Can the human race survive? No, but extinction has many meanings, and evolution has a few tricks up its long sleeve.

“The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler,
a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice,
the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some
old blind allegiance to the past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.”

—Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey

In the Bay of Naples, not far from the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, there swim two seemingly unremarkable creatures: a common sea slug, and a jellyfish, called a medusa. The jellyfish bob carelessly through the upper waters of the bay and after birth quickly mature into full-grown, elegant adults. The sea slug’s larvae also contentedly ride the water’s warm currents, apparently happy to live the lives that snails generally do. You wouldn’t think that these creatures could possibly have anything to do with one another, but in fact they are intimately and strangely connected.

Marine biologists first saw this connection when they noticed that full-grown versions of the sea slugs had a small, vestigial parasite attached near their mouth. This wasn’t anything you would immediately notice. But it was when scientists looked further that they made their remarkable discovery. The story goes this way: As the slug larvae bob through the bay, they often become entangled in the tentacles of the medusa, the jelly fish, where they are then swallowed up into its umbrella-shaped body. At this point you would assume that the larvae would soon be done in, a nice morsel, gobbled up by the predator jellyfish. But that is not how it goes. Instead it is the snails that begin to dine, voraciously—first on the radial canals of the jellyfish, then on the borders of the rim, and finally on the tentacles themselves, until the medusa disappears entirely from the picture, with nothing more than the small bud of a parasite attached to its skin right near its mouth – the remnants of the jelly fish. The victim becomes the predator.

Lewis Thomas, the physician, researcher, and award-winning essayist, told this story in his wonderful 1970s book The Medusa and the Snail to illustrate how peculiar and connected life on earth is. It certainly does that, but I’m recounting it here because in the eccentric relationship of these two creatures lies the echo of what the future holds in store for the human race.

In my book Last Ape Standing, I spend hundreds of pages investigating how we Homo sapiens came to be, why only we, of the many other human species that once emerged on earth survived and how our survival has shaped us into the remarkably complicated species we are.  At the end of an exploration like that, the inevitable—and heavily loaded—question arises, what next? Where will human evolution take us now after our long and astonishing adventures? Are we still evolving? And if we are, what will the next act look like? Can we expect ever-enlarging brains to cram themselves behind alienlike foreheads? Or will our noggins contract to the size of a walnut, shrunk by media and pharmaceuticals (the dimensions of the human brain have, in fact, diminished 10 percent over the past thirty thousand years)? Or perhaps we will grow weak, fat, and small of limb, vaguely resembling Jabba the Hutt, while simultaneously sprouting an extra digit or two to better handle all of the texting we do? It might even be possible, as one scientist has speculated, that we will diverge into two subspecies, one fit and beautiful and the other overweight and slovenly, a kind of real-world version of the Eloi and Morlocks in H. G. Well’s Time Machine, except without the cannibalism and enslavement, we hope.*

But I don’t think this is the way it will go.

The Sleeves of Evolution

The past four billion years have revealed that evolution has an endless supply of tricks up its long and hoary sleeve. Anything is possible, given enough time. But it does create variation on a central theme: as environments shift, the forces of natural selection cause species to branch out to create differentiated versions of themselves, like so many Galapagos finches. Those variations that survive, move on. Those that don’t, are relegated to the evolutionary trash bin. That means that like Neanderthals and Denisovans and Homo erectus, once very successful human species in their own right, we too will disappear, and soon.

We may be the last apes standing, but we won’t be standing for long.

This is a startling thought. But all of the gears and levers of evolution indicate that when we became the symbolic creature, an animal capable of transforming fired synapses into decisions, choices, art, and invention, we simultaneously caught ourselves in our own crosshairs. Because with these deft and purposeful powers, we also devised a new kind of evolution, the cultural variety, driven by creativity and invention. That set in motion a long, and ever accelerating string of social, cultural, and technological leaps unencumbered by old biological apparatuses like proteins and molecules.

