Risk v. Rules, and Perhaps the Evolution of a New Human Species

Some people like rules, others like risk. Do our reactions to each, to COVID ... even to bats ... point towards an evolutionary break now in progress?

Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness. – Stephen Jay Gould

---

The DNA of humans and chimps is 98.8 percent identical. A half dozen million years back we shared a common ancestor with both them and bonobos. One day, after a few million additional years of evolution, two or more new species might thoughtfully look back on us as their common ancestor. 

Or perhaps not so thoughtfully.

I’m no expert in human evolution, but sometime after March 2020 I began wondering if we are now witnessing the early hints of human species separation. The possibility occurred to me again this week when I read Matt Taibbi’s

Racket News

essay: “Bat Scares Egghead Couple: Trump Blamed.” 

Taibbi’s subject was an August 1 opinion essay in the New York Times from Belle Boggs, a North Carolina author who recently had a bat trapped in her home. I’ve never heard of Boggs, but I am very familiar with bats getting in the house, and after reading the beginning of her essay my first thought was that she and her husband were lucky. 

But not for the reasons she thinks. Because rather than shoo the bat out of the house, a tedious and not always effective ordeal, she claims she and hubby had concluded from the Centers for Disease Control that the bat needed to be isolated, professionally captured, and then tested for rabies. 

Some bats are so intelligent that when presented with an open door or window they swiftly eco-locate the exit. Many aren’t that swift and require a “catch and release” approach. That backup plan is something I have executed with blankets, cardboard boxes and once even a laundry basket (that actually worked best).

Boggs and hubby got a smart bat, which got out to their porch, foiling the supposed effort to isolate and test it.

I have my doubts. If I were married to Boggs and she told me to trap, rather than get rid of the creature, I might also accidentally-on-purpose leave the door to the porch open. That’s how a real Batman would have done it. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)

Because the smart and liberated bat wasn’t rabies tested, Boggs went into a panic of wondering whether the bat had surreptitiously bitten her or the Batman as they were sleeping.

Taibbi explained how convoluted the matter became from there: “It didn’t bite her, but she needed a sheriff’s deputy, a county health nurse, state animal control, the CDC, and an E.R. doctor to tell her what to do about that.”

The NYTimes’s initial title for Batwoman’s report was: “The Curious Incident of the Bat and the ‘Administrative State.’” As that implies, this was an attempt to praise the mountain of federal, state and local officials Boggs had at her disposal to harass on command because . . . she encountered a bat . . . that swiftly left her alone. 

They got lucky, not because an army of bureaucrats were there to reassure them that the bats weren’t biting them in their sleep, but because they could have (and should have) gone right back to sleep. The bat was smart and cordial enough to quickly show itself out. No harm, no foul. 

A main point of her essay is that a second Trump administration could inflict some tiny dents in the largest bureaucracy ever created by supposedly evolved apes (we can only hope!) But this, predicted Boggs, would lead to a horror show of everyone-out-for-themselves anarchy.

After a hilarious and well-worth-the-read takedown of all this crazymaking, Taibbi noted the founding generation of Americans were a risk-taking, sturdy, self-sufficient group who left us a limited and necessary state. Not a nanny state.

“And so, lacking imagination, the founders never addressed the problem of reality flying through the windows of rich neurotics, failing also to guarantee companionship through “every calamity,”” Taibbi concluded. “Did they get it wrong? Are we really that pathetic now?”

Some of us, unfortunately, are just that.

One of the enduring personal unpleasantries from the COVID era is that I no longer have automatic tolerance for neurotics. Prior to March 2020, when I saw someone wearing a surgical mask in public, my compassion and protective instincts ratcheted up high. I assumed I was in the presence of a cancer patient or someone otherwise immunocompromised who–for whatever reason–needed or just wanted to be out in public. This inspired a desire to do whatever I could to make their personally risky foray a safe and pleasant experience.

But today? Now my first assumption, and one that I never had before, is that I’m in the presence of a performative panic-bot like Boggs. The genuinely ill people are still out there, and still deserving of my (our) instant compassion. But now I have to consciously remember this, rather than instinctively accept it. 

Many larger offenses were created by the lockdown, mask-fetishized, vaccine-mandating COVID cult that absconded with America and much of the world for most of two years (not you Sweden … bravo on that one). As a result, suicide and substance abuse are way up, while student learning, mental health and economic growth are each weak. There are other examples of needless inflictions of distress that we did to ourselves.

Most of us were facing a COVID mortality risk between functionally zero and absolutely zero. We knew this, almost from the start, from watching Italy weather the early storm as it got outside of Asia. We should have metaphorically done what Batwoman and her husband should have literally done and just gone back to bed when it was clear the death risk wasn’t affecting us. The resources and energy of the CDC, local health departments, and even the sheriff should be there to protect the people truly at risk of dying from COVID (and rabies).

Some of us resisted cooperation with the crazymaking. But too many others fit the description that a friend of mine laid out soon after the commandments began: “COVID has become the Super Bowl for people who spent all of elementary school trying to show the teacher they could be the absolute best at following the rules.”

And this is what brought me to my thoughts about the future of human evolution. Perhaps the obedience experiment with COVID reactions, like that of Boggs with the bat, hint at a developing split in the DNA of humans.

If so, what does that look like after another six million years?

I could see a far-off future when some of our descendants will continue to shoo out the bats and then go back to bed without turning the incident into a police and federal case. We’ll keep driving our cars (or whatever we’re driving) just a little faster than the law allows – maybe a lot faster. We’ll still own guns and blow up the biggest shit we can find on Independence Day. We’ll leave Earth, colonize Mars, terraform it to our particular needs, and then look for more planets to inhabit and transform.

The other set or sets of human-descended cousins will remain on Earth, where things will be very safe. They’ll live in vacuum-sealed, germ-free bubbles, maybe with warning sirens from Boggs Industries that go off whenever a bat gets within 500 yards. They will consume Dr. Fauci’s Highly Nutritious Soylent Mush (which at some point will be available in not just green flavor, but exciting purple and blue!)

Some things will be hard for the star-jumping cousins to do in their new homes, so they’ll return to visit Earth. Maybe it’ll be hard to replicate the thrill and danger of hanging off El Capitan when gravity isn’t as strong.

Another thing they’ll do is peer in on their cousins, much as we do today when visiting chimps at the zoo. Except, in this case, the cousins will be in cages of their own making.