Humans haven't stopped evolving
harvardmagazine.com
harvardmagazine.com
Do you think we will become more and more tolerant? like with the happy people? One day maybe we can drink only milk and eat only cheese, even on the sweltering summer heat. For me those days i still struggle and sometimes reluctantly find myself reverting back to greens
I do not, sorry. This question feels quite odd to see, too, frankly. I became intolerant in ~20 years just "because", and only when I checked at medics for non-related general tests, and out of the blue it showed on the results paper. And And this is when I never had any abnormal meals with it, but just casually and normally as any other one, I believe. It was like a blow to the gut...
This intolerance changes the life much. It makes impossible to have any meals with other people in group or be afraid of trying anything that may have any kind of milk in it, and you may imagine that there's so much of it out there... including many kinds of common bread, cakes, candies, certain cheese, coffee as Latte, Cappuccino etc. The aftereffect depends on the person, and some have diarrhea-type issues, but in the case here, it only the stomach that hurts so much as if someone cuts it inside-out. There are tablets, but... it's always dear scary and it doesn't help much...
Currently, I am ~1.75m and ~63kg in ~40 years old woman, and I see more of this intolerance become normalized in European and Asian countries where some stores sell lactose-free holy milk and some cafes offer a so much appreciated lactoze-free lovely coffee...
There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.
Evolution still happens when creatures reproduce at different ratios, but civilization and tech allows people to survive and/or reproduce when they naturally wouldn't.
All it amounts to is 'sounds good to me'.
For example, today we can sit for hours and thrive, while a hunter-gatherer or farmer would starve sitting around all day. Our bodies protest, but we manage to reproduce, and treat or palliate the ailments that come with sedentarism. We surely are evolving to better tolerate sedentarism, but it's slowed down because medicine allow the unfit to sedentarism to survive and reproduce instead of dying early.
You can see the delay of evolution, allowing the biologically unfit to reproduce, at any hospital. Medicine saves or prolongs more lives than ever, and death is the second driving force of evolution. Stephen Hawkins, for example, was diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live, and despite that he had three descendants years after. He couldn't do physical work, but could do great mental work, which our society values.
You can correctly argue that our civilization is part of the environment, though. In that case, natural evolution isn't slowing down, it's just going in a different direction than it used to.
However, cultural/society/educational evolution happens much-much faster (but is also much-much weaker, can disappear on just a few weeks).
Again, we would naturally still change, but not in the the way or at the rate otger organisms continue to or at which we would sans technology.
I think this is a very limited way to view technology
Agriculture, medicine, transport combine massivly lower the bar for base survival let alone reproduction on all skill checks otgerwise place don metabolism, physical fitness, immunological fitness.
This isnt me taking a dig either, I am among the ranks of those who would be dead without these modern "comforts" but as a reuslt if there is a genetic driver for my lack of fitness (which there is) those genes are now not being selected against.
Perhaps we don't think of tech as an evolution stop, but really most of the comfort and conveniance it brings are won by removing the discomfort otherwise applied as evolutionary pressure.
Can't live in this place? no worries, create air conditioning. Can't calculate this? no worries, computers. Can't feed all these mouths because hunting and gathering wouldnt work? no worries, agriculture.
Tech, in my opinion, offers most of its perceived benefits by removing natural pressures to move, stop, or adapt from ourselves.
But even if that were 100% true, that just shifts selection pressure elsewhere. For example, your ability to hunt is probably not selected for in modern society, where it would have been in centuries past. But your social standing (and the genetic traits that are beneficial for acquiring that social status) definitely would be, especially in places where there is a large sex imbalance.
We are currently undergoing a major change in reproduction due to the "severing" of the ties between having sex and having children due to modern birth control. Evolution is what caused sex to be so pleasurable/desired in the first place, because having sex greatly increases the chances of someone passing on their genes. The ability to have lots of sex now without having children as a byproduct means there will be natural selection pressure for another impetus for people to have children.
The point I'm making is that we use technology to solve discomforts, and discomfort tends to be something which would otherwise manifest as evolutionary pressure. This doesn't remove the fact we will change, but it does impact our trajectory. Perhaps one such direction of change is we go from having low variance with a moving mean, to a static mean with increasing variance.
so, we've removed much of the historical pressure but this doesnt mean, like I said, mutations stop. It simply means our environment is now less selective or selects for things we dont yet measure or understand.