At first glance you might think that this would be a boon to our kind. How better to better our lot than with fire and wheels, steam engines, automobiles, fast food, satellites, computers, cell phones, and robots, not to mention mathematics, money, art, and literature, each conspicuously designed to reduce work and improve the quality of our lives. But it turns out not to be that simple. Improvements sometimes have unintended consequences. With the execution of every bright new idea it seems we find ourselves instantly in need of still newer solutions that only seem to make the world more entangled. We are continually ginning up so much change, fashioning thingamabobs, weaponry, pollutants, and complexity in general, so swiftly, that we have outrun our own genes.

Remember, we initially grew up as creatures that evolved in a world quite bereft of technical and cultural advancement. But now that we have changed all of that. We are having an exceedingly difficult time keeping up, even though we are the agents of the very change that is throttling us. The consequence of our incessant innovation is that it has led us inevitably, paradoxically, irrevocably, to invent a world for which we are unfit. We have become medusae to our own snails, devouring ourselves nearly out of existence. The irony of this is Shakespearean in its depth and breadth. In ourselves we may finally have met our match: an evolutionary force to which even we cannot adapt.

We are undoing ourselves because the old baggage of our evolution impels us to. We already know that every animal wants power over its environment and does its level best to gain it. Our DNA demands survival. It is just that the neoteny that has made us the last ape standing and the Swiss Army knife of creatures, has only amplified, not replaced, the often uglier, primal parts of us. Fear, rage, and appetites that cry for instant gratification are still very much wound into our DNA. That combination of our powers of invention and our old primal drives will, I suspect, soon carry us off from the grand emporium of living things.

Caught In Our Own Crosshairs

There is ample evidence that we are growing ragged at the hands of the Brave New World we have busily been rolling off the assembly line, especially in the United States. Growing numbers of us freely admit to being thoroughly stressed. Study after study reports that the United States is “a nation at a critical crossroads when it comes to stress and health.” Americans, and many of world’s 7.5 billion people, are caught in a vicious cycle: managing stress in unhealthy ways while assembling insurmountable barriers that prevent us from revising our own behavior to undo the damage we are wreaking upon ourselves. As a result, 68 percent of Americans are overweight. Almost 34 percent are obese. (This is rarely a problem in hunter-gatherer cultures.)

In March 2022, a Harris Poll found that over half of Americans are thoroughly frazzled.† COVID, inflation and the war in Ukraine are significant culprits, but even before the pandemic, three in ten Americans said they were depressed, with depression most prevalent between the ages of forty-five and sixty-five. Forty-two percent report being irritable or angry, and 39 percent nervous or anxious. Gen Xers and so-called Millennials admit to being more anxious about personal relationships than even their baby-boomer parents.* It’s so bad that the results of our angst have found their way into dental offices, where dentists now spend far more of their time treating patients with jaw pain, receding gums, and worn teeth than they did thirty years ago. Why? Because we are tense and anxious, grinding our teeth down to nubs as we sleep.

Stress, as the experience of lab rats everywhere has repeatedly revealed, is a sign that a living thing is growing increasingly unfit for the world in which it lives. And as Darwin and Alfred Wallace astutely observed more than 150 years ago, when a living thing and its environment are no longer a good match, something has to give, and it is always the living thing.

The source of our stress are the “advancements” we pile on to get more done, squeeze out more time for work, spend more time in front of social and other media, and eat unhealthfully because it makes us feel better in the short run. In a world loaded with complexity, distractions, and deadlines, rather than relaxing or getting more exercise when pressures mount, studies show that we skip meals, spend more time online or in front of the TV, then overeat and lie awake at night so that we enter the next day bleary-eyed and exhausted. What triggers these behaviors? Those old primal drives and appetites we struggle to ignore.

Which returns us to the question, what next?

Is Resistance Futile?

