Are we beyond laws of evolution?

We as a society are disconnecting from nature. This is a truism for the human species. But how disconnected are we from nature, from where we evolved? On the face of it, this sounds like a philosophical question. Still, if one gets to measure this, which tool to use? Miles Richardson, a professor engaged in nature connectedness studies at the School of Psychology, University of Derby, UK, has published a study that attempts to measure this widening connection between humans and nature. His finding says that human connection to nature has declined 60 per cent since 1800.

Richardson used a model that simulated people’s interaction with the environment. “It’s built on the idea of the extinction of experience—the cycle where loss of nature leads to lower connection, which can then get passed on to the next generation,” he said. Richardson evaluated the connection in terms of nature-related words being used by us currently, and how it has been used over generations. He delved into cultures, as there were no surveys in the 1800s. He used the frequency of nature-related words like river and blossom in books as a proxy to sense the connectedness of people with nature. “When their use is plotted over time, a clear decline of around 60 per cent is revealed. Particularly from 1850, a time when industrialisation and urbanisation grew rapidly.” “It’s a story of urbanisation, intergenerational change, and the quiet erosion of everyday nature in our lives,” he said.

The “extinction of experience” with nature has a parallel story unfolding: humans colonising, dominating and burdening the natural planet with enormous forces to usher in an imbalance never experienced before. In 2020, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, estimated that human-made objects (excluding waste) outweigh all the living beings on Earth. And it is adding up: every week new human-made objects are produced that weigh equal to the body weight of 7.7 billion people. “We cannot hide behind the feeling that we’re just a small species, one out of many,” said Ron Milo, a co-author of the study, emphasising the unbearable burden of our existence on the planet, and how dominant we have become in the planet’s natural existence. The Sixth Extinction is evidently attributed to humans; besides the first ever change in natural climate triggered by a species.

Evolution is a complex process of permutation, combination, circumstantial and existential necessities driving adaptation and thus biological development since the start of life on Earth. Humans are a result of this. But no species, at least in recorded evidence, ever had such an impact on the planet. Many believe that humans have become neutral to the natural evolutionary calls; it has snatched the power to decide its destiny from the natural world. In the essay “The Spice of Life”, the late Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist, wrote, “Natural selection has almost become irrelevant. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 years or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilisation we've built with the same body and brain.” This is because humans have nearly ditched mass killers/predators like diseases through scientific inventions and organised responses to crises. As if the “survival of the fittest” dictate does not apply to us—humans are here to decide for themselves whether to survive and how to evolve. The only way we can vanquish ourselves is if we choose not to reproduce. In other words, it is not the survival of the fittest but the fittest deciding to survive outside the natural world, where reproduction is just a means to keep the race alive.