Bijo, I'd like to add that with science going the way it is we humans might rely more on artificial evolution instead of a natural one. We've been playing with the genetics of our livestock and our crops for quite a long time, but the knowledge about the real stuff inside as far as timelines go is a very recent development.

A deliberate, artificial evolution would be morally equal to genocide. The only reason why not all disadvantaged by today's society structure run on killing sprees out of frustration is because society doesn't look the way it looks due to conspiracy or deliberate efforts, but as a semi-random result of several wills acting to further different interests, with some of these semi-random actions resulting in temporary synergistic effects that temporarily creates an advantage for a particular set of people who happen to have certain properties, with this set varying from time to time. If you would actually try to form a centralized, deliberately controlled version of this, do you really think that would work? How would you define who gets to belong to the group of untermenschen, how large percentage of the population would you dare to put into that cathegory without risking resistance (a minority as usual, I assume?), and would all cultures really choose their artificial evolution in the same manner? Would Muslim, Buddhist and Christian communities choose in the same way? Would a multicultural society not start to favor their own ethnical group, instead of looking solely on properties? Would an ethnic group tolerate it, if their group was found to have a weakness that would put all or most of those belonging to that group, in the untermensh cathegory? If current indeliberate artifical evolution is controversial and cause for war and other bloodshed, what do you think a deliberate artificial evolution would cause?