If you have taken a course on biology or life and Earth sciences, you have probably heard Herbert Spencer’s famous phrase, “survival of the fittest.” This phrase is meant to suggest, along with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, that the organisms in a species that are the fittest to survive will be the most likely to pass down their genetics and over time, the species will evolve to be better suited to survive. In my opinion, a more appropriate phrase would be “survival of the good enough.” This is to suggest that the efficiency of evolution is a function of the difficulty to survive. When survival was the determining factor of procreation, we evolved to survive.

If one were to change the determining factor of procreation, one changes the goal of the evolutionary process with it. Once humans developed society, the deterring factor to produce offspring was not only the difficulty to survive, but also a new generation of factors potentially including social status, an increased emphasis on intelligence, the ability to communicate, and the list goes on. At the point that these factors were introduced, so too was the outcome of any evolutionary process, resulting not in a species better suited to survive but better suited to fit the factors of which it took to procreate. 

Having introduced modern medicine into this equation, the goal of our evolutionary process today is as far from being fit to survive as it has ever been and is so complex that one could never simplify it to a four word phrase. Even with modern society and technology having the influence on our evolution that it does, the amount of time it takes for evolution to run its course effectively takes hundreds of thousands of years. The unprecedented advancements in technology that we have seen in these past centuries have put us in an environment in which we did not evolve to prosper in.

Currently, the determining factor of procreation may as well be unknown. Do we want to preserve the traits that we evolved to have or are we okay with evolving to catch up with the modern environment? Regardless, not all of the world is on the same page from an evolutionary standpoint; there are still regions on Earth where survival may as well be the sole determinant of procreation. How long can humans last with these differences across the globe before we start to see separate human species begin to distinguish themselves?

The speed that we have been able to develop our technology has quite literally broken the traditional process of evolution but at the same time, that very development was a product of evolution. There is really only speculation as to the effects that this can or will have on us in the future, not even to speak of the health concerns that we should have right now, living in a world that we are genetically not designed to live in. 

Humans have not evolved to sit at a desk and stare at a screen for eight hours a day. Humans have not evolved to develop our social skills through a phone. At what point will social media become synonymous with social life? More importantly, is this a natural progression of our species simply rooted in technological advancement or does this break the means of human interaction and development by which we are meant to live? There is a theory known as the Great Filter that once a species becomes smart enough to destroy itself, it does.

We can see time and time again, examples of society is built around technology. The amount of space devoted to parking lots, roads, and intersections; is an example of how urban areas are built around personal transportation technology. This technology was not designed to accommodate our evolutionary background but rather a functioning economy and convenient travel. Petroleum technology was designed to fuel industry and public transportation, the emissions of which are not what we have evolved to breathe. So much of this world has been designed to push the human race forward technologically but the technology developed has not put an emphasis on the human species. With no compensation on the genetic side of things, how far can we push technology before we have created an environment that does not suit human life at all?