A brief science lesson. Once upon a time, a british economist named Malthus wrote a short book on a fundamental realization he had, and his concerns about it. The facts that laid before Malthus’s table were that population growth is exponential, whereas resource growth is finite and arithmetical at best. The inevitable result would always be poverty and famine, that there was no path to prosperity available to mankind, and that despite all of our technological innovations, in the end we’d be just as poorly off as our starving ancestors and the starving Chinese and the starving Indians and the starving Africans. Mathematics simply dictated it.

Another man, Charles Darwin, when he read this, realized that this was the case not just for mankind but all living things. All living things reproduced exponentially, while only being able to gather more resources arithmetically. This meant that in the natural world, life was constantly overshooting its carrying capacity, ie more babies were being born than could possibly be fed. Every generation a great die-off must occur, to reorient population to resource accumulation, he reasoned, and the factors that led to some organisms dying while others didn’t created the survival of the fittest. Perhaps one organism had better lungs and thus could run faster, perhaps an organism had better eyes and could spy out prey better than average, or perhaps an organism was better camouflaged than its peers and thus avoided the sharp eyes of predators. Survival traits one encounters in the natural world are impossible to miss, the logic that those who had more and better versions of these obviously effective measures must have outcompeted their rival stock is common sense, the fact that not all living things can survive due to exponential birth rates is a mathematical truth.

Gradually, as each generation is born, competes, and largely dies off, in competition with members of their own species and other species occupying the same biological niche, (perhaps using the same shelter, perhaps the same soil, perhaps the same sunlight, perhaps the same prey, etc) and those predating upon a certain niche, (eating them, infecting them, scavenging from them) certain survival traits begin to emerge as more and more common the longer the game is played, because even a slight advantage over time leads to a dramatic lead over all competition. Once virtually everyone has either died or inherited these winning traits, the competition begins all over again and just as ruthlessly as only some new advantage will help one genetic line emerge victorious over the others. This constant need to improve or die is the seemingly miraculous force that has created humans out of algae. In a name, it is evolution. Genetic change, competition, and the favoring of certain survival traits that keep turning out to be winners, automatically keeps life progressing towards certain ends. Ends that can be discerned if one looks at the history of life’s evolution across time. Ends that all living beings must embrace and adopt, or go extinct for the lack of them, due to the proven worth of those traits that evolution has selected for life over and over and over again.

Evolution has been breeding for all sorts of various traits, like disease resistance, sexual attractiveness, strength, speed, etc. It’s obvious why birds have talons, fish have gills, and so on. More interesting and less visible is the meta-evolution selecting for meta-traits. These are not specific adaptations to specific needs, but the overarching vector of progress in fields that constantly ‘win,’ strategies that tend to hit the ‘jackpot.’ Starting from its humble beginnings, life has been evolving in a clear direction, towards certain meta-traits that are most likely to win. From my analysis, these are:

Power. Complexity. Adaptability. Intelligence. Resilience. You could say that whether it’s teeth, claws, or stingers—plumage, mating calls, or antlers—it always falls under one of these meta-traits. It’s always an attempt to gain more of one of the above. Life has been constantly evolving itself into higher and higher magnitudes of these traits, through whatever channels it happens across. Just like entropy provides a vector to the workings of the universe, power, complexity, adaptability, intelligence, and resilience provide a vector to the workings of evolution.

Humanity of course is the highest exemplar of evolution on earth. This is because we possess above all the very evolutionary meta-traits that all life has been striving to possess since the beginning. Life has been evolving from weak creatures unable to alter their environment or confront others into much larger, more powerful creatures able to do so. In the past life could only drift about in the sea, but as time went by it found ways to move itself. In the past there were only plants that fed off the sun, but eventually animals that fed off plants appeared, and then animals that fed off animals, in a constantly increasingly powerful chain. All of this becomes moot when compared to human’s ability to split atoms, travel into outer space, harness the nearly infinite energies of the natural world, slaughter any other organism we care to, and even domesticate plants and animals to serve our needs.

