Humans have become the rulers of the planet through cognitive, agricultural, and scientific revolutions, but now they are pushing themselves beyond their limits through intelligent design, including genetic manipulation, cyborg engineering, and the development of humanoids. Whether these changes will mean the end of humanity or the beginning of a new era remains to be seen.
If you were to ask yourself this question, nine times out of ten, you’d say no. We’re doing just fine, and we’re not going anywhere. It’s probably even stranger to think that humans, who are doing so well and reigning at the top of the global ecosystem, will ever end. But the things we take for granted can sometimes pose the greatest threats. Human history has taken unexpected turns many times over, and there’s no guarantee that our current prosperity will last forever. In fact, we know of several civilizations in the past that were wiped out by nature or external factors. These historical examples should make us think more seriously about the possibility of the end of the human race.
Humans, commonly referred to as Homo sapiens, have been around for about 2 million years, beginning in Africa and continuing through three major upheavals. First, around 70,000 years ago, homo sapiens gained the ability to imagine things that don’t exist. This is called the cognitive revolution, and it was the first change for Homo sapiens. On the surface, the ability to imagine abstract worlds may not seem like a big deal. However, this cognitive revolution allowed homo sapiens to survive and outcompete other species. This ability went beyond mere imagination: it created new social norms and rules, which led to the creation of different cultures and institutions. Myths, legends, and religions were products of this abstract thinking; they were not just stories, but powerful means of binding groups together. The Cognitive Revolution was thus a major turning point that transformed Homo sapiens from simple animals into complex social beings.
Next, the cognitive revolution triggered a quantum leap in linguistic capabilities. More than just a means of communication, language played a crucial role in the accumulation and transmission of collective knowledge. The ability to explain complex concepts and share abstract ideas allowed Homo sapiens to organize larger societies. This ability helped humans adapt to their environment, overcome new challenges, and led to the invention of many tools and technologies. This period established Homo sapiens as the protagonists of the Earth’s ecosystem.
The next period of upheaval was the Agricultural Revolution as we know it. The biggest change that the Agricultural Revolution, which began around 10,000 years ago, brought about was an exponential increase in the number of people. It also marked the difference between homo sapiens and other life forms in that, unlike the hunter-gatherer era, when we were in tune with nature, after the Agricultural Revolution we began to manipulate nature, including what to grow and how much to grow. The Agricultural Revolution also reinforced social hierarchies and was the beginning of economic inequality. The accumulation of surplus produce widened the gap between the haves and have-nots, which led to the formation of power structures. This led to the emergence of city-states and the development of civilization, laying the foundation for the complex social structures we know today.
The final change was the Scientific Revolution. In the past, humans relied primarily on gods and believed that everything was in God’s hands, but once humans denied that God was omniscient and admitted their ignorance, science developed rapidly, leading to the modern world. The Scientific Revolution gave humans the power to understand and manipulate the natural world. This allowed us to make leaps and bounds in technological advancement, and the Industrial Revolution allowed us to enjoy material abundance. But scientific advances didn’t just bring material abundance; they also fundamentally changed the way we live, forcing us to reevaluate traditional values and beliefs. The changes brought about by the Scientific Revolution are still ongoing, and we are on a journey with no known end.
Now, humanity is on the verge of another cataclysm. While humans have been able to change and dominate nature, homo sapiens has not been able to escape its biologically determined limitations. The ability to change their appearance at will, to alter their personalities, and so on, was and is not possible, even for the most capable of us. But it is no longer impossible for us. They are now beginning to break the laws of life that have held for hundreds of millions of years. Since the Big Bang, everything in nature has evolved and changed according to the law of natural selection, which states that the strongest survive. For example, in the case of giraffes with short necks and giraffes with long necks, the longer-necked giraffes were more useful for reaching prey in high places and were easier to survive and reproduce, so the longer-necked trait was able to spread more than the shorter-necked trait, and giraffes became longer-necked. Sapiens was also able to pass on its traits to its descendants because they were stronger than other species, and modern humans evolved from Sapiens. However, now that homo sapiens have the ability to select for traits rather than nature, they can actually design the traits they want. This is a fundamentally different way of evolving from the natural selection of the past. Humans are no longer evolving according to the laws of nature. The time has come for humans to design their own evolution and control its outcome.
When traits are designed by humans rather than selected by natural selection, this is known as the law of intelligent design. And Homo sapiens is gradually replacing the law of natural selection with the law of intelligent design in three ways. The first is through biotechnology. Biotechnology is the same as the previous one, and it involves the manipulation of DNA or genes to express desired traits in living things. Intelligent design using biotechnology has technically been done in the past. A simple example is castration. Cows have been castrated to create docile cows, and men have been castrated to maintain a high-pitched voice. In the past, intelligent design was accomplished through these physical methods, but in the modern era, we use methods that directly alter DNA. Nowadays, we have completed a genome map that shows the role of each piece of DNA in an organism, and we can use this genome map to genetically manipulate it to add traits that we want or remove traits that we don’t want, thus practicing intelligent design. Examples include the creation of green fluorescent rabbits by inserting a gene from a jellyfish that expresses green fluorescence into the embryos of white rabbits, and, more productively, the creation of dairy cows genetically engineered to produce milk containing lysostaphin, an enzyme that attacks the bacteria that cause mastitis, in order to reduce the damage caused to the dairy industry by mastitis in cows’ udders. These biotechnological approaches are now showing promise in humans. For example, gene editing techniques are being explored to proactively eliminate inherited diseases or enhance certain physical abilities. If these technologies become a reality, humans will no longer be tied to a fate determined by nature and will be able to choose their own future.
The second way is through cyborg engineering. A cyborg is a partial mixture of animate and inanimate objects, such as a person with a prosthetic hand. Cyborgs are being researched in a variety of areas, from simple hearing aids that amplify sound information to prosthetic limbs that can move through signals from the brain. They are essentially human beings, homo sapiens, but in a way, they are new life forms. Cyborg technology is moving beyond mere assistive devices to dramatically augment human capabilities. In the military, cyborg soldiers with enhanced physical abilities are already being researched, and in the medical field, technologies are being developed to enable paralyzed patients to move again through neural interfaces. These technologies are opening up new possibilities beyond our physical limitations, and the line between man and machine is becoming increasingly blurred.
The final option is to create entirely new inanimate beings. Humanoid robots are an example of this approach. Humanoid robots that look and behave similarly to humans have been around since the 1990s, starting with Asamo in Japan, and more recently, humanoids that can express dozens of emotions and communicate freely have been developed. A robot called Sophia, developed by a company called Hanson Robotics, is actually a robot that can express 62 different emotions and communicate in multiple languages, and has actually been granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia. This is why it’s not far-fetched to say that human-made robots will soon replace humans. Humanoids are more than just machines. With artificial intelligence, they can learn on their own, mimic emotions, and exhibit human-like thought processes. If these robots reach a point where they are virtually indistinguishable from humans, how will we perceive them? Will they be our friends or potential competitors? This question will be crucial as we prepare for the future.
In the three ways listed above, humans are advancing intelligent design. But can we really call the organisms created through intelligent design and the new laws of life sapiens? If we were to design and create humans of any shape by manipulating genes, or humanoids that were indistinguishably similar to humans, it would be difficult to call them sapiens. This is why, in modern times, sapiens is coming to an end. A world inhabited by “designed” humans, as seen in many science fiction movies, but also in the movie Island, may be our future. And it will no longer be a world of homo sapiens. Perhaps we are watching the final scenes of the millions of years of Homo sapiens history. The end of Homo sapiens is no longer a distant fantasy; it may be part of the reality we are creating.
