An interesting thought occurred to me while I was walking back from a technical support call. What if technology is actually a selection pressure in an evolutionary context? Those “more fit” individuals who can embrace technology survive to pass on their traits to the next generation, while those who cannot or will not embrace technology find themselves out of work, starving, and ultimately not passing their traits on to the next generation. What traits come with the actual embracing of technology? Obviously intellectualism, idealism, curiosity, determination, independence and interdependence all come to mind. What other traits may be involved? Perhaps expanded social interactions, bolstered by technology will help push us, evolutionarily speaking towards being a more social and connected species. I find it fascinating to note that technology is rendering physical barriers to socialization meaningless. The idea of space being a limiting factor, and watching as that limit erodes is changing how we behave in a global and local setting. Eventually the ‘outside’ will evaporate as our social interests in that setting will have progressively less meaning than it did before. What will happen to us as we create new technologies and those technologies create a new us? Are we set on a path of technological and biological unity?
Bluedepth's Journal
Thoughts & Opinions
The problem I have with this in a strictly evolutionary context is that technology affinity (or the willingness to adopt technology) isn't heritable.
You can browbeat your kids into technolove, but ultimately your genes are not going to pass down the love of technology.
I think what you're referring to instead is cultural adaptation, rather than biological. Those that adapt best to the cultural practices that allow them to thrive physically and emotionally are the ones that are going to survive to reproductive age and pass on their genetic material. Referring to technology as a cultural adaptation with regard to "fitness" is dicey though, because the implication here is that failure to adopt technology would result in conditions so dire that one wouldn't survive to reproductive age. Needless to say that's pretty extreme and not a likely scenario.
Personally, I'm not convinced technology as a general concept is completely "adaptive". We are certainly more "connected" now than perhaps at any other time in history, but some would argue that "cyber"-connection comes at the cost of other forms of communication. I don't have evidence to back this up, but I suspect this cyber communication boom is resulting in, among other things, a gradual "dumbing down" of language where increased use of acronyms and other language shortcuts is removing nuance from our everyday communications. Is that really adaptive?