Survival of the Niftiest
Toward a Psychic Origin of Species
Three Tries at an Evolutionary Thought Experiment

What happens? We see but only sort of. Squinting, we try to see better, constructing elaborate taxonomies, phylogenies, ontogenies.

We look at ourselves and try reverse engineering: we’re this way, they were that way (or so we think), ergo… (complete as per your political biases, write up the result to some-length and wait for the prizes to come rolling in).

Truth is, we don’t know 1) what happens, 2) how it happens, 3) how long it takes to happen.

The very panoply—hark, fellow panoplists!—of human history may itself be a long, slow species-generating process of daunting complexity, but now at work in psychic realms of which our vaunted materialist science knows, literally, nothing.

In the past we see physical adaptation leading to enhanced survival (or so we think). Now, added to the already-complex mix we have what we call "consciousness" and resultant behavioral choices: Me marry a Merle-Haggard fan? Wouldn’t dream of it. Oh sure, maybe an occasional one-night stand (leading to the occasional odd offspring), but settle down and proliferate with such a one? No way.

Spread such choices across a culture, then across cultures, then across 10,000 (or more) years, and you wind up with what we’re in the middle of: "History." "Civilization."

As a member of a group given to certain choices (say, "blue states"), I look at members of a group given to different choices (say, "red states"), and knee-jerkily I judge deftly and happily: "Dinosaurs! You guys are dinosaurs on the path to extinction!"

The mud-slinging goes both ways (compare The National Review and The Nation, the Fox News Channel and BBC, Tom Wolfe and Gore Vidal), but the terrible, difficult truth is: If we are trapped in this long slow muddle (or so it seems to us) of emergent species, we in each group have nothing but our own myopic self-interest by which to judge both us and all the infuriatingly different thems.

Does, at some point, the new species suddenly gell and all is clear (like the moment water changes to ice)? Or is the process consistent and maddeningly long and slow, with dominance becoming evident only gradually and atop an ever-growing heap of corpses?

We. Don’t. Know.

And you may be sure that either nature doesn’t care, or if it cares it does so in ways and by criteria absolutely beyond our comprehending.

Clever ones shout cleverly from the rooftops and convince some of the less-clever that oh yes we do know. Others—and who knows how clever or unclever they may be—hold their tongues and get on with the business of getting on with their business.

The opening line of the Tao Te Ching may be far more meaningful—and prescient—than we’ve ever thought: Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak.

The clever shouting ones may seem to prevail, even giving their name to an age, an era, or an epoque, but if the muddle is as long and slow as it seems to be, such tiny, brief generational victories have no more meaning than the shift of one grain of sand as the tide moves.