Yesterday, when we came home, it felt like a hard day´s night, so I relaxed with a book in my favourite reading chair.
The book that happened to be handy was Michael Crichton´s ”The Lost World” – and yes, I still read a lot, and all kinds of books….
In that book one of the characters, Ian Malcolm, once discusses changes in behavior as a possible reason for mass extinction events in the past. It goes something like this: ””I´m talking about all the order in the natural world! Change can emerge fast, because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Now we humans are transforming the planet, without knowing if it is a dangerous development or not. Evolution in behavioral processes can happen fast, much faster than we think!
In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting, to farming, to cities, to cyberspace. Our behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive, no one knows!
Althought personally I think cyberspace means the end of our species. This idea to get the whole world wired together means mass death! Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve adaptive behavior fastest. You put a thousand birds on an isolated island, and they evolve very fast in this way. You put a million on a big continent, and it all slows down.
Look at us humans! Our evolution occurs through our behavior. We innovate new behaviour to adapt to changes in our environment. But innovation occurs only in small groups! Put three people on a committee, and they might get something done. Ten people, and it gets much harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens! With thirty millions it is already impossible.
That´s the effect of mass media: it keeps adaptive behavior from happening. Mass media swamps diversity! It makes every place on earth the same! Regional differences vanish. In the mass media world there is less of everything!
People worry about losing species diversity in the rainforest, bu what about intellectual diversity, the thing needed for our ability to adapt our behavior in order to survive? That is disappearing faster than the trees! And now we are planning p to put five billion people together in cyberspace! That will freeze our entire species! Everyone will think the same thing at the same time, global conformity! Extinction does not require asteroids or diseases, all that is needed is fatal changes in behavior….”
The book is written thirty years ago….
I have been thinking a lot about the coming Apocalypse, and I have come to the conclusion that we, at least in some ways, are going to cause it ourselves by destroying the very planet on which we are living. I have thought that this will happen through nuclear war and poisoning of the biosphere, global warming and so on, and this because we are too stupid and evil to prevent it.
Chrichton offers a way of thinking that might be right on spot. It is all about behavior, destructive mass behavior, that is made conform by mass media and internet, the very same instruments that suffocate and silence every voice that tries to talk reason.
Heard the word cancel culture? How do the world choose who is to be canceled? Through social media, mass media, trendings on the internet! What an positively devilish instrument to create and sustain lethal mass behavior!
So, as a Christian I think I shall continue to be very suspicious when it comes to what ”everybody” thinks and says, and to how human behavior changes in the world! Changes, as our concepts of good and evil, and what is morally right or wrong, changes…..