Shoot-out at the Occipital Ridge

This kind of thing gets tossed around a lot, but it bears repeating until it sinks firmly into your skull: Whatever it is, however it works that some force, whether it be a blind, amoral force of the organizational edicts of lifeless physics, or some sentient and directed intelligence, it doesn't necessarily matter. Regardless of the schema you subscribe to, the reality is that the societal development of humanity completely leaves the arc of life development in general. Although still under powerful compulsion to breed and die, we are now and have been for at least hundreds of thousands of years a unique element in the world of living things. Whether we are abosolutely unique... well, this remains to be seen. But science cannot approach (and hasn't really tried since Darwin's day) do form any kind of rational assessment of the evolutionary significance of mass human behavior. And this is no surprise: the language and models of evolutionary biology and Darwin are all but useless in the face of the enormous speed with which our culture and technology are mutating, as compared to biological evolution. In culture, mass behavior alterations need not wait around to the next generation to establish a base population and dozens more for the behavioral impact to start breeding seriously into the population. A whole society may change its behavior in light of a particular event, overnight. This change may dissapear the next year, or it may persist for decades or even centuries. Look at the university system: they invented that in the Dark Ages.

But on an even more fundamental level, the fact is that our behavior doesn't really fit the evolutionary paradigm. Yes, we try to breed, and yes, we try to avoid death. But our minds and powers and inclinations are always driving us beyond these simple organism concerns, sometimes even superceeding them completely in the service of some high ideal. We are adapting at an enormous pace, yet most of the adaptations have nothing to do with survival and even less with finding a good piece of ass. The question is, are we doing things for a reason? Not whatever crazy nonsense we all feed ourselves about motivations and justifications, but a true justification. Question number two is, does this reason connect to the reasons behind the whole life swarming up out of the lifeless primordial indistinction? Are we talking about the same thing at all anymore? Are humans really "evolving" at this point? Or has our new method of cognitive and societal adaptation completely superceeded the dominant paradigm of the development of living systems?

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.