...So We Kill Ourselves?

Benjamin Phelan's article "How We Evolve" can basically be summed up by the information given on the last page. Much of the article explains how humans have evolved throughout the centuries, how DNA changes and mutations can be linked back to particular cultures, and how our advanced human intelligence has led to the development of many devices and actions that are harming our entire world. This last bit of information is the bit that Phelan hones in on as he concludes his article. He expresses his fears that because of our advanced intelligence, humans are potentially bringing about "a self-inflicted extinction" (202). Even though our DNA can evolve quickly in order to help us adapt to our natural surroundings and circumstances, at the rate we're working at now, our so-called progressions might result in the extinction of the human race as we know it.

What Phelan talks about almost seems like an unintentional suicide by the human race. We are so focused on making new and advanced technologies that we don't realize the dangerous repercussions that come hand in hand with these technologies. Phelan explains that "the global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb" (202). Because we are aware that our species will, inevitably, one day become extinct, we should use this knowledge to try and put off this extinction as long as possible. Sure, we can't change what is going to happen naturally, but we don't have to cause it to come about quicker than it would on its own. Phelan puts it perfectly when he says "we continue to evolve in the face of hunger, disease, and a changing ecosystem; but our virtual habitat of culture could enable us to become both subjects of evolution and conscious codirectors of it" (202).

It's a scary thought, that we might have a hand in our own evolution due to the evolution of our species up to this point. Common sense would say that we should be conscious of the decisions we are making and the effects of these decisions, especially if they are directly impacting our evolution. What's scary about this thought is that most of the time, we're not conscious about these decisions...or rather, we're not conscious of the repercussions of our decisions. We don't like to believe that our developments and the way we live our daily lives is harming our environment, and subsequently our evolution. Phelan sums it up the best in the last two sentences of his article: "the culture that we've created is, strangely, evolution's most powerful tool and its potential nemesis, the womb of human nature and perhaps its grave. By our own hand: this is how we evolve" (202).