Has it occurred to anybody else to seriously question modern human phenotypes? Propagation is still the only significant component of *actual* human evolution, despite the fact that it hasn't been biologically relevant for many thousands of years. With each successive generation we continue to weed out the exceptional and remarkable among us, lowering the ceiling of our immediate potential for self-awareness and achievement and relegating the role of human civilization as a whole to simple continuity of existence. Where once adaptation in this direction may have been necessary for our survival as a species, we have now over-specialized in basic survival to such an extreme that, as a collective, we are actually incapable of doing ANYTHING ELSE well. Only a very few members of human society ever actually use their mid-to-higher-level cognitive functions, and we are so adept at mitigating our own denial that we have created "niches" in our societies for these more highly-evolved individuals to thrive... in safe isolation from those essential social mechanisms which keep us stupid - and which ensure we continue reproducing as efficiently as possible, while growing backwards intellectually.
— because we can't risk some rogue intelligent thought permanently damaging our once hard-fought (now hardly-fought) status quo!
— because we can't risk some rogue intelligent thought permanently damaging our once hard-fought (now hardly-fought) status quo!
Those most capable of mindless imitation are presently the most likely to reproduce. Those least likely to think for themselves, to ask questions about their natures or futures which extend beyond the scope of their current limited perspectives, those with the highest capacity for self-deception ("I CHOSE to be like this, to look like this, to think like this, just because I'm me - and nobody else had any say in it. I live solely for my own reasons! I'm my own person.") are the founders of our future... and so, with nearly every new human birth, our actual "humanity" dies - but, of course, intellectual death is so far ahead in the race right now that its coattails are "probably just a trick of the light, anyway."
No need to worry.
CERTAINLY no need to change... certainly not radically, desperately, as if the future of our species REMAINING "our species" depended upon it.
Which behaviors and traits are ultimately passed along from generation to generation—now through almost exclusively social means rather than biological—is irrelevant. None of them are remarkable anymore. Our physical selves are so heavily modified by purely aesthetic—meaningless—choices that we are all physically polymorphic to the point of insanity; our thought processes are so heavily and skillfully managed both internally and externally that our intellects are worthless beyond the scope of our own pitiful social power struggles. Even across xeno-geographical barriers, our social homogenization process is prevailing over true growth or *useful* evolution; people all over the world now buy the same brands of clothing, wear the same hair styles, listen to the same music, worship the same few gods - and with each passing year, the diversity of once-"human culture" will continue to diminish until humanity is just like the surface of the ocean: endlessly vast, moving only to its own monotonous rhythm, undifferentiated, unremarkable... and completely oblivious to its potential for purpose.
What better fate could there be for us, though? If we really come from dust and ashes, so to speak, it seems poetic and just that after all our millennia of concerted efforts to shirk our responsibility to our potential, we are actually lobotomizing ourselves more and more with every passing moment. When the time comes for us to return to the ground, the transition from "human" to "nothing" will thus be far less jarring than if we had actually made "something" of ourselves.
Eventually, there will be no such transition necessary - and "eventually" is much closer than you think.