Evolution isn't magical, it's purely probabilistic. You can drive the probabilities down real low and then genetically engineer the rest away.
In practical terms it would be impossible to genetically engineer away genetic variation (assuming you could convince people to stop having sex and visit your cloning lab instead). There are all sorts of things like DNA damage, horizontal gene transfer, and just the inherent error potential of reproduction that you would never be able to eliminate.
Of course it would also be highly undesirable to stop genetic variation, since that's what gives a species the ability to adapt and survive.
Anyone can reproduce and pass down their genes, so what mutations are we currently selecting? Maybe looks, but I doubt even that.
So, at best, the argument seems to be that the surviving gene pool may get more complex with lots of optional mutations which all coexist? Could we end up like some plant species full of cultivars where larger swathes of genes are expressing differently out of a very convoluted library?
If you're envisioning medical science to allow people to survive with otherwise lethal mutations, I would say that is not an escape from evolution. Instead, you've revised the reproductive cycle to include more epigenetic components. The species is still the survivable set of genes and cultural practices which are evolving together, and which terminate when they no longer function as a system.
Yes, ability to fend off (or avoid) a tiger attack is not much of a factor nowadays, but even something as simple as a religion that encourages having large families, and encourages marrying within religion (you don't need to live on an island to be somewhat genetically isolated) will have an effect.
As far as survival (not dying) goes, I'm guessing that risk appetite, and certain specific forms of it (e.g. fear of heights) has a genetic component, and it looks like base jumpers and free soloists are experiencing selection pressure!
In the modern world there is also a lot of truth to the premise of the nominally satirical movie "idiocracy", where it's not things we regard as positive (strength, intelligence, etc) that drive reproductive success, but in fact the opposite, with birth rates among the unintelligent often higher than that among the intelligent (who are prone to worrying about having kids).
What tends to drive evolution the most seems to be occasional rapid shifts in the environment rather than stable selection pressures. For example, we were lucky that COVID-19 wasn't worse than it was, but nonetheless by definition those who died were those with immune systems less well prepared for the new threat, and the human species as a whole has now slightly "evolved" to be better able to survive that selection pressure.
Isolation (really meaning tendency not to inter-breed) doesn't have to be physical - it can be cultural too, and it seems this isn't limited to humans - many animal species that are on the cusp of speciation (lions/tigers, horses/donkeys, etc) share the same habitat and are just choosing to avoid each other.
In any case, "isolated" populations are only necessary for speciation, not for evolution. Even a single drifting gene pool is going to evolve to adapt to the changing environment, since individuals will still differ genetically. Whatever the environment throws at you will cause some individuals to do better than others (e.g. you survived the Ebola outbreak, others didn't), and these fitter genetics will then spread in the gene pool.
We have changed evolutionary pressures, but certainly not removed them.
I'm also not sure where the line between selective breeding and "evolution" , I wouldn't consider a Pomeranian an "evolution" of a wolf (though I guess it is a different species). Is any persistent genetic change "evolution"?
As for humans in general we've effectively eliminated most sources of selection, survivability really isn't an issue anymore, and fecundity is largely random, pretty much anyone can have kids, or choose not to have kids. The strongest thing we're probably selecting for right now is Mormonism and even they aren't making a dent in evolution.
There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain. -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Spice of Life", 2000
Discoveries about being able to process lactose and when those genes evolved all were after 2000, for example.
Does it excuse Gould for making such bold claims? You have to decide I guess. That is a lot fuzzier.
Another would be, 50k years is such a narrow window that evolution cannot be observed across it.
Your alternative claim is just factually wrong. The population frequency of an allele under selection pressure can change within a few generations.
For example the HbS allele, that confers both sickle cell trait and malaria resistance, became less common among Africans transported as slaves to regions where malaria was not endemic.
You can find it hard to believe, but I think most people in that field agree that humans from the last 40 000 years would grow up as modern humans without problems.
Can you be more specific? There's both a hardware and firmware element to this. Perhaps the hardware element is transferable.
