Evolution...

Evolution has played a major role in the dominance of the human species. We have evolved into this dominant species because of our developed brain, opposable thumb and lot of other features most of us are aware of. But whats next? Does evolution end here? Are we the most highly evolved beings? Maybe, Maybe not, only time can tell. Time of billions and billions of years, but how are we as a species evolving on a time scale of hundreds or thousands of years?

If we look in the animal kingdom some of the most dominant species are social animals that form a close knit group. Although the clashes amongst groups are inevitable and most of the times fierce and life threatening for the group members they still survive only because of their sole evolutionary tendency to fight for their group members. Humans as a species gained a upper hand from some of its more powerful counterparts in the early evolutionary phase (I like to call it the survival of the fittest phase) just because of this very trait and till date its seen in our highly civilized global society that only the groups, that we call families (could be even a business family), that are close knit survive the test of time.

But then why does one sometime get the sense of insecurity in this closed packed herd? Why does one feel himself to be more important than the group? Why does one tend to do more for himself at the expense of the other members of the group? These traits lead to cheating and theft, but are these traits wrong? Generally as preached by our education system these traits are considered a taboo of the society, but they are evolutionary defects caused by our own interests. Evolution has taught us to live in numbers, but as we progress in our greed we feel safe in larger and larger number and hence we become part of multiple groups in order to survive. Being part of multiple groups its impossible for person to look into the interest of all his various family members at the same time. Many a times with a very high probability these interests clash and then comes the crucial moment where one needs to decide his loyalty towards a family. Billions of years of evolution has embedded into us the fact that only the closed knit groups survive and thus one generally decides to stick with the group which is the most tightly bound. So if this decision of his goes against the norms of the larger group called society he is banned from the larger group and sometimes even punished severely.

So are we any different from the animals? How are the humans a more gentle and evolved species? All I feel is that billions of yrs of evolution can not be wiped out from our brains in a matter of thousands of years and it will take another few billion years of evolution for one species to be the most dominant and still be humble in the true sense.