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How is life evolving now?

When we think of human evolution and how life would look like a few million years from now, our imagination directly turns to flying individuals, integrating our bodies with technology and becoming cyborgs, being multi-planetary species and whatnot. But even if some of it turns out to be true, we still miss out on an important part of this world, multi-human organisms. Let’s dive a bit deeper..

I want you to imagine how cells in a regular multicellular organism work. All cell organelles and resultant cells have evolved for millions (or billions) of years to form groups of cells, tissues and organs to form multicellular organisms which can perform tasks that these cells can’t do individually and essentially live a better life by better protecting itself against environmental changes, predators, etc. They do their tasks to the best of their ability with utmost efficiency. This specific knowledge has been acquired by it over the years of development. Now take this analogy to how our society operates. We are born. We are taken care of by our family, friends, relatives, schools, neighborhoods, businesses, non-profits, the cities and nation we live in, our laws and the whole civilization. We start learning from the moment we interact with them and learn to fit into society, create value by doing something out of what we learnt and finding opportunities to serve, sustain ourselves by forming relationships and getting money for the value we provide and run many of these organizations to repeat this process.

Now consider a particular organization. Take McDonalds, for example. Now, this fast food restaurant chain does some particular tasks that are its value it provides in exchange for money (which is a commonly accepted measure of value of goods and services). It needs to do certain things to deliver that value proposition. It has people with a particular set of skills who are responsible to carry on different tasks. This organization or organism also replicates by copying its value proposition like red-yellow theme and logo, tasty and addictive burgers that are served very fast and cheap and other key factors to another location or ecosystem, among another group of people. It does that by gathering the local resources based on a pre-existing blueprint or its DNA.

Now at any point of time, the people that work for McDonalds act as some type of cells for this organism, along with other resources that it uses. Similar analogies can also be derived for all the types of organizations like a city or a  nation (which act more like a forest or an ecosystem for businesses) with more or less similarity to various type of biological evolution mechanism we have seen.

Point is, these organizations, institutions, nations, etc. are the organisms that evolved from us. We are the creators of this new life with new laws. And they are better able to do things than a single human being. We know this. For example, a single man may not ever be able to go into space. But ISRO or NASA can. People train to become part of it. They are “passionate” about working in NASA and exploring space, working on tech, etc. Then they become part of this multicellular organism and do the task.

Are you getting how this goes? You are brought up consuming everything around you which shapes you in one form. Your likes and dislikes are all products of what you consume from surroundings, your inherent genetics, and their interaction. Then you study, train and become passionate and become part of more than one organism (at least at this point). I think some of it has been explore before in the topic of structural functionalism, but still I believe if we do give it a serious try, we may be able to pinpoint the exact laws that govern the evolution of humans and maybe even find out some aspects of how the future could look like. Please comment/interact to shed light on the topic. If you have any literature, research, etc. on this, do share... I would love to go through it and tinker more on this topic. Thanks a lot for reading!