All life started as unicellular organisms without even a nucleus but now has moved on to vastly complicated multi-cellular lifeforms with all sorts of specialized cells and organs which in turn gave way to vast communities of living beings working together to build an even vaster more complex society. Herds of animals, packs of wolves, tribes of monkeys, colonies of bacteria, etc all show the meta-arrow of increasing complexity as a means towards increasing survivability and success. All of course pale in comparison to the cities, nations, cyberworld, and trade networks that humans span today, including the entire society of our past in written down records so that the number of relations and cooperation grows and grows but never shrinks.

Adaptability is a prime plus for life forms that wish to live. When the atmosphere became oxygenated instead of sulfuric or whatever it was, only the life that could adapt to this massive change survived. When carbon dioxide became thin in the air, only the more adaptive grasses that could survive on less carbon survived. AIDS is so successful because of its ability to almost limitlessly adapt to the various drugs used against it. Omnivores are better than carnivores due to their ability to adapt to what food supplies are available, who are of course better than animals like koalas who are so incapable of adaption, that they only eat one other species on earth. However, the most adaptable life form of all is again, humanity. We can be found in all parts of the earth, under any climate. We can eat anything, thrive in heat or cold, high altitude or sea level, due to our technology which equips us for any job or condition. At this point we can even send people underwater for months in submarines or float them about in outer space for months on space stations. We are The most adaptable life form that can exist in more environments than anything else on earth. And given that the world will eventually be destroyed, only life forms as adaptable as us, ie, that can first reach outer space, have any evolutionary chance at all. ALL life, everything else, lives by our sufferance alone and owes all its gratitude and existence to us.

Intelligence, routinely described as a combination of information storage, processing and abstract thinking, has been universally increasing in the history of life. From unicellular life without a nucleus (the central processor), to life without DNA to life with DNA (memory banks), up to the development of the nervous system and the brain, and then to larger and larger brains across the board. (Until nearly all mammals and birds of today are geniuses compared to the reptiles and amphibians and fish of the past, who in turn were infinitely smarter than plants, etc) But the intelligence of other life forms again falls well short of humanity. Using our initial advantage in the very best and biggest brains (proportional to body-weight) existent, we have gone on to develop language and written language to broaden our intellectual output to include the collective intelligence of our whole community across all time, and then even made machine languages we could talk to with their own set of brainpower—low in abstract thinking, but extremely high at processing speed and storage capacity. A single human is already impressively more intelligent than the closest animal competition—the collective intelligence of the human organism that works alongside pets, computers, written records and dialogue between humans is exponentially smarter, capable of nearly anything—and indeed the record of our accomplishments bears this out.

Resilience is typified in any hardy plant that can resist the cold or drought, anything with a good immune system, a thick coat of fur or armor, a vastly fast reproductive process, or anything of the sort that makes them hard to kill. Cockroaches and the common cold are perhaps the most famously resilient, but in the end nothing approaches mankind. For a simple reason—humanity is the only life form that can outlive the destruction of their planet. Now That’s resilience. Not only that, but it would be simple for the mankind of today to, just as a proof of principle, build an underground bunker for itself and nuke the entire world, leaving everything but itself a dead wasteland. At this point all other living things live by our sufferance, except perhaps a few microbes buried deep in the earth or under the seas, and for the pests that continue to assault us, they have not their resilience to brag about but the sheer hassle of destroying them that prevents us. Meanwhile no life form on other could kill us out, and our technology can generally sense and then avert any natural disaster that would threaten us, again showing which species is the hardiest and least vulnerable to extinction.

For these reasons humans are the superior life form, they are doing what life does best, they are what life wants most, they are the purpose of life incarnate. They are life’s champions. If life were a princess in the stands observing with mixed worry and hope for the outcome of the joust, we are the knight who wears her ribbon and pledges victory in her name. We are her most faithful, most trusted servant. The warrior who protects her from all comers, who punishes any who defame her virtue or beauty, and spreads her fame and glory to the far corners of the realm. As bearers of this title and mantle, this special status and honor, we are not just another life form. We are Life’s Form. We are superior to all other living beings, all other life is already expressed and included in us, who in our vast complexity, power, intelligence, adaptability, and resilience, contain the meaning of all their existence as well as the additional special meaning of our own. There is nothing in life humanity does not already possess, life is superfluous now that humanity is on the scene, and yet humanity is indispensable to all other life. This is the relation between us, one of superior and inferior, of condescension and gratitude, of ruler and ruled.

The same reasoning can be applied to the various sub-species of man.  If anyone dares.