Evolve (v), to develop gradually, especially from a simple to a more complicated form. Oxford Dictionary.
There’s a key word missing here. ‘Progress.’
Many associate human evolution with Zallinger’s The Road to Homo Sapien (1965), a procession from our earliest ancestor to the modern homo sapien. Admittedly, I do too. My mind skips past the theories I learned in school and flashes to this infamous illustration. It’s based on the Orthogenesis model that frames human evolution as a linear progression toward a defined goal.
But it’s quite the opposite. For many evolutionary biologists, ‘progress’ is also absent from their definitions. In a 2013 Harvard Gazette article, evolution is described as the “ultimate tinkerer, always having to make do with the parts on hand. Its creations tend to be imperfect, just fit enough to survive.”
To evolve is to adapt. To struggle through the harshness of change, confusion, and loss. To learn from new obstacles and find temporary solutions to temporary issues. It’s less of a straight line and more of a…zigzag.
The people who’ve dedicated their entire lives to understanding evolution are telling us point blank. It’s not the perfectly calculated actions that have gotten us to where we are as human beings. Yet, we’re fixated on Zallinger’s drawing. On antiquated and discredited interpretations. We’ve internalized a false sense of what growth looks like and used it as a metric for our own lives.
I often get caught up in a rejection-reinvention cycle. I’d say most of us do. Throughout our lives, we feel an intense desire to hold on to the past. Whether it’s past realities we lived, or past versions of imagined futures that never came to be. With this, comes an intense self-rejection. We’re taught to repress this desire for the past, as we’re reminded of the supposed line of progress our ancestors followed. The one we need to uphold in order to advance as individuals and as a species. We’re socialized to reinvent ourselves by moving forward without looking back.
But again, as evolutionary biologists have told us, progress isn’t linear. Progress, as we think of it, doesn’t even exist. So, the reinvention is shortly followed by an intrinsic rejection we feel as a symptom of repressing our core need to use the past as a tool for shaping our present.
If you were to map out your own drawing of yourself a la Zallinger, from birth to now, you’d see. All the versions of yourself. The plummets and ascensions. The despairs and joys. Already, you’ve cycled through these possibilities of yourself, in no particular order. And throughout your lifetime, you’ll experience evolution in infinite ways.
Your identity will evolve. Your emotions will evolve. Your body will evolve. Your dreams, fears, pains, joys, will evolve. Your relationships with others will evolve. Your relationship with yourself will evolve. Your understanding of the past will evolve. Your vision of the future will evolve. Your journey will evolve. You will evolve. And you won’t do it by going from A to Z. It’ll be ups, downs, plateaus, again and again.
Despite our failure or refusal to accept this inherit non-linear pattern of evolution, we’ll still experience it. We’re biologically programmed to. To struggle. To learn. To adapt. To zigzag.
