Mankind is in all likelihood going to be an evolutionary dead-end. Hopefully understanding why this is the case, if done in time, can not only prevent this, but also allow us to reach undreamed-of prosperity. However, as things currently stand, not only are we most likely to be an evolutionary dead-end, it will probably happen within the next 5 years, and we are actually quite fortunate to have already lasted this long. For example, during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, had it not been for Russian submarine commander Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov’s sole dissenting vote in a decision to launch a nuclear strike against the USA, mankind might have already suffered a nuclear holocaust.

Understanding why we are likely to be an evolutionary dead-end is actually very easy if one has a slight grasp of evolution and a few simple economic concepts. Let us begin with a simple evolutionary insight, human beings are slightly smarter tribal apes whose nature and instincts were molded to survive in an often-times vicious tribal world. For most of our evolution, until about 20,000 years ago, we lived in small tribes where tribal warfare was the optimal evolutionary strategy and one of the main reasons we are social and have evolved big brains to begin with. As Steven Pinker tells us:

“… men go to war to get or keep women –not necessarily as a conscious goal of the warriors(though often it is exactly that), but as the ultimate payoff that allowed a willingness to fight to evolve. Access to women is the limiting factor on male’s reproductive success. Having two wives can double a man’s children, having three wives can triple it, and so on. The most common spoils of tribal warfare are women. Raiders kill the men, abduct the nubile women, gang-rape them, and allocate them as wives.” ( Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” 1999, p. 510)

First you increase the economic pie available to your tribe/gene-pool by coordinating a raid and killing other men and children, and then you increase your reproductive success by raping the women and making them your wives. To be successful in war you need a strong sense of unity which translates itself into the strong nationalist/militaristic/patriotic tendencies we are so susceptible to and has the planet littered with nuclear weapons and “civilized” taxpayers believing we actually need them. The bond men make as co-warriors is likely stronger than male/female love. A female is easily replaceable (another raid, etc.) but the loss of that co-warrior that will help get the next female and/or defend you when you only get one chance at life is probably even more important. Just like natural selection has shaped us to enjoy sex due to the vital genetic payoff, it has also shaped us to enjoy war, killing, and torturing. As a recent Live Science article aptly titled “Humans Crave Violence Just Like Sex” discusses, mice have been found to love to fight and gain pleasure in a similar manner to how we love food and sex. Article mentions:

Scientists have known that mice and other animals are drawn to fights. Until now, they didn’t know how the brain was involved. The new study, detailed online this week in the journal Psychopharmacology, reveals the same clusters of brain cells involved in other rewards are also behind the craving for violence. “Aggression occurs among virtually all vertebrates and is necessary to get and keep important resources such as mates, territory and food,” said study team member Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “We have found that the reward pathway in the brain becomes engaged in response to an aggressive event and that dopamine is involved.” ……. “We learned from these experiments that an individual will intentionally seek out an aggressive encounter solely because they experience a rewarding sensation from it,” Kennedy said.

Given its importance, war/patriotism easily fills us with a great sense of purpose. England’s prime minister during WWII and national hero Winston Churchill shows us how inspiring, exciting and purposeful WWI was to him when he mentioned:

“I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it’s smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can’t help it — I enjoy every second of it.”

And in another occasion:

“My God! This is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling… Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me…”

Towards the end of WWII, Russia’s Red Army is estimated to have raped over 2 million German women. The Allies weren’t much better. We shouldn’t be shocked when men murder and rape, the real miracle that has taken thousands of years of cultural evolution to create, are the modern cultural values we absorb that program us into respecting the body/property/thoughts of all human beings regardless of age, sex, and race.

Being the social apes that we are, fellow humans are our biggest assets which helps explain the evolution of altruism/compassion due to the great benefits we get at the group-level, and horrendous selfishness/violence towards fellow men since we are our biggest competitors.

