And They're Off

The Sumerian civilization hit the scene, at the mouth of the Tigris, on the Persian Gulf, just a few short years after the Egyptians filled the tub and got in. With irrigation systems, a written language and complex social systems, including a class system and built in slavery, the Sumerians almost had the land speed record for earliest to sit around enjoying leisure time. Second is still pretty good, considering my ancestors were still a few thousand years away from picking gnats off each other at that point.
There comes a time, however, when you just have to say goodbye to your brothers who, through no fault of their own, opt out of a little evolutionary advancement. No one wants to be voted off the island for coming in second.
John Wyndam, of Chrysalids fame, had his own idea of where we were headed, if only those pesky Normals had left the kids alone. The Boys from Brazil, an eerily prescient look at human engineering, those kids from the Next Generation, who are left to die on some alien planet, and the X-Men, all threats to their creators, populate the mind of evolutionists who know our days are numbered. Do I look worried?
The religious factions will all weigh in on this debate to tell us that the next phase in our evolution will inevitably come through death and ascension to a higher plane. The Buddhists will eventually stop being re-born, the Christians will be hanging out in the New Jerusalem, and Pauly Shore will finally stop making movies.
That's probably for the best because the planet I call home will undoubtedly be in the hands of our evolutionary replacements. Most of the people I know probably wouldn't adjust all that well to the new routine. With the built in belief that we're on the top of the heap, we'd have our noses out of joint until we finally go extinct.
Now, just imagine some Sumerian fat cat, sitting in his Lazy-boy, some seven thousand years ago. He had all the amenities we have (and don't try to tell me having a computer makes us superior) and wanted nothing. I think he might be disappointed to know how long it's taken us to go pretty much nowhere since then. He was probably of the mind that human advancement was at an end and was wondering what kind of species might pop up and take his chair away from him. I'll bet he didn't think that all these years later we'd still be here trying to solve the issues that were plaguing his people then. War, devalued currencies, shrinking trade, class crisis and poverty. Of course, he had no way of knowing that Kraft Dinner, American Idol and a re-make of Starsky and Hutch would be all we could come up with. I bet he'd be crying in his beer. I'd cry in my beer if I thought that seven thousand years from now we'd still be here, inventing new flavours for Pringles and still trying to stomp out our neighbors for believing in a afterlife that includes them.
Evolution is a slow moving train, however, and I suspect we'll be waiting at the station for a while yet. And unless we hurry things along, by killing ourselves off, we'll probably see Pauly resurrect his career and one day become President.
As Cicero said, "It is fortune, not wisdom, that rules man's life."