Humans Are Fast Evolving Into an Astonishing Lifeform

How many times a day do you communicate electronically, either with other individuals or artificial intelligence (AI), or use electronic sources of news, information, social media, apps, or gameplay?

It’s safe to say…a lot.

Here’s a summary of research for American users.^1-5

Electronic communications per day in the developed world

Source: Eric Haseltine

Granted, we don’t necessarily read all those texts, emails, and notifications, but in developed countries, we spend on average 6-7 hours a day glued to a screen of one kind or another.^6,7 That’s roughly one-third of the total time we’re awake.

And every one of those hours is spent connecting in some fashion with other humans, whether communicating directly or consuming content other humans have created.

While it’s true that we’ve been glued to screens in the form of TV since the 1950s, person-to-person electronic communication has exploded from about six phone calls a day in the landline era⁸ to the hundreds of times described by the chart above.^1-5

What’s the effect of this explosion of communication?

Intuition says that the astonishing speed with which this era of hyper-communication has occurred must change us in some way or other, but how?

Political echo-chambers, online bullying, flaming, isolation from decreased face-to-face encounters, online radicalization, cybercrime, decreased attention spans, and proliferation of misinformation are just a few of the phenomena that have emerged on the negative side.

On the positive side, productivity and the pace of innovation have skyrocketed as we share a staggering amount of knowledge. Which, of course, are big reasons hyper-communication has happened—it’s very efficient and profitable.

But all these exponential changes miss something much deeper: the rapid evolutionary change to human civilization writ large.

Human evolution is happening right in front of us

Evolutionary changes to individual humans take hundreds of thousands of years. But major changes to humans as a social species can occur much faster. For more than 200,000 years, Homo sapiens lived in small, mostly nomadic clans before the introduction of agriculture around 10,000 years ago. With agriculture and development of technologies for communication and transportation, the largest unit of human societies grew from clans to tribes, to villages, to cities, to city-states, to nation-states, and, more recently, aggregations of nation-states such as the EU. All of this transpired in only 5 percent of the time Homo sapiens have existed. The percentage of our history we’ve been aggregating into larger groups is much lower when you consider that hominids as a genus emerged 15-20 million years ago.

Accompanying increased aggregation into larger social units has been a profound increase in specialization of individuals within those units. In hunter-gatherer societies, people were generalists who could fend for themselves to provide food and shelter. Today, we’re all specialists: farmers, builders, teachers, factory workers, accountants, lawyers, physicians, and so forth. Within those specializations are many further layers of specialization. In medicine, for instance, there are now 24 specialties and 130 subspecialties, whereas 200 years ago, there were just a handful. Ditto for law, engineering, accounting, and most other disciplines.

Interestingly, our bodies and brains obey this same principle, where—in contrast to micro-organisms, where individual cells are generalists that perform all necessary functions—human cells are highly specialized, performing narrow functions such as sensing, digesting, moving, healing, remembering, and reproducing.

These aggregated, specialized cells can’t survive or reproduce on their own.

Why nature favors aggregations of specialists vs. individual generalists

If specialists in aggregates can’t survive on their own, why have so many different kinds of multicellular plants and animals evolved? Further, why, over hundreds of millions of years, have the number of cells—along with specialization of those cells—steadily increased, as shown in the plot of cells in the largest animals in different epochs?^9-14 Compare that trend to the size of the largest social units humans have belonged to over the past 200,000 years.^15-20

Source: Eric Haseltine

Source: Eric Haseltine

The first answer is that nature doesn’t always favor ever-larger aggregations of specialists. Although 7-12 million unique species of multicellular organisms exist, there are still 1-3 million unicellular species. Moreover, some ecosystems (where food is scarce) favor relatively small aggregations of cells in multicellular creatures (for instance, the average mass of land animals shrank for a time after extinction events like the one that doomed the dinosaurs, favoring smaller creatures).^23,24

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Thus, increases over time in aggregation/specialization principle only apply to resource-rich ecosystems, such as the “social ecosystem” of humans.

Evolutionary biologists theorize that aggregation/specialization affords species, and the individual cells that comprise them, significant advantages, among them protection from predation, intraspecies dominance, effectiveness as a predator, and conservation of body heat (larger bodies retain more heat).^9,11,12,13

And, as the number and different types of brain cells increase in a multicellular animal, so does the ability to learn, adapt, and improvise in varied and changing environments.^9,11,12,13

What this means for our future

Before you say, “All this is metaphorical because humans are not single cells, countries are not bodies, and the global communication network is not a nervous system,” consider this: Humans are biological entities. Therefore, everything about them, including their communications technology and social structures, serves to promote their survival and reproduction and, thus, does not arise randomly, but in response to natural laws.^12,13

Evidence presented here suggests that those same laws apply equally to cells (such as neurons), aggregations of cells (such as humans), and aggregations of aggregations (such as civilizations).

Whether we’re talking about cells, humans, or societies, there’s strength in numbers.

A clear implication of this principle is that aggregation and specialization in human affairs will continue to increase as long as the advantages of aggregation persist.

And technology will continue to accelerate this increase. Direct brain-to-brain communication has been demonstrated in the lab, and AI has decoded and transmitted “thoughts” from brain signals.^21,22 Thus, in the future, it is likely that we will be able to communicate with others just by thinking. When that happens, will we still be individuals, or part of something larger?

Technically, we’ll remain individuals. Unlike our constituent cells that all have the same genes and cannot survive outside our body, individual humans, for the foreseeable future, will not all have the same genes and will be able survive—with difficulty—apart from other humans.

However, it is likely that the strength-in-numbers principle will make many of us feel like we are losing ever more autonomy, as we face pressure to become ever more specialized in ever larger social units.

Which means that the social unrest that has arisen as some groups rebel against aggregations such as immigration, foreign trade, and globalization will grow, causing one of three outcomes: Social aggregation will reach a limit and slow (at least temporarily), reverse itself (as with Brexit, Balkanization of Yugoslavia, and tariff wars), or continue apace.

In all three scenarios, the natural law of aggregation will be at war with human desires for autonomy.

We can only hope that this war stays a metaphorical one.