cares if it falls. They are each just bunches of chemicals obeying the laws of physics in the moment. Evolution is the accumulation of billions (or trillions) of these moments. We have a natural tendency towards comforting stories with satisfying endings. When we retroactively imbue a process with direction and intentionality, that is called teleology . Teleology is a belief that events have rea sons for happening, and that the ‘universe’ seeks out desired end states. For example, oxygen exists so humans have something to breathe. A dog’s teleological story would be humans exist to throw Frisbees and provide snacks. That evolution occurred in order to produce us , or that the universe exists to produce life are similar stories. Just like there is nothing special about ‘the bottom of the box’ being the preferred destination for raisins, humans are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are just one of the many current outcomes of what worked best after X millions of iterations. There’s no guarantee we’ll remain as we are, because species change, or fail to, with their environment and today’s summit can become tomorrow’s valley. TaaL: It can be comforting to perceive one’s species as the final result of the universe striving for a perfect being, but the universe doesn’t have any such modus operandi. In fact, the main story of life on your planet is single - celled and always will be. The occasional expansions of life into (and back out of) niches which allow large size, long life, and consciousness are both rare and brief. If you think you’re fitter than ants, jellyfish, and bacteria, I have some news for you: large complex life is the fragile outlier in Earthlife’s probability distribution, and then only during a fraction of the time your planet will support life. Conscious life, such as yours, is the most fragile and temporary of all; a crystal wine goblet in a tornado. It has the potential to sustain itself, but only to the extent it can transcend the gene agenda (which enabled it to exist in the first place) and make rational plans about the future. Your brains are currently evolving to be smaller; and have lost 10-15% of their size in the last 20 thousand years 19 . If humans leave descendants a million years from now, they could easily be smallish communal insectivores with brains like spider monkeys , because gene’s sole purpose is to replicate, and recent selection seems to favor group sociality over individual intelligence. Moreover, resource depletion and a hotter climate will tend to shrink the size of any surviving species during that period. A sapient species needs to take a hand in its own 4D existence rather than living entirely i n the moment as you folks currently do. You’re special, but not… special.
The Bottom Line: Evolution is not a “march of progress” but
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