By LEE DE COLA
Modern biology describes life as an endlessly-complexifying process, transforming matter and energy into often radically new forms, most of which have been destroyed in one catastrophe or another over geologic time. The organisms and organization that has evolved today make Earth the most interesting planet in the solar system, perhaps in the Galaxy, possibly in the universe.
We also know that humanity is accelerating evolution by intensifying the extinction of species and undoubtedly also stimulating new and complex life forms and behavior. Consider the ubiquitous American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos), which is being threatened by the probably human-induced importation of West Nile virus but also may be benefiting from a greater abundance of road kill. This kind of mutual adaptation leads me to propose the emergence of a new species: homo vehicularis, a radically new life form that has come to dominate the planet in a way that its predecessor h. sapiens could not have dreamed of.
In 2000 there were over 150 million personal cars registered in the U.S. (more than one per every two people). The global population is no doubt ten times that, suggesting that the planet has over 1 billion of these h. vehicularis organisms, only about 100 years old but multiplying much faster than humans. This transformation can be appreciated in two ways: one astronomical, the other personal.
One way of looking at the evolution of this new life form is to consider not only its numbers but also its activity. An article in the New York Times (April 2 2000) reported that the distance traveled on the nation’s streets and highways was 2.688 trillion miles. An astronomer knows that it’s useless to compare this mileage to so puny a voyage as that to the Moon—over 350 round trips to the sun would equal such a distance, but how far is that? Yet consider that this number of miles reaches over 10% of the distance to the nearest star; it is almost ½ of a light year, a truly astronomical magnitude.
In other words, if we add to U.S. travel mileage that of all the homo vehiculari of the world, the new species in total is traveling at a speed many times faster than light. And of course this is a global process, transforming landscapes in a self-amplifying process: our vehicles enable us to reach further into the countryside, while what we seek in the land becomes located further away. We definitely evolve.
As an urban cyclist who commutes to work I experience this new species in a unique way. On a bicycle it is safest to completely ignore the distinction between driver and machine and to treat them as a unit, an animal that is generally well-behaved if rather stupid, usually slow to react, but quite dangerous if threatened or not watched carefully. It takes too much time to make eye contact with the internal driver-symbiont; it is easier to move within the herd. Yet this is happening to h. vehicularis as well: “driving” is becoming a process of moving with the flow: there is little value in signaling (edging out of the lane is warning enough), the flow itself is a liquid community. (My daughter once asked if the cars liked traffic jams because, like dogs, it gave them a chance to sniff one another’s tailpipes!)
In fact, traffic has itself evolved from a gaseous state where sparse organisms rarely encountered one another to a liquid state where flow—and sometimes turbulence—is the new dynamic. (To continue this analogy, the next state would be solid…) As an alien organism, a cyclist is in an excellent position to observe this new organization.
Although the forms are unique, this process is as old as life, which complexifies in the classical biological manner of integrating old and new technologies. Slugs “invented” shells to become snails and bacteria incorporated other bacteria to acquire movement. Just so, humans, their products, and their environment continue to intertwine, combining protoplasm, hydrocarbons, and minerals—not to mention plastic, glass, and increasing amounts of silicon. Evolution evolves.