September 30, 2025

Evolution was totally dependent upon diversity. But evolution did not create diversity; the diversity had to originate with complex environments. That means a wide variety of conditions were needed to create the diversity.

The reason why is because evolution is a process of continually increasing complexity. Evolution doesn't guess at complexity; it picks up complexity that is generated from varied conditions.

You thought that was about biology, huh. The same is true of social evolution as biological evolution. Varied environments are needed to evolve social complexity. Without social complexity, humans would still be hunter-gatherers fed by nature with no technology.

There is a counter force to social complexity that attempts to simplify everything, as if complexities got too extreme. It's a reactive force, not an analysis. The simplifiers still want the best of everything, which requires technological complexity. Otherwise, all they have to do is move into the wild and let nature solve their problems, which is not what they have in mind.

It's as if the nay-sayers would prefer to go back in time several centuries. Very few persons could afford horses; and most persons worked as serfs in the fields for ten or twelve hours per day. Eating only once per day, they had to put on a lot of fat to last for the rest of the day. They mostly ate grains; so they evolved a physiology that promotes fat when eating grains. The serfs working in the fields did that to human physiology.

It shows that conditions shape evolution. So if everyone should be geniuses rolling in gold and driving gold Cadillacs, what sort of conditions would produce that result? Maybe the overwhelming complexities of technology are getting there.