New Adventures in Materiality

Can evolution save us?

How do instinctual species, the ones without particular intellectual abilities, say bats, do evolve? How did they grew sonar and wings? Asking these questions, and trying to answer them, may open some doors.

Seriously, how long ago the first bat with the first sonar did emerge? Was it before or after the first bat with membrane like wings? Is this another chicken and egg conundrum? Is such knowledge, the knowledge of natural evolution, even attainable?

Because I wonder how many obstacles got to hit the heads of some so-called proto-bats before its lineage eventually grew some defences. Over how long of a period did that happened? Can we even conceptualize how such path to evolution may be occurring?

We know it's slow paced, a multi-generational process. Can such a slow naturally evolving path even apply to us now, modern humans? Or have we bypassed the whole evolution circuitry while crushing all our natural boundaries with science?

Obviously, science works faster than evolution. We know that as a fact. And we also know that science can be terribly and brutally efficient. It breaks all sorts of barriers while trying to focus on some results, where natural evolution seems to slowly weave every change and adaptation through all possible realities over some never-ending ongoing generational shifts.

Therefore, evolution is wide, slow and foolproof, where science is focused, fast and forceful, and sketchy. Science breaks things. It sure breaks the living, much faster than evolution can heal it. And we are part of the living. Can science brake us, irremediably, beyond salvation? It probably can.

Then, how about modelling science to have it mimic natural evolution? How about a science that makes sure to respect the living, and its slow paced complexity? How about a science that looks at things through all possible angles? Because while we have been dabbling with human genes for decades now, we've only ended decoding our entire genome a week ago. Just saying.