Our evolution – let’s take a moment to consider where we are

As humans we often get so busy, we forget some of the important things that have come to pass and it’s good to be reminded or to even learn about them for the first time.

We are so often focused on creating the future we forget the journey we have travelled and how unique we (actually) are, or at least to this planet in any case, not necessarily in terms of the wider universe, or as some would argue, multiverse.

By taking time to reflect on some elements of our story, I think we can better appreciate what we have the potential for, as well as acknowledge the capacity we possess to make a difference, and where we should really concentrate those efforts on in terms of trying to make a difference.

- we are a species - and I use the word species as opposed to race, which is in part to challenge us to appreciate that we are just one of the many species that occupy this comparatively small planet and that we should know and remind ourselves of our place in it

- we live on a planet spinning at 67, 000 miles an hour - in a solar system that is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530, 000 mph[i]

- we are over seven billion people – and it’s estimated that by 2050 there will be 9.6 billion of us[ii] (more than a one-third increase)

- our galaxy is made up of between 200 and 400 billion stars – and there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies in our universe[iii]

- the universe is an estimated 17.5 billion years old, and our planet a relatively young 4.5 billion years – just think about that, covid has been with us for almost (but only) 2 years – try for a moment to imagine 4.5 billion years

- we branched off from chimps and bonobos about 6 million years ago – our first ancestor appeared about 4.4 million years ago[iv]

- two million years ago, early humanoids (Homo habilis) first appeared on earth with a brain capacity of 650-700cc; followed by Homo Erectus and Neanderthals and finally Homo Sapiens - today our brain capacity is around 1500cc[v]

- 1.2 millions years ago, it’s estimated that there were 18, 500 homini’s on earth, not humans but homini’s, i.e., our descendants … it’s estimated that there have been around 700 billion mutations since[vi]

- thirty-one percent of our genes can be found in yeast, forty percent in worms, 50 percent in fruit flies and all but 1.5% in chimpanzees – we are as it were 98.5% chimpanzee[vii]

- only in the last 10, 000 years that the world has begun to truly transform dramatically with the development of crops, livestock, villages, cities, global trade and financial markets

- human beings are 99.9 per cent identical – genetically speaking, yet we almost entirely focus on the 0.1% of difference

- 6.4 billion letters make up our DNA and we are an estimated 50 to 100 letters different from our parents[viii] – anyone who thinks there are completely free this should temper that belief with that thought – we are more like our parents than we can possibly imagine

- microbes make up 80% of all biomass…in 1/5 of a teaspoon of sea water, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses)…the human microbiome in our gut, mouth, skin and elsewhere, harbour three thousand kinds of bacteria with 3 billion distinct genes[ix]

- viruses are champions of DNA mutation….A single sneeze propels 40, 000 droplets, each containing up to 200 million individual viruses, across the room exceeding speeds of 200mph[x]

This is all pretty amazing when you take time to think about this but here are a couple of interesting thoughts which increases our perspective on things even further.

- If you spend half an hour in a regular shopping mall, you will pass more people than our ancestors saw during their entire lifetime

- did you know that there almost no examples of Neanderthal cavities?[xi] It’s an incredible thought – for all the perceptions in our minds of Neanderthals as violent creatures lacking the capacity to think, at least their teeth were in great shape as compared with humans, which begs the question what the hell have we done (as an apparently the intelligent humanoid) since then?

Context - Key events in the last few decades

Our evolution has been quite distinctive and of course the events that have influenced it, but we now live in a world where our failure to fully appreciate who we are and the journey we have travelled, or to take the opportunity to reflect on where we are at in this moment is costing us.

Let’s consider some key moments from the last 70 years which gives us an indication of where we have gone wrong and some idea of the challenges we face and how we need to re-think our priorities:

- between 1950 & 2000, the global population increased 2.5 times, but food production has more than tripled[xii]

- globally, obesity has almost doubled between 1980 and 2014[xiii]

- the rise in obesity in recent decades also mirrors the fall in sleep duration and quality[xiv]

- since 1990, the gap between rich and poor has increased exponentially

- the share of wealth controlled by the top 0.1% grew from 7% in the 1970s to 22% in 2012[xv]

- the top one-tenth of the richest 1% own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%’[xvi]

- three-quarters of all border walls and fences that currently exist were erected after the year 2000[xvii]

- incredible developments in IT and Social Media - launch of eBay (1997), the first wifi-enabled laptop (a Mac, 1999), broadband (2000), expansion of 3G (2001), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004) Twitter (2006); iPhone & Kindle (2007), notebook sales overtook Desktop sales (2008), Samsung’s first Android phone (2009) iPad (2010), Tumblr, Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011) - has seen an vast increase of the speed of life and with it our inability to keep pace with it

- as of 2008, humanity was consuming 30% more per year than the planet sustainably produces[xviii]

- by 2008, $4 to $5 of debt was required to create $1 of growth[xix]

- 70% of the developed world have experienced stagnation between 2005 and 2014[xx]

- today there are 28 cities with a population of more than 10 million people - by 2030, the UN predicts that there will be 41 – and more than half will be in Asia[xxi]

We are now in an era, often referred to as the Anthropocene, where we are no longer shaped by our planet, but rather we are shaping the planet. And this brings me to one of the key arguments - Creativity, Imagination, Innovation, and the Entrepreneurial Spirit has brought us to this point – it’s a double-edged sword. And there is no sign of us stopping or that it is slowing down, or that we will be discouraged from pursuing such.

