HUMANITY'S SURVIVAL BY PROACTION

If humanity wants to survive, we may have to shift from genetically shaped reactive adaptation to intentionally proactive adaptation. In other words, we have to exchange environmentally dangerous technologies for environmentally friendly technologies, and better be fast in it.

Evolution is the gradual adaptation to conditions in the here-and-now. For humans that meant a reactive, slow, piecemeal and localized adaptation by which they could evolve during millions of years. But while our genetic evolution gave us the capacity to let technological growth accelerate, it did not generate a genetic evolution that created an equally fast acceleration of adaptation capacities.

Technology goes on creating economic growth and population growth which, together, lead to the increasing problems of meat production, climate change, depletion of ocean fish, depletion of groundwater stock and depletion of forests. Some of these processes have even reached points of no return.

In other words, our genetic evolution did not generate a sufficiently large shift from environmentally dangerous technologies to environmentally friendly (green) technologies. As a consequence, we have arrived at a point where this enlarging gap between fast changing physical conditions and our genetically shaped slow adaptation has become the most dangerous growth process for us. This growing gap is in fact more fundamental than the dangers of economic growth and population growth.

Therefore, the core question is whether our genes will make us go on to gaspingly run behind the effects of economic growth, technological growth and population growth, or make us able to modify those growth processes in time.

More precisely, the question is whether we will be able to change our genetic influences so that we become proactive and fast, at a global scale, in order to reduce the gap between the environment degradation and our adaptation practices. Can we timely shift from reactively fighting of symptoms to proactively fighting of causes?