During the last twenty-or-so thousand years something amazing happened. What economists refer to as “The Market Process” emerged and transformed these biologically slightly-smarter-murdering-apes into the global economy or what the great 19th century British philosopher Herbert Spencer referred to as “The Social Organism”. The Market Process is composed of various parts/components/“social institutions” like trade, money, economic competition, finance/banking, interest rates, governmental/religious/legal structures which enforce the various rules/customs that allow its functioning. Let’s devote one paragraph to discussing ‘economic competition’ and the vital role that ‘private property’ and ‘economic freedom’ play in its functioning.

In the modern social order new/superior knowledge arises in the minds of people/entrepreneurs/companies/orders and spreads via economic competition. For example, power windows, and rear view cameras, were all good ideas/information/knowledge that originally emerged in the minds of a few individuals/companies/orders. THE FREEDOM of the public to choose among competing auto-manufacturers, motivated, and inevitably forced, other auto-manufacturers (competitors) to copy the new ideas/knowledge, and it is for this reason, thanks to economic competition, that all auto-manufacturers provide them and use the latest and greatest production techniques. As cost-cutting ideas emerge leading prices to continuously fall, new profitable ideas arise and once again spread via competition in an endless cycle of knowledge generation/innovation. For example, computers were once very expensive, but once the price of making them came down enough, people easily realized that every home could have them, which gave birth to our computerized world and the Internet and all the great things that flow from it. So we can see how ‘private property’ leads to the ‘freedom to choose’ that “turns on” ‘economic competition’, which is what motivates the creation and spread of superior knowledge/information and subsequent social order. The modern social order is composed of billions of brains/companies inadvertently competing/innovating/learning from each other as we produce our labor/products/services and peacefully trade. The more wealth is produced, the more wealth has to be offered in exchange for labor as entrepreneurs/companies compete against each other for the labor they need which helps explain why the economic pie grows for everyone. The tribal order that our brutal instincts are perfectly suited for had comparatively no innovation/trade/money/commerce and was coordinated mostly by primal instinct and thus warfare/etc.

Just like the human body is the result of the actions of some 30 trillion cells but obviously NOT the result of any conscious planning or designing by them (natural selection being the sort of inadvertent designer), the ‘Market Process’ too is the result of human action but NOT of conscious human planning or design. The Market Process shares this trait with language, it too is the result of human action, yet never designed or “invented” by some genius caveman. The great economist Carl Menger asks:

“How can it be that institutions that serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its development[The Market Process]come into being without a common will directed towards establishing them?”

1974 Nobel laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek beautifully answered that monumentally important question more or less as follows. We already know that ‘private property’ leads to ‘freedom to choose/trade/commerce’, which leads to ‘economic competition’, which leads to rapid discovery and spread of superior knowledge/information and social order. We can envision mankind, say 40,000 years ago, being a sort of petri-dish of inadvertently competing tribes that are being “naturally selected” based on how large/powerful/advanced they become. Those tribes/orders whose customs/religions inadvertently became more peaceful and thus less violent, extended peace, friendship, trade to those outside the tribe, etc. would become more advanced/powerful, and as they grew, they would inadvertently spread the very customs and evolving economic system (market process) that allowed them to reach such relative heights. This is the essence of Hayekian cultural/group selection and for brevity’s sake such a short paragraph will have to do for now (better explained here).

This competitive-distributed-social-learning process has inadvertently led to explosive production/innovation which has allowed mankind to easily/rapidly sustain greater numbers and has given birth to two potential problems which keep arising and will in all likelihood lead to our extinction. One is Socialism/Communism, which is an attempt by the economically ignorant/tribal public and their leaders to replace the competitive/innovative ‘market order’ for monopolistic and thus competition-immune government bureaucracies which inadvertently cripple/paralyze the very competitive process that creates their social order to begin with, so you eventually get socioeconomic chaos which is what happens in all socialist/communist countries or when the public(government/monopolistic) sector gets too large. The now-classic image below shows a Socialist/Communist/Monopolistic order (North Korea) vs. a free/competitive/Capitalist order (South Korea). Try to envision the dynamism of the real world, ideas constantly emerging/spreading in minds in the South(even outside in other countries and moving to/from the country) and spreading. But the North?

The second is the inevitable technological advancement in increasingly destructive weapons which we discuss a bit more.