That's why the colonisation of colder areas happened at about the time of behavioural modernity. Before that, humans where anatomically modern (mostly identical to us) but did not have the cultural equipment to deal with difficult environments.
No we can't. Have you been the tundra? You can't survive there on your own without technology. These people could.
Archaeologists find blade tools in the Caucasus from 300,000 years ago, and blades and awls were made in Southern Africa during a very cold phase 75,000 years ago.
Northern China had blade tools from 40,000 years ago, bone awls from 35,000 years ago and eyed needles from 30,000 years ago.
In Europe, eyed needles accompanied Homo sapiens toward the coldest part of the last glacial cycle, the last glacial maximum, around 22,000 years ago.
~ https://phys.org/news/2026-03-ancient-needles-awls-survival-...
To some degree it's true. We have all sorts of variable parameters that are probably different from back then (eg. Average height) but we still have the same body shape, etc
1) maybe those species aren’t as unchanged as we think, because our evidence of the past is limited to things like skeletons, and maybe the skeletal structure of the shark didn’t change much, but other aspects did.
But more likely…
2) maybe unchanging requires a stable environment with stable selection pressures - but humans have had a rollercoaster of change in selection pressures, possibly more than any other species.
Now consider our own species and the pressures that got us to this present body plan. They just aren't there. The shark still is facing pressures that favor the hundreds of millions of years old shark morphology. Are we facing pressures that our hominid ancestors faced? Doubtful. Look at how our bodies often react when they meet the pressures of our modern society: we often become anxious, depressed, and obese. Most of our ill behaviors such as this have some survival advantage to it that just isn't getting pressured in modern society. Your constant anxiety keeping you up at night is actually saving your family clan from a lurking predator in the bush. Your lack of portion control abilities means you can eat all the fish you just caught and pack on more fat to your frame to smooth over leaner times. Today these selective advantages are seen as illnesses people see doctors to get pills for. Our bodies are so misplaced for the society we've built for ourselves. Our mind's can't even fully fit this society into a working model ourselves without missing a lot of important information. We've out ran our capabilities a long time ago in some senses with the cultural/technological evolution that overshot our own biology. We are tumbling into some new body plan I'm not sure what exactly, but things aren't in any way stable now.
Humans live in diverse ecosystems from artic to desert to city, each with differing environmental challenges, and mate with whoever they fancy when they swipe right.
When the belief is that of "creationism"[0], it's not so far to go to reject evidence of, well, anything that runs counter to the narrative espoused by a variety of those belief systems. Including the fact of evolution.
I'd point out that those who subscribe to such belief systems are a large fraction of the human population, the largest contingent of which are not resident in the United States, nor are they Americans.
And perhaps those who create such titles are cynically exploiting the gullible. Then again, I'd posit that Hanlon's Razor[1] be assessed in this case. Such an assessment might well uncover cynicism/evil, but probably not -- as those involved may well subscribe to the belief systems referenced above and/or are ignorant/dumb.
All that said, such an idea isn't new. Here's an analog[0] from more than 400 years ago (circa 1600AD):
What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty,
In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In
apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals
I was referring to scientific illiteracy/denial rather than creationists (who don't believe we're the product of evolution in the first place).
I don't think Hanlon's Razor applies here. The author of a Harvard Magazine article is unlikely to be stupid, especially given the article in question, nor can choosing a clickbait title be considered as "malice". One can wonder what was the exact thought process in coming up with the title - perhaps more charitably they just thought that many people might think that human evolution is slowing, if not actually stopped, or maybe there really wasn't much thought put into it at all !
We'll all be out of work, surviving off our own wits, and ability to survive and thrive will go back to being based on things we judge as desirable.
On reconsideration, it's not clear how much of our increase in intelligence over the last few million years is due to the greater success of more intelligent individuals, or rather the greater success of more collectively intelligent populations, based on language and communication etc.
Again, half-joking, but it's interesting to consider if AI as an "intelligence leveler" could eventually have an effect. If we all have access to super-intelligence, then does our own individual intelligence matter that much? You could even speculate that the invention of AI puts a cap on the intelligence of a species since then perhaps the success of the species depends more on the intelligence of the AI, not of the species itself.
