Brain Wave #22: Are we evolving?

 Brain Wave #22: Are we evolving?

I'm so uneducated on what I'm about to talk about (as always) but I thought about talking about this, which is good enough for now?

I acknowledge that I'm a bit late, but I've watched the Veritasium video yesterday about Teflon, and C-8, and PFAS, an whatnot. The video talks about how now basically every organism on the planet has PFAS in their bodies, go back 50 years the problem used to be asbestos, so on with whatever man made bullshit we come up with without doing any research about how it's gonna affect ourselves and the environment. Heck, I probably got a shit ton of microplastics in my bloodstream having the time of their inanimated life going through my left knee. To bring the point even more forward than required, imagine what fuckery people during the middle ages had in their bodies, without even knowing what was good or bad for them, just blame the local woman of wizardry and die of syphilis. I can't lie maybe I would've enjoyed a life like that: imagine coming back home from the battle of your lifetime and bang your wife and a twink of undisclosed age which was only acceptable back then, at the same time! Maybe I got a bit side tracked...
You get what I'm talking about though, every generation has their bullshit "thing that we think is good for us, but actually is not" thing, not our fault to be honest, not individually at least: it's just a huge movement to make money for billiona- hang on I was about to get political. You get why this happens, open your eyes. What's weird to me is that this time things like PFAS got literally everywhere, y'know me my little peanut brain is always fascinated by how big and diverse the world is OMG THE WORLD IS BIG AND DIVERSE. But how did we get to the point that even the penguins in Antarctica are subject to PFAS. Not my beloved penguins. I mean we know how we got here, what I'm trying to get to (really slowly) where are we gonna go from here? Think about it, stuff like asbestos and those kinds of problems were relatively short-term in comparison to how we changed from Gilgamesh to Donald Trump (king of examples) but something that is to a global scale will definitely have an impact on how the world will look like in a hundred, two hundred years time.  What I was thinking while watching the video is that: if these things are already in our blood, will it be a definitive characteristic in future generations? A lot of people realising this will think and say "Oh no! We're officially evolving backwards, for the first time in thousands of years we're not going forwards as a species" yeah...nah it's something that us humans aways thought about for centuries and now people on TikTok try to brainwash us with, at the end of the day it's just a generational idea based on how the past was better in certain fields, but at the end of the day progress only comes to a halt when something radical such as "burning thousands of books containing useful information" happens. Not something that has ever occurred, right?

Another way people look at this is the phenomenon of life expectancy increasing over the years. Obviously it's not something that increases overnight, but you know: go back a few hundred years people only used to live up to 40 or 50. Go even more back people used to get married at like 15, which makes sense in comparison to when you die, so don't go breaking everybody's balls about how that should've been considered unethical, what the fuck did they know?
Point is people live up to a hundred or so years now, good or bad thing, that is not up to me to decide. Obviously people have emotions so they're happier that their loved one are able to live longer and get to spend more time with them, because they themselves live longer. Also greedy bastards out there try to raise the age of retirement on a daily basis, so ain't that good for them? It is however argued that us as a species shouldn't live that long: think about it when we get old we get weak and somewhat impaired, both our physical and mental state start to degrade, many even are ready to die as they cannot bear this lifestyle. So in a sense we might be meant to live up to 50 or so, as after that we start to decay and we cannot live at our best. Obviously that might not be the most ethical or empathetic of an argument, but me not knowing the exact science about it, I'm gonna refrain from commenting, I just think it's an interesting take on this whole discourse. 

So, this begs further the question, are we evolving? Of course, the answer will still be yes, whether it's quicker or slower of an evolution it's not really easy to tell, good or bad even then there cannot be an objective correct answer. I do however personally think that: other than having to be more aware of how the world is changing everyday and how we should stay more informed about what we're producing and consuming on a daily basis, we shouldn't be too worried about us as a species going in a good or bad direction. Not only because our destiny is controlled by some dumbass billio- I'm doing this again... Not only because evolution is a phenomenon such that we don't realise it overtime as it comes natural for our species, but also because whether you like it or not we're gonna evolve overtime anyway, it's a natural change that occurs no matter what, whichever direction we're going we're going somewhere anyway, so the question is quite dumb.

I almost forgot a point that I wanted to make previously..
Think abut animals (I do all the time, I love 'em) they're not self conscious creatures obviously. We, on the other end, are which to me is the sole reason why we care about everything that we just talked about. We're anxious, we're constantly worried about life and death, and because of that we're worried about what's gonna happen after we die, even to a very very great extent. Let's go back to the fuckass example they tell you as a kid about the giraffes and their long necks: the short neck giraffe didn't look at the long neck giraffe and think "Oh this fucker can reach the leaves, we're destined to have long necks then" of course not, and in my opinion we should have a similar mindset.. I mean, we should be both aware of what's killing us and what's  actually good for us to consume overtime, obviously we can't take the mindset of "natural selection y'know" and murder everyone, but at the same time we should be conscious about the fact that we are not gonna go extinct due to PFAS and microplastics and stuff, there still will be many of us left who will not only adapt but even fight this problem and help the species move forward. Again, it's not the end of the world nor the quickest evolving species.
Also, another thing is this is affecting animal evolution, something else that we're able to tackle, but also something kinda sad. We've been experiencing extinctions of quite a few different animal species recently: this is something that 1. has been happening since like the dawn of time 2. even though we've kind of accelerated it in the past century, we have been surviving off of animals since like forever. Just imagine if we were part of most animals' consumer cycle as they're for us, creepy.

But yeah, however you feel about the human species going forward, it is kind of inevitable that we go in a certain direction overtime, but I'm not gonna bore you with the same "we have to go forward" or "we need to change, now" type of fluff, because at the end of the day it is just how things go. I don't personally think that our self conscious minds are powerful enough to think about the past and the future at this great extent as evolution is. Y'know, shit just happens.

Good bai for now, poposwag