Word: humaneness
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...grandest sense--the attempt to comprehend the universe and our place in it--has entered an era of diminishing returns. Scientists will continue making incremental advances, but they will never achieve their most ambitious goals, such as understanding the origin of the universe, of life and of human consciousness. Most people find this prediction hard to believe, because scientists and journalists breathlessly hype each new breakthrough, whether genuine or spurious, and ignore all the areas in which science makes little or no progress. The human mind, in particular, remains as mysterious as ever. Some prominent mind scientists, including [TIME Visions...
...guess where this argument is heading. During the Ice Ages, when our own species emerged, human populations were small and scattered and were continuously disrupted by climatic fluctuations. Conditions were ideal for genetic innovation. Today, however, the human population is 6 billion and mushrooming and increasingly densely distributed. At the same time, individual humans are incomparably more mobile than ever before. Efficient communication means that, for example, American males can advertise for wives in journals distributed halfway around the globe...
...diversification, Homo sapiens is in a mode of reintegration, as witness the fact that the boundaries between the former geographical variants of our species are becoming increasingly blurred. If present trends continue, those boundaries will become blurrier still. Amid all this, the conditions for incorporating meaningful new innovations into human populations have all but disappeared--and with them the prospects for significant evolutionary change...
...course, such predictions are based on the assumption that current conditions will prevail into the foreseeable future, and it is quite possible that this assumption is wrong. Anything that would serve to fragment the current huge human population might help re-establish the conditions necessary for future human change. Unfortunately, we would undoubtedly perceive such an event as a terrible disaster, since it would necessarily entail the disappearance of billions of human beings...
...will forever remain the willful, capricious, appalling creatures that we have been ever since our species emerged during the late Ice Ages. The good news is that we will remain the creative, interesting, caring, wonderful creatures that we have been for exactly as long. Over the long haul, human nature will almost certainly stay as idiosyncratic as it is today. It's unrealistic to hope that evolution will ride in on its white horse in the next 50--or even 500,000--years to improve the breed and save us from our follies. We shall have to learn to live...