With AI already able to hack into our human-written computer systems, now being trusted to write much of the new code itself(!), it certainly doesn't take a Sci-Fi fantasy to predict an AI agent wreaking major damage or taking control over some system/factory it was able to hack into, in pursuit of the goals it was given.
It really would not be surprising to discover that, even today, some vibe coded system has an unrequested backdoor built into it, that the agent thought (without malice) it might be useful to add.
Right now we truly are building paperclip maximizers. Idiot-savant RL-trained goal-seekers that we're hoping can be controlled via quaint means such as prompts and guardrails.
Maybe if it found selective pressures were still dominating and driving evolution in recent decades in developed nations with low childhood mortality that would be surprising. Though the framing of the article is almost that it would be surprising if mutations were happening at all which is obviously stupid - we haven't figured out how to reverse entropy so mutation rates haven't gone down, evolution by genetic drift is obviously continuing to occur, and with advances in medicine the number of folks surviving with mutations that would have been problematic otherwise is increasing.
Truly disappointing slop. Like obviously humans faced selective pressures during an era when like 8 in 10 kids died of plague or similar things, a biological factor where survival is correlated with genetic factors that influence immunity and disease survival.
Again, super useful science to see exactly what that influence was, but it would only be surprising if we learned we'd somehow managed to turn off entropy and statistics during the black death and we didn't face selective pressures.
Basically, any genetic trait that causes people today to think "You know, I think I'm going to remain childfree" is specifically selected against, and any trait that causes people to want more children will be selected for. I'd argue that the invention of reliable birth control was that biggest change in human selective pressures in history. Evolution made sex highly pleasurable and desirable because it often resulted in passing on your genes. That's no longer true with reliable birth control, and with such a huge environmental shift natural selection will act on other avenues that cause people to have children.
Idiocracy's "stupid genes win" likely won't happen, my theory is that selection will remove memes (behavioral/thought/cultural patterns) that cause childlessness from the meme pool much faster.
Could also well be that natural selection will rear it's ugly head again first. I previously thought that people rejecting the evolutionary theory (creationists etc) were just backwards and anti-science. But I've realized since that this is a too simple judgement. The ethical implications of evolution are dark. Humans have had a word for selection since the dawn of language - "death".
A bit sad that paraphrasing Paul Watzlawick in this context fits very well: one cannot not participate in evolution.
The sociologist Eric Kaufmann wrote a book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, arguing that traditionalist religious groups (such as ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish) will become demographically dominant in the long-term (decades and centuries) due to their greater fertility and high retention rates (>80% of their children stay in the group as adults)
I think the fact that in e.g. the United States there are multiple such high fertility traditionalist religious minority groups coexisting makes it unlikely any one of them will end up completely dominant in coming centuries. More likely, I think, conservative religious groups will ally together across confessional boundaries to attain shared policy objectives (e.g. government funding of private religious schools). As such, I don’t think the possibility of defection to secular society will disappear; secular people will still exist, just numerically and politically weakened compared to today.
People have relatives and relatives have many genes in common.
If there are genetic traits that predispose people to remaining childless, it could wind up that populations with those genes end up with larger branches on their family tree.
It's been a while since I read the Selfish Gene, but its central point is that natural selection is about genes, not individuals.
All over the world, some groups are deciding not to have kids and some are. Globally declining fertility rate says nothing about genetic proclivity to want children unless fertility rate goes to zero.
Now, though, birth control has broken that connection between "having sex" and "making babies", so now "making sex desirable" no longer is enough of a trigger that results in passing on your genes. So, in that sense, the environment in which humans reproduce has changed drastically, in a short period of time. So now there should be strong selection pressure for people to have children beyond just making sex enjoyable. Whether that shows up in a stronger innate desire for children themselves or whatever I won't speculate on - I'm just making the point that widespread birth control is a huge change to humans' environment to which natural selection should act on, by definition. What I am not saying is that "not wanting children" currently is the result of some fundamental genetic difference between sub-populations.
(Disclaimer: The rest is a personal theory with zero scientific support.)
This begs the question: selection based on what? In many bird species it is the complexity of the male's song, or the colourful beauty of his feathers. There are "dances" and courtship rituals in many animals, including even insects.
