Every once in a while, we learn about a new discovery about the ancient world. Sometimes bones are found from which scientists are able to discern the way that pre-historic people looked. Sometimes artifacts are unearthed that illustrate how ancient people lived. There is one aspect of these discoveries that is constant – ancient people were nothing like us. We would never let our daughters marry one. By our lights, they were uglier; they were shorter; and, with all due respect to the Neanderthal community, they were really dumb.
These observations are nothing new. They are obvious. But what they teach us, and what we seldom think about is how we, too, are just another stage in the evolution of what we egocentrically call, “our species.” You can be sure that Ethel and Herman Cro-Magnon never sat around in their caves in what is now southwestern France and lamented about how un-evolved everyone was. Looking back from our perspective, this seems funny. Is it just as funny to imagine Ethel and Herman Jacobwitz sitting around in their apartment in the Bronx contemplating how un-evolved we all are? It shouldn’t be.
What will become of “our species?” Will our evolutionary adaptations create a better form of life or will we regress and become more like, say, Stephen Miller? There is no way to know. That won’t stop me, though, from speculating.
To early man (and woman – I will say, “man” just for ease of reference and because I am one), survival was all that mattered. The world was, as Thomas Hobbes said, “nasty, brutish and short.” Unlike us, they didn’t worry about who their favorite NFL team was going to draft or whether the carpet in their dining room matched the drapes. No, their only concern was whether they would have something to eat or be something to eat. Their physiognomy was constructed to enable them to get through all of that. One example is that eating sugar was essential for the energy necessary for them to avoid Tyrannosaurus attacks. Nor were they yet able to rest their tired heads on a “My Pillow”. So, over eons, our physiognomy developed an attraction to sweets.
We, on the other hand, are seldom threatened by similar dangers unless you count the one posed by the owner of “My Pillow.” So now, sweets are not essential. To the contrary, they have become dangerous. They make us fat and diabetic. But they also make us happy. And happiness is to us, what survival was to the ancients. It has become our guiding light. We can only hope that our bodies will ultimately evolve into systems where happiness will be as essential to our survival as the avoidance of being a meal was to the ancients. If evolution works the way we think it does, then I predict that our progeny will develop a physiognomy that finds a way to allow us to eat as many banana splits as we possibly can. And those future beings will look back on our diets as “pre-historic.”
This may not always work to our benefit. Let’s take sex for an example. Procreation was essential to survival. The ancients died at an early age, and they needed children to keep whatever they had going. Much more recently, children were the early form of social security. People relied on their kids to take care of them as they grew unable to take care of themselves. Many still do. As a result, the act of procreation (what we typically call “fucking”) was another essential human function. Accordingly, like evolution made essential sweets feel good, it made essential sex feel good (and actually even better than a Kit Kat Bar). Now, though, the population explosion and our more advanced society has diminished the need for more children. But the pleasure of sex hasn’t been diminished at all. We have birth control and that works ok. But not everybody does it. We have abortion procedures, but, again, only if you don’t live in Texas and only if the present Supreme Court Justices all get pregnant at once.
So, what will evolution do with this issue? Based on history, as reluctant as I am to propose this, the obvious evolutionary adaptation would be to make the sex act less pleasurable. Not painful, that would dictate the end of us all. Just maybe a little less enjoyable. Like maybe taking out the garbage. People would still do it but with the same attitude that we have as we carry the smelly old remains of our uneaten egg salad for disposal.
If my speculations actually do come true, and candy replaces sex, then I predict that the most popular porn flick of the future will be “Debbie Does Dots.”
We were right 