Devo has their take: “De-evolution is real”

Life in the Universe by Prof. Stephen Hawking | Rational Vedanta:

There is no time, to wait for Darwinian evolution, to make us more intelligent, and better natured. But we are now entering a new phase, of what might be called, self designed evolution, in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA.

In “progressive” circles (I use the term progress cautiously because it’s often uncritically deployed in the service of environmental destruction), it’s taken as a given that humanity must evolve in order to survive an impending ecological disaster. Yet, havne’t we had enough progress and evolution to deal with the crisis? After all, humans did quite well for tens of thousands of years but started to slip with the invention of various technologies that we equate with human “progress”: agriculture, writing, electricity, combustion engines, microwave ovens, etc. You look at any book and you see these inventions going along a straight line as if increased information means we are smarter or better and that we are along a linear path of evolution. But is this really the case?

Part of the problem can be found in the extended Stephen Hawing talk quoted above. He equates DNA’s nucleic acids with words in books, as if to say that writing (alphabetic in particular) mirrors nature, or visa versa. But this is contrary to what many scholars have documented (interesting literate metaphor), which is that the phonetic alphabet (our form of writing) actually biases the left brain, and hence is very much out of step with ecological intelligence. Leonard Shlain in the Alphabet and the Goddess suggests that writing supplanted our brain’s evolutionary tools for hunting and killing, while pushing aside the right brain’s capacity for gathering and nurturing. This is a contrarian view of evolution which argues, to paraphrase the great band Devo, we have “devolved” into a particular cognitive bias that is responsible for global chaos.

Hawking says we need external evolution– this would be a similar argument for the “global brain” that so many “evolutionaries” would advocate. But just because we build a brain, does it mean it’s a sane one? I would argue– along with practically any yogi in the world–that we are particularly out of balance with our perfectly adequate biological heritage. What we need is revolvelution– a re-awakening of what is already our evolutionary and natural gift. We don’t need any more gizmos or additional DNA strands to do the trick. We just need ourselves to wake up to what is already there.