And with the likes of India, Brazil and China endeavouring to catch up with and in some respects overtake the west, it’s not going to stop anytime soon. The GFN [Global Footprint Network] for example has calculated that the total amount of productive land and water on Earth amounts to 12 billion global hectares. With roughly 7 billion people on earth, this equates to 1.72 global hectares per person. In 1961 human demand accounted for 0.7 planet’s worth of biocapacity.[xxii]

In 2008, GFN said, we needed 1.5 planets to sustain us, something that is clearly unsustainable but worryingly, it is estimated that there are less than 60 harvests left as the Earth’s topsoil has been slowly eroded over time due to industrial farming

If we wanted to get an idea of what some of our priorities might be then these offer some indication. Perhaps we - the wider Youth Work Community - need to consider abandoning the idea of being so creative, imaginative, innovative, and entrepreneurial, and become much more political around these issues.

I believe it is now time to be much more up front about the state of the world we live in as opposed to constantly creating and innovating tools to address the symptoms of these issues and adopt a much more pro-active approach to these issues.

The Result

The last half century (and perhaps more particularly the last 10-20 years) has witnessed a vast increase in the speed and evolution of almost everything, which has resulted in among other things the following:

- failure of trickle-down economics and a growing inequality

- emergence of developing economies trying to catch up with west

- junk food, obesity, food additives and toxic pollutants

- climate change

- increased levels of stress, anxiety and suicide countered by the emergence of the self-help industry

- endless consumption

- the loss of free play and unsupervised risk-taking

- changes in parenting practices

- changes in the make-up of the traditional family

- re-emergence of East vs West divide

- the dilution of existing democratic states vs growth in authoritarian states

- increasing civil and political strife across numerous countries

- growing political polarization

- growing division between liberal and conservative, urban and rural, college educated and non-college educated

- increase in the number of border walls

- increased immigration and fleeing of refugees

- growing levels of protectionism

- corruption and the loss of trust in traditional institutions

- increasing campaigns for justice and social justice, as contrasted with social justice vs dilution of human rights

- greater visibility of minorities viz a viz persecution of minorities

- increase in the number of democratic states versus dilution of the rights of citizens in established democratic states

- renewed emergence of nationalism and populist politics

- terrorism and new forms of extremism

- battle for the hearts and minds of academia

- exploration of outer space

- mapping of the human genome

- genetic manipulation and cloning

- growth in geo-politics

- pervasive technology: ‘artificial’ intelligence, robotics, drones, ebooks, audio books, digital books, virtual libraries, blogs, vlogs, microblogs, podcasts, videocasts, file–sharing, video-sharing, social networks, forums, MOOCs, on-line courses, virtual classrooms, and even virtual universities.

Impact

The impact from all this progress can I believe can be best described in the following nine ways. It might appear that I choose to concentrate on the negative as it were, but I suggest it is more a case of identifying the issues that I believe we now face, or rather we should face up to, and adopt a much more pro-active stance towards.

1. Degenerative Approach to life and those around us – Individualism, Competition, Lack of Solidarity, Endless Targets, Growing Distrust, Managed Exploitation, a ‘Fix You’ Mentality, Imbalanced Lifestyle, Pointless Priorities, Constant Measurements, Misplaced Ambitions, Misogyny and ‘The Binary Mindset’

2. Growing Isolation and Disconnect with one another – disconnection, loneliness and ‘safetyism’

3. Increasing Acceleration and our inability to keep up – erosion of the ‘Four second rule,’ adaptation and Invasiveness

4. A Pervasive Collective Narcissism – growth in the ‘Attention Economy’ and Insecure Narcissism

5. Increasing levels of Stress – Fragility, Decreasing Resilience and Pervasive Technology

6. Addiction to Screens – ‘Screen Time’ and ‘Magical Promises’

7. Dilution of our Mental Capacity – lack of Critical Thinking, Information Overload and Fixed Mindset

8. Decreasing levels of meaningful engagement with others – Restricted Childhoods and Modern Disorders

9. Illusion Vs Reality – Sexualisation of Young People

In my next blog (Part 2) I will go into these nine headings in more detail.

[i] F**k It, The ultimate spiritual way, John C. Parkin, Hay House, 2011 [ii] Post Capitalism, A Guide To Our Future, Paul Mason, Penguin Books, 2016 [iii] Know This, Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries and Developments, John Brockman, Harper Perennial, 2017; Extraterrestrials don’t land on earth! (David Christian) [iv] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [v] The Compassionate Mind, Paul Gilbert, Constable, 2013 [vi] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [vii] Beyond Human Nature, Jesse J. Prinz, W.W.Norton Company, 2012 [viii] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [ix] This will make you smarter, New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking, John Brockman, Transworld Publishers, 2012; Microbes run the world (Stewart Brand) [x] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [xi] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [xii] The Great Acceleration, How The World is Getting Faster, Faster, Robert Colville, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016 [xiii] Evolving Ourselves, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans, Oneworld Publications, 2015 [xiv] The Great Acceleration, How The World is Getting Faster, Faster, Robert Colville, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016 [xv] More Human, Designing a World Where People Come First, Steve Hilton, W H Allen, 2015 [xvi] More Human, Designing a World Where People Come First, Steve Hilton, W H Allen, 2015 [xvii] Utopia for Realists And How We Got There, Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 2018 [xviii] The Great Acceleration, How The World is Getting Faster, Faster, Robert Colville, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016 [xix] What should we be worried about? Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night, John Brockman, Harper Perennial, 2014; A world without growth? (Satyajit Das) [xx] Nervous States, How Feeling Took Over The World, William Davies, Jonathan Cape, 2018 [xxi] The Great Acceleration, How The World is Getting Faster, Faster, Robert Colville, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016 [xxii] The Growth Delusion, The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations, David Pilling, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019