The descent of man

More and more inventions could put Darwin’s evolution in reverse gear

Vacationing in Turin, Italy, Bunny and I are confronted with a problem. We need to do laundry in the washing machine in our rented apartment, but the make is unfamiliar to us. The instructions for its use are given on the machine, but they are in Italian, not English.

Bunny has a grasp of basic Italian, but the technical instructions on the machine are incomprehensible to her. Then an idea strikes her. Her phone has an app which, when pointed at printed words in whatever language, can translate them into any other language, possibly not excluding Hindi, Swahili, or Serbo-Croatian.

Bunny uses the app and – Bingo! – out comes the text in Standard English, punctuation and all. 

As we put our laundry into the machine, we recite the reverent refrain that has become the leitmotif of human civilisation: What would we do without the marvels of tech? 

We repeat this mantra when we use phones to translate language, or employ GPS to help us find where we need to go, or get Gemini to give us the lowdown on what Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems are, and why the chap slacked on the job and didn’t complete the darn things. 

What would we do without modern tech? Our ancient forebears repeated those words when people got fed up with having to use their fingers to count 2+2=4 and invented the abacus. Now, instead of fingers you moved two beads from left to right, then moved two more beads, and – Eureka! – you’d get four. No more fiddling with fingers. 

And before you could say ‘Apple’, we had laptops, smartphones, and AI, thanks to which we no longer have to rely on humans to solve problems but let digital tech do it for us. 

Darwinian evolution is based on the human problem-solving capacity to reach ever higher stages of development. 

By abdicating our inventiveness in problem solving will we put Darwin into reverse gear? Instead of the Ascent of Man, have we initiated the Descent of Man? Will Homo sapiens, Wise Man, literally ape his pre-human ancestors and make a Monkey of himself?