Our demise doesn’t have to be a Terminator-style annihilation that leaves the world emptied of all humans, postapocalyptic cities stark and decaying with the smashed remains of our cultural accomplishments strewn everywhere. It will more likely be metamorphosis, a transformation in which we step over the Rubicon of our old selves and emerge as a new creature built on our own backs without ever realizing, at least early on, that we are no longer the species we thought we were. Did the first Neanderthal know that he, or she, was no longer the creature that preceded it, Homo heidelbergensis)?

I believe we are already morphing into a new kind of human, infinitely more intelligent than you or I are, perhaps more socially adept, or at least able to juggle large tribes of friends, acquaintances, and business associates with the skill of a circus performer. A creature more capable of keeping up with the change it generates. I call that species Cybersapiens, from two Greek words that together mean “wise navigator.”

To handle the challenges of time shortages and long distances, Cybersapiens may even be able to bilocate or split off multiple, digital versions of themselves, each of whom can blithely live separate lives and then periodically rejoin their experiences digitally so that they become a supersize version of a single self. Imagine being able, unlike Robert Frost’s traveler in his poem “The Road Not Taken,” to travel two paths, each with a separate version of yourself. Unlike creatures fashioned out with old-fashioned, carbon-made DNA, the next humans might not only speed up their minds and multiply their “selves,” but boost their speed, strength, and creativity, conceiving and inventing hyper- intelligently while they range the world, the solar system, and, in time, the galaxy. In the not-distant future we may trade in the blood that biological evolution has so cunningly crafted over hundreds of millions of years for artificial hemoglobin. We may exchange our current brand of neurons for nanomanufactured digital varieties, find ways to remake our bodies so that we are forever fresh, and do away with disease so that death itself finally takes a holiday. The terms male and female may even become passé. All of this is sounding less and less like science fiction. To put it simply, a lack of biological constraint may become the defining trait of the next human.

We are already part and parcel of our technologies. When was the last time you pocketed your cell phone or simply walked to work, hunter-gatherer style? Can we live without streaming, microwaves, instant messaging, satellites, jets? We have long been coevolving with our tools. It’s just that now everything from digital technology, robotics and nanotechnology are blurring the lines between humans and machines, reality and virtuality, biology and technology. Soon the lines will twitch away completely.

Admittedly, should we find ourselves with what amounts to superhuman powers, but still burdened by our primal luggage, there would be a downside to these sorts of alterations. It all makes you wonder if something essential in us might disappear should such possibilities come to pass. But then, perhaps, that is what will make the new species new. And besides, will we have anything to say about it? In this scenario, evolution drives the boat, not us.

Our newfound capabilities might become more than we can handle. Will we evolve into some version of comic-book heroes and villains, clashing mythically and with terrible consequences? Powers like these give the term cutting edge a new and lethal meaning.

And what of those who don’t have access to all of the fresh, amplifying technologies? Should we guard against a world of super-haves and super-have-nots? It is these sides of the equation that concern me most.

Given evolution’s trajectory, short of another asteroid collision or global cataclysm, we will almost certainly become augmented versions of our current selves. That has been the trend for seven million years. We are apes increasingly endowed with more intelligence, and more tools, becoming simultaneously wiser and more lethal. The question now is, will we survive ourselves? Can we even manage to become the next human?

It is the evolution of a long childhood that explains why we survived when other human species did not. (See my article in Slate Magazine explaining how the evolution of a long human childhood saved the human race.) I’m counting on keeping the child within us around to bail us out as we evolve, the part that loves to meander and play, go down blind alleys, wonder why and fancy the impossible. It is this impractical, flexible part we can’t afford to lose because it makes us free in a way that no other animal is, fallible and supple and inventive, if occasionally dangerous. It’s the part that has gotten us this far. Maybe it will work for the next human, too.

* Poll conducted by the American Psychological Association, 2010.

* Poll conducted by the American Psychological Association, 2022. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2022/march-2022-survival-mode

*A term coined in my previous book Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits That Make Us Human.