Humans almost certainly also subject to evolution caused by the evolutionary pressures of mate selection!
This is best said by Anthony Hokpins in Westworld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjsGJOXhPGU
"I read a theory once that the human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State Building—just an elaborate mating ritual.
Maybe it doesn't matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. But, of course, the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty."
Which is a good bit of drama, but... if true, what are the consequences for the evolution of the human species?
Assume for a moment, that yes, women are attracted to male intelligence, which men show off with music, art, and "great works".
The obvious immediate effect is that this causes the average intelligence of Homo Sapiens to increase over time.
But the secondary effect is more interesting: judging intelligence benefits from more intelligence! As the next generation of women inherit greater intelligence, they become better judges of male intelligence, more picky and precise. This forces male intelligence to increase ever faster to keep up with the "rising demand". Rinse and repeat.
I can't prove, but strongly suspect that this is the case.
Birds of Paradise become "more beautiful" on the scale of aeons because more beauty in the males doesn't improve the judgement of the females.
Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.
You might find the book Blindsight interesting, since... Well, to avoid spoilers, I'll just say the story doesn't put our concept of intelligence on the usual top-of-creation pedestal.
Something I noted -- trying to avoid spoilers here -- is that Rorschach is awfully similar to LLMs, but the book pre-dates ChatGPT by several years, which I feel says everything you need to know about how well the author foresaw the future.
I think you can benefit from reading Franz de Waal works. He was a primatologist and he had a similar ideas. Though according to him intelligence was (is) not just a useless "peacock feather", he adds one more block in your feedback loop: hierarchy. Intelligence is used by males to play political games to raise their social status. Social status influences frequency of reproduction for males, so there is a natural (?) selection for political success which depends on good looks, physical fitness and intelligence.
It works for a lot of species but higher primates somehow got enough intelligence to make it dominate good looks and physical fitness and then the positive feedback loop led to evolution of Homo Sapience.
I especially like this theory because it explain why people lose all their pretense to be rational when it comes to politics: human mind is political first. Language, logic, rational discourse are later inventions on top of a political mind. They can work in a neutral environment but when it comes to politics Nature gets the upper hand, and the cultural intellectual sediments of rational thought are wiped instantly, and people's intelligence drops to levels of chimpanzee's: keep alliance with the strongest alpha if you can, rational discourse be damned. One needs a very strong mental discipline to resist it.
> Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.
This idea doesn't explain how intelligence became so important for females. Your idea is like chicken-and-egg problem, you can explain how chickens and eggs let each other to exist, but not where did the first chicked (or egg) come from. And the idea relies on the assumption that female's opinion matters. It matters for some species and doesn't matter for others. It matters in some societies and doesn't matter in others.
> It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection.
When I read this I thought you'd go about role of sexual dimorphism in evolution and Vigen Geodakyan evolutionary theory of sex[1], but no. Still you may be interested, though I want to note, I don't know if the theory is "scientific" or not. I'm not a biologist to judge, and I didn't have luck to find some kind of a scientific debate about it. Some objections to the theory, but not full-blown attempts to dismantle it. And I think the theory is not politically correct: it implies that roles of males and females in evolution are different. It is not bad per se, but you know how (most of) people think (with their political mind borrowed from chimpanzee): if roles are different in evolution, then you can argue for a society change that would mirror it and would give you some privileges and raise your social status against some others, and then you would get new kind of Nazis trying to genocide half the population of Homo Sapience.
This fact is itself subject to evolution. (In birds, it's the women who have the different chromosome.) Mammals may have evolved to share most genes between sexes because that allows either sex to benefit from traits evolved by the other one, and not solely because it's the easy way to store genes.
Did you know men have a genetic breast size?
First, the article is not just proposing genetic drift, which is the change in allele frequency by chance. It is arguing that change in allele frequency is due to natural selection pressure, and that most certainly is evolution. Copied from the Wikipedia entry, because I think it's simple and clear:
> Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations.
That is exactly what the article described.
You mean, they might be more likely to have lots of offspring than someone who was disabled and living on government assistance?
Or 500 years ago, be more likely to slaughter the men and rape the women of a neighboring kingdom, than those who stayed home?
