A large part of Darwin's observations upon which he based his theoretical model of natural selection was in fact taken from the context of the breeding and management of domesticated species in his native England. Many of the patterns of selection he was basing his theories upon were in fact the kinds of human selection that had resulted in the domesticating of many kinds of plants and animals, and that had a fairly well known human history behind its occurrence. Darwin was able to infer from the domestic to wild populations that a similar kind of system of selection was occurring that resulted in the on-going modification of species.

Taking our cue from Darwin's theory, I would like to revisit the idea of cultural selection that has resulted in the domestication of so many different species of floral and fauna for human cultural purposes. We are in a time now of the global human being, in which increasingly culture and human civilization is converging to a single set of implicit technological standards, and this process of human development is increasingly encapsulating the entire earth and quickly dividing up the earth's remaining natural spaces as so many sectors between the interstices of human civilization.

We may hypothesize a kind of global domestication of feral life forms occurring, that is increasingly forcing many species of life to either make a jump to a culturally adapted form or else to face the prospect of rapid extinction. A few species appear to have made the leap from feral to semi-domesticated and appear as quite successful within a human background. Other species appear to be unable to make this kind of jump and appear therefore doomed for evolutionary removal. In fact more species than not appear to be incapable of effecting this kind of evolutionary transition, and we may be in the midst of an unprecedented evolutionary epoch, that really probably started more than 10,000 years ago, that is overall witness another mass extinction event and the bottlenecking of surviving species. 

Recent advances in cloning, genetic engineering and modification is adding an entirely new dimension to the age old practice of cultural selection for domestic forms of life. For the first time it appears that we have the entire mechanism of evolutionary change in our grasp, under our control, and that we can for the first time begin shaping species in a kind of designer fashion without having to wait generations of careful selective breeding and culling to see the results. We have in a sense accelerated the pace of evolution at the very moment that natural selection and the evolution of feral forms appears to be reaching a global standstill and dead end.

Natural selection in the world appears therefore to be undergoing an important revolution, or rather "evolution" of its own. Biological systems worldwide, and the global ecology in general, is becoming increasingly subject to human cultural influences whether these influences are direct or indirect in effect, and these influences are serving increasingly as basic factors of constraint, or limiting factors, that increasingly determine the outcomes of natural selection regimes and events. Many forms of life are having therefore to adapt to and survive within the context of a global human ecology, and many forms of life are failing to achieve this mode of adaptation and as a consequence are running the risk of extinction. Human culture has become the modern comet of global mass extinction. The rise of penicillin resistant strains of bacteria, many of which are almost exclusively dependent upon the human body as a host, is a clear example of the rise of new life-forms that are an unintended but expectable consequence of human cultural selection.

An expectable outcome of this is not only what we are in the midst of, which is a global mass extinction event that is playing out over thousands of years, but at an increasing rate that is positively correlated with the rate of human population growth, but that as a consequence new forms of life will continue to emerge that come attached and primarily dependent upon human cultural selection, intervention and management, either directly or indirectly. It is sort of like the Yellowstone Grizzlies at the dump site, behaving in ways that are strikingly human. I would think this kind of transformation of nature to be something of a perversion of natural design and evolutionary ecology. It is a kind of Frankenstein complex that leads to the evolution of monstrosities that merely pass as viable forms of life. This is true whether we talk about pygmy chimp populations being breed in captive experimental facilities or stock salmon that return each year to their hatcheries. We all know of proverbial story of the monster rats of Chernobyl. Fewer people hear about the pig-sized nutrias invading Louisiana.

This transformation of the natural world therefore begs certain basic questions about the future course of life on earth. I do not think, in the bigger scheme of things, that human kind will come to completely control or manage all of nature, and that nature might not in the long run succeed and rebound where human beings fail and themselves face extinction. We in fact may be much closer historically to this consequence than we realize or care to admit. I'm sure that even if we cast human civilization in the shroud of a long-term nuclear winter, and irradiate ourselves to a bizarre extinction through mass mutation, we would at the end of the day find life emerging once again with renewed vitality between the cracks of where our over-rated civilization crumbles. 

Just the same, while we are around and in the driver's seat, it would behoove human beings to carefully consider where they are going and how they are going to get there. If we wish to accept the meta-ethical responsibility of our global dominance as a life-form, then perhaps we should take the proposition of the cultural selection and management of life at all levels of its occurrence more seriously and more to heart than we previously have. With great power to shape life anew comes grave responsibility to limit and constrain this power in constructive and wise ways.

By and large the main impact humanity is continuing to have upon the biosphere is destructive. The shear volume, mass and behavioral impact of very large human populations on earth seems perhaps to be more than the earth itself can bear. As with all destruction, there is the occasion for the reemergence, the rebirth, of life.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II