The following is a specimen answer to a History examination question set for GCSE students of the species Homo emergens in the year 2126 (year 76 NSE of the New Species Epoch)
Discuss the extinction of our predecessor species Homo sapiens in the middle of the 21st century and its replacement by Homo emergens
The factors that led to the downfall Homo sapiens, sometimes called humans, were in fact biological. Their cognitive capacities were no longer able to match the complexity of the world which their own technology had created.
Homo sapiens emerged from a group of similar hominin species such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals. It had evolved a brain structure which gave it an edge in cognitive reasoning. This allowed it not only to drive its competitor hominins to extinction: it allowed it to become, briefly, the biologically and ecologically dominant life form on this planet. And to form huge interconnected networks of information, trade and energy exchange called “cities”. Yet the brains of these creatures had not evolved beyond those of their ancestors. Who were adapted for survival in small hostile competing groups. The neurological architecture which had been so adaptive for that period was utterly inadequate for the complicated world which had been created in the last century of their existence. These cognitive inadequacies included confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, motivated reasoning and a tendency to divide quickly into mutually jealous hostile groups. The primitive institutions which this species evolved were therefore plagued by short term bias, institutional inertia and deep patterns of hierarchical loyalty which left them unable to adapt to the rapidly changing complexities in which they operated. And none of these cognitive failures could be overcome, because they were part of the inherited biological adaptations of the species.
Thus the complications of the late human era such as climate change, Artificial Intelligence and disease pandemics represented a new environment to which this species could no longer adapt. Instead of solutions they caused economic decline, political polarisation and eventually The Great Final War of 2046. The massive falls in human population and its reduction to technological impotence provided the ecological niche into which our own species, Homo emergens, was able to move. Our current thriving is due to the same superior intellectual capacity which had allowed H sapiens to exterminate Homo erectus: as it in turn had done to the preceding Australopithecines. It is a mark of our intelligence that we have not exterminated our own predecessors but have confined their remnants to zoological parks where they may continue to be objects of scientific study and public amusement. Their fate shows that no species can survive if it is not well adapted to its environment: a lesson our own would do well to learn.
copyright: EmergentEdge Specimen solutions 76: “we write ’em- you pass ’em!”
#biology #evolution #extinction #cognitive bias #war #climate change
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