Or for a trait closer to my heart, be adept at handling the intellectual requirements of surviving exile and persecution?
You know it's the success they confer toward reproduction that causes traits to survive or not, right? Without reproduction, of course one generation's genetic noise is just noise. And longevity traits don't survive if they hamper reproduction. Just the opposite: Lots of traits that succeed because they improve the chances of breeding are the worst possible things you would want for longevity. Risk taking behavior and all manner of psychoses have survived and thrived for millenia not because the individuals with them live long, but because they breed prolifically.
And lactase persistence is quite recent. Some people say that Tibetans and some S E Asians are particularly adapted as well to their local environment of high altitude and sea diving but I don’t know anything about that.
In contrast, an allele under selection pressure drags along large chunks of the chromosome on which it occurs. Statistically, the effect is different. You start to see long-range correlations across the chromosome.
The MHC region, which contains genes that govern many functions of the immune system, has been under continuous selection pressure resulting in extraordinary variability, but also very strong long range correlations spanning the region. It's unlike anywhere else in the human genome. This is a clear signature of evolution.
This is certainly true for humans as well. Does being faster, stronger, better vision, better hearing, necessarily mean you will beat a "worse" human for calories to survive and also mating opportunity? Nope. And that is why we aren't all 9 foot tall space jam monsters. It isn't about being a perfect specimen, but a good enough one to keep on a little longer.
During happy times, mutation creates a variety of individuals. During stressful times, individuals who happen to have traits that help them weather the stress are the ones who survive more. Sometimes much more. That's when the evolution happens.
Both parts can happen concurrently and gradually, like those butterflies who turned black to hide in coal smoke.
Do you mean the black ones survived and procreated?
The opposite is the Black Death. Some people had more aggressive immune systems that were able to destroy the bacteria before it destroyed them. This is thought to have caused a jump increase in the "immune aggressivity" of European populations, causing more autoimmune diseases in subsequent generations.
As for humans: I mean, duh? The selective pressures faced by humans have changed radically in the time we've been around.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/bajau-sea...
we all are not quite freediving most of our waking lives, but the daily pressures of modern urban living must be exerting a similar level of evolutionary pressure on us.
Thank you for mentioning the Artists of so ineffably magnificent works:
"Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again."
I like how this is not even specific to life nor genes, and it's not hard to add to it the idea of happening-again in ways that make the thing better-or-worse at happening again.
Personally I think this applies to all coherently-causal systems.. still trying to figure out whether to believe QM is fully causal or not! (Currently seems like it might be a mixture?)
In the last few hundred years since industrialization we've been destroying our own environment - the one we'd previously adapted to - at a rather remarkable rate, an "experiment" that is still playing out. Will it turn out to be successful, or will we end up modifying the environment so much (or just fail to evolve quickly enough to adapt to changes outside of our control) that in another million years we'll all be gone?
We'll certainly not last forever, even if we manage to have a run as long as the dinosaurs. Whether it's climate change, disease, or some unforeseen change in our fortunes, eventually we'll either go extinct or branch off into a bunch of other species that would be unrecognizable to ourselves.
I agree individual humans mostly seem to behave more like single-celled micro-organisms and it's a stretch to call it a collective-organism, but it's also not impossible to see the relevant analogous aspects though I think! (like, the internet could be one example?)
It's an interesting question whether the human species (or life-as-a-whole?) viewed as a single-system will be able to reproduce itself. Sounds like the question only makes sense when talking about settling elsewhere than Earth.. Mmm, reminds me of the Fermi Paradox. Will we make it through this!?!
Similarly with social progress. There is a common myth of linear progress through history, where humanity now is better than we were a century ago, a millenium ago, and ten thousand years ago. In some ways we're better, in other ways we don't even know what we've forgotten and lost.
What we want is conscious evolution, where we shape the direction that we wish to evolve towards. Unfortunately with the state of politics we've lost decades of progress in a very short time.
That's the way evolution works - isolated sub-populations that mostly don't breed with outsiders necessarily diverge.
Of course evolution is essentially directionless, just "survival of the survivors", although over time whole ecosystems of co-evolving animals and plants will necessarily settle into dynamic "attractor states" of semi-stable co-existence, until a spanner is thrown into the works.