My personal philosophy on why humanity is doomed.
Humanity, on the whole, has ruined our ability to evolve. We have doomed our own species; and yet, in a way, it is evolution that doomed itself. Before we manage to kill everything in the world, including ourselves, it seems necessary to examine why it is that we do what we do, and why this was our evolutionary fate.
The key factor in a species ability to evolve is prevention. Most species of animal derive a certain ability to perceive threats before they are too close to avoid, in order to stay alive. Else they simply develop a system that deters the threats. For instance:
Ex. 1: Some animals can sense incoming lightning and flock to nearby trees that they may avoid getting struck themselves.
Ex. 2: Some animals evolve to use a variety of colored appendages in order to convince other animals that they are poisonous to ingest.
Human beings, on the whole, have long since lost this uncanny ability to deal with potential issues before they become horribly obvious issues. Part of this is because we learned to use tools, and to fashion tools that were better and better. This lost to us the edge of a more natural understanding of threat, and our more instinctual need for a sort of harmony. Perhaps our instinctual need is not towards harmony, but an evolutionary directive that keeps things in check. Somehow, we managed to skip out on that one.
Now, we have only our ability to minimize the damage that has already befallen us. We try to defend ourselves against threats, but only once the threat is a reality. We don't learn to try to scare off the would-be killers, we get attacked and simply have to reduce the deaths that will be coming. When did we start caring about the eco-system? When it was so far gone that we had already lost much of what we had. When did we start worrying about what we were doing with our pollution? When the effects were so rampant that we simply HAD to notice. We lost our natural edge for prevention long ago.
We, instead, grew into a group that gained time for art. Art is probably the ultimate downfall of humanity as a species. While it can be a beautiful past-time, the fact is that it was unnecessary to our survival, but it did breed greed. Greed in a natural sense is more of wanting you and your offspring to have the best in life. Mostly the offspring. The whole point of breeding and, honestly, existing as a biological organism is to pass on the best of the best to the next generation. If you can survive long enough to breed, and your offspring can do the same, it is generally assumed that you have succeeded.
Sadly, with our human greed, not only did we lose some of the perspective of providing for those we wish to pass our best on to, but we twisted the original purpose. Greed led to the promotion of lavish lifestyles, which are ultimately short-sighted as far as keeping the generations after you alive. If you are eating all of the available fish in the ocean, your children will not be able to eat them. You will breed diseased and weak offspring, mostly because they will not be able to be provided for. It is a dooming of your own species.
However, because of our ability to lead a life where we could have the things we wanted, and did NOT need, and the tools to not only continue this process, but to unburden enough people that an entire group was able to give up such work in order to purely concentrate on the creation of unnecessary items, we basically removed our instinctual drive to make sure that we had what we needed for those behind us.
Not only that, but because of the way our society began to protect people, we suddenly, in many societies, lost the ability to cast out or slay those who were too weak to get on without dragging others down. The handicapped beggars of Rome and such... they did not add to the society, or the group, they simply drained from it, siphoning from the bottom. If something only lives to feed from you, it is, in general, a parasite, and unless it is your own offspring (and honestly if it is parasitic to you and it seems like it would continue to be so later on, it would still, in evolutionary and instinctual terms, make more sense to terminate it). Instead, what we ended up doing was defending the rights of those who could not defend their own.
Not only this, but we allowed those who were once useful but later became parasitic (really old people who could no longer provide for themselves) and we protected them as well, rather than shutting them out of the world to go die in the woods. We even spent our time artificially evolving our lives (via tools) to keep ourselves alive, and we repeatedly invested time and energy into continuing the lives of people who could not ever be productive, but would have died without the aid. This is not sound behavior.
Now, it is prudent to point out that I am not suggesting that we go out and kill all the people with physical disabilities or mental defects or such. Nor do I suggest that we cull the diseased from our ranks and breed pure Aryan babies or anything of that sort. What I am saying is that because we did not do these things, we doomed our own species. We cannot evolve, and as such, we can never exist in harmony with the world around us. Because we did not continue to gain the ability to NATURALLY deal with our issues, and learn to co-exist, our only method of survival now is to change our environment to suit ourselves, and that is, at least in the over-done method that humans must do it in, the signal of our end.
The energy it takes to keep us alive and thriving through the incredible number of unnatural tools we have learned to create and learned to use will eventually be too much for us to carry on. We will continually have to use the resources around us, and as our numbers grow and we continue to keep practicing our lifestyle of lavish behavior, holding afloat those who cannot rise above alone, and breaking our connections to our natural mandates, we will continue to use so much of what is around us that it will be unable to support us any longer. We will eventually become a force of our own, far beyond that of anything on our planet... but we will never evolve. And if our tools were ever stop working, we would sink, and no one could hold us afloat.
BN: I don't really care if we all die, and we never evolve. I'm a good human, and I'm just here for the ride. My time on Earth will end before any kind of horrible calamity will befall mankind. And I couldn't rise above the water on my own, so I'm all good with keeping the parasites alive and well. Hell, we could use a raise.