Richard Dawkins once said that Darwin's theory of evolution which helped our species to survive, evolve and thrive, specifically the behavioral elements which have helped humans become the dominant species in the planet are actually not suitable as moral and ethical principles to take humanity forward.
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Counter-intuitive, isn't it,
coming from an evolutionary biologist whose life's work is to present to the world the irrefutable proof how life has evolved from the single cell organisms in a primeval ocean to what it is today?
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Addition of the textbox and the quoted text is by me.
In fact, it makes the most sense coming from an accomplished evolutionary biologist like him. If you think about it, or have studied evolution in high school or later in life, you would know how evolution works.
The fundamental principle of evolution is
Survival of the fittest
Through millennia, Mother Nature has time and again appeared before a dwindling species and declared her verdict
"Thou art weighed in the balances of nature and thou art found wanting"
Mother Nature, however, has not been unbiased during her trials or before the trials even. She has rewarded some species with blessings and others with curses almost with no rhyme or reason. This has loaded the balances against those species which She would come before and sit in judgment, the verdict being never to be seen again on the face of the planet.
Many millennia later, her favorite child, man, called these blessings:
Mutations
Since the beginning of life has Mother Nature's law of survival of the fittest and her reward and punishment system of mutations dictated life or death of countless species.
Humanity, or in scientific terms Homo sapiens has always been her favorite when it came to survival instincts and mutations.
But man is different from all her children. Everything he got from Mother Nature, he used it for his benefit. He killed the Neanderthals and assimilated the last few remnants of that hominid species into his own to ensure that he became the universal master of the whole planet.
In his struggle for existence, in his quest for power and dominance, he destroyed ecosystems, made deserts out of forests and is now responsible for the sixth mass extinction to have ever been seen on this planet and the first one to be caused by a species. And so this mass extinction is being called the Anthropocene Mass Extinction.
His struggle for existence became his struggle for the imposition of his ideas on others. Not only has he destroyed the environment and put life on the entire planet in danger, he has not been kind to his own brothers.
Since prehistory, he has created groups and tribes and kingdoms and nations and religion. He has killed in the name of countless belief systems which according to him were all true no matter how contradictory they were because he never had unity of thought and belief. He believed something and his brother would believe something else and they would fight on it and the brother would get killed.
And this goes on and on and it seems it will never stop.
All the above characteristics of humanity are often very starkly visible on the Steem blockchain and have the capacity to destroy what is being built. People often act and fight here with such selfish interests it reminds of the very nature of man and makes one shiver.
We may destroy this platform unless we collectively take steps away from this natural state of affairs.
We cannot fight among ourselves here. We should not. We should not keep selfish interests above the collective one.
And in order to achieve this, another trait of humanity is what can help us and that trait is of being a social animal. The only difference from the societies and groups of old is that this society has to be one huge society, one huge family to include everyone so that no one is left behind and everyone works towards the betterment of others.
That's the way to take ourselves forward. Blockchain and many other digital technologies have the potential to bring into this planet an economy of plentifulness for the first time ever in history.
We must ensure everyone gets the benefits and no one fights. I think this is possible because I have seen such positivity in Steem which I believe will defeat the natural instincts I talked about in detail.
That day, when the plentifulness helps everyone on this planet, we would have become truly evolved.
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