Homo sapiens is the only surviving member of several past human species. We have advanced science and technology through the Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, but advances in biotechnology have raised the possibility that it could lead to our extinction. We must now consider whether this technology will lead to our evolution or our demise.
Are we the only species on Earth? Most people would say yes. However, if we look back in history more than 10,000 years ago, there were at least six other species of humans living alongside us, including Neanderthals, Homo erectus, and Homo soloensis. The reason we are the only human species today, despite having so many species, is because of the cognitive revolution. Through communication, Homo sapiens was able to understand invisible concepts like God, money, and nations, allowing us to cooperate with many other sapiens, even those we never met. This gave them an advantage in competition with other species. The Agricultural Revolution allowed us to rapidly expand our population, and we are now living in the midst of the ever-changing tides of science and technology.
Prior to the Scientific Revolution, evolution was not driven by human choice or need; it was driven by natural selection, in which individuals of the same species that were better adapted to their environment survived. However, with the Scientific Revolution, we are more actively changing our external environment and improving our lives through intelligent design. In Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Harari describes the evolution of Homo sapiens through the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution from three perspectives: biotechnology, cyborg engineering, and non-organic engineering. In this article, we’ll focus on how biotechnology could lead to the end of Homo sapiens.
Before we get to that, let’s first understand what biotechnology is. Biotechnology is the utilization of a living organism’s functions or features for human purposes, either to create new traits not found in that species or to create a completely new species. For example, mass-producing insulin, a drug for diabetes, has the potential to extend human life and cure incurable diseases. But it also raises religious and ethical issues, including human cloning and the use of animals as test subjects. While research on human cloning has been largely abandoned due to opposition, research on human genetics is likely to take off in the near future because of the many benefits it holds.
In the Scientific Revolution, we began to take a dangerous gamble, crossing into God’s domain. We are no longer a species that is influenced by nature and evolves accordingly, but a species that changes nature to suit our needs and expresses our insatiable desires through science and technology. This desire has allowed us to use animals to create artificial organs and greatly enhance their intellectual capabilities. Since the genome of Homo sapiens is not significantly more complex than that of animals, there is no reason why these technologies cannot be applied to humans.
In this way, not only our physical and functional abilities, but also our intellectual capacities are being controlled by biotechnology. So, if humans create a genetically intact organism with maximum capabilities, should we call it an evolved Homo sapiens? Or should we call it a completely different species from Homo sapiens? In reality, the differences between us and apes stem from small genetic differences, so should we recognize the genetic differences between Homo sapiens and the more superior organisms we’ve genetically engineered and classify them as a new species? Or should they be considered the same species as us?
We can’t predict exactly where science and technology will take us on this issue, where its limits will be, or what changes it will bring in the future. However, it is only in a very short period of human history that biotechnology has begun to impact our lives. This short period of time changed our lives and gave us the desire to modify ourselves, to plunge into the realm of the divine, to attempt intelligent design, to dream of immortality. Since there will be no more brakes on this desire, it will eventually lead to the end of the history of Homo sapiens.
