On the (Future) Nature of Humanity, Part 1

Disclaimer: This post is mainly philosophical. It's all speculative, and just something that I found very interesting and worth note.

After a long conversation with Dave a while ago, we came to the conclusion that humanity is like one giant, multicellular organism. Well, to be more accurate, humanity linked through modern society is a giant multicellular organism. Admittedly, this idea isn't anything all that new. It's has been around for a long time. But at this moment, I can't think of the one book that I want to talk about, so - MOVING ON!

Anyway, if humanity is a multicellular organism, it must have gotten that way through some sort of evolution, just as prokaryotes evolved into eukaryotes. And this is where this particular branch of our hypothesis provides some interesting conjectures about things like population growth. When discussing population growth, there are three possible outcomes. The first is a plateau, in which zero population growth occurs. The second is a decline, in which population growth is negative. And the final is an incline, in which population growth is positive.

In discussing human poplulation growth, we were most interested in the plateau (the one I thought would happen) and the positive growth (the one Dave thought would happen). Dave and I talked about this for a while with no conclusion. But then Dave gave an analogy that just cracked it open for me. He told me a story about how if you put fruit flys (I think that was the organism - it really doesn't matter) into a container with sufficient food for all of them and then come back a day later, they are all dead. Why? Because they died in their own waste. Now, assuming humanity is like that jar of fruit flys, humanities future looks rather bleak.

But then I realized that wasn't the correct analogy. Instead we should compare humanity in modern soceity to the evolution from a prokaryote to a eukaryote. A prokaryote will reproduce without care, as long as it has the conditions to do so. It doesn't care about it's neighbors. But eventaully, that prokaryote evolved together with a bunch of it's (previously uncared about) neighbors, and created the first eukaryote. Now, suddenly, the prokaryote (which is now a cell of the larger organism), can't/won't just reproduce indiscrimantly. Or else we call it cancer.

Therefore, if humanity in modern society is thought of as one giant eukaryotic organism, then eventually through self-regulation, humanity will control it's population growth as to prevent overpopulation. The "consciouness" of humanity will evolve to the point that it can do nothing BUT think of itself as a multi-cellular organism.

And why is the prokaryote/eukaryote analogy more appropriate than the fruit flys in the jar one? For the simple reason that humanity in modern society can communicate with itself nearly instantaneously, just as cells in a multicellular organism can. Our (individual) level of consciousness, thanks to our three part brain, allows us to act in concert with one another, quite similar (but infinitely more complex) to how cells interact in an organism. With the fruit flys, they have no way of communicating, and therefore act as a bunch of prokaryotic cells, reproducing without care for their neighbors.

And this is where the thinking ends. In the second part of this two part series (to be posted sometime), I will discuss what allows our "global" consciousness. What allows us to be that multicellular organism instead of the jar of bugs.

Editor's Note:

I realize now that I've been using the definition of eurkaryote all wrong. A eukaryote isn't necessarily mutlicellular. So, if you replace Eukaryote with multicellular up there, you'll find the correct analogy I was going for. Luckily, I have AP Biology this year, so I can brush up on all this classification mumbo jumbo.