An orthodox evolutionist is very uncomfortable if you start speaking of stellar evolution or cultural evolution. I’ve heard these guys say: if there are no genes involved, you do not use the word “evolution.” See? They don’t want to see it as a formative process touching the organic, the inorganic, the social, the psychological.
If we change our values and say that nature conserves complexity and strives for complexity—if that’s true, then the human neocortex and human society are the most precious and advanced objects and organizational dynamics in the universe.
A sufficient number of people will have integrated this state of global electronic selfhood that it will be irreversible.
The old evolutionary model—which was that evolution was this struggle of the fittest and the devil take the hindmost—is pretty much discredited, and we now understand that what is maximized in evolution is not the sharpness of the fang or the length of the claw, but the ability to cooperate with other species harmoniously. That’s what’s being maximized. Every parasite—or, I mean, every disease wants to be simply a benign parasite. No disease wants to see its host die, because then the party is over for everyone.
What if we exist to stockpile plutonium, and to build this staggering technology, to build these space colonies to lift the terran gene swarm off the surface of the planet, because the planet is in danger? What about the fact that the last million years has been the most turbulent of the last hundred million, and the last hundred thousand the most turbulent of that? Perhaps the planet is destabilizing. In that case, what is happening is: it isn’t that Man is evolving into Spaceman and leaving the planet, it’s that Man is the cutting edge of biology on the planet, and biology is frantic to escape.
