Are We Measuring Human Evolution Wrong?

Whenever we speak of evolution, we almost instinctively think of biology. A Darwinian idea of natural selection, of bodies adapting over millions of years, or brains becoming increasingly sophisticated. I profess a different parameter to recognise or gauge evolution— those capacities that make us distinctly human.

Science and psychology tell us how our brains develop and how our cognition matures. We can measure intelligence, memory, physical strength and even emotional regulation with increasing accuracy.

But have we overlooked a far more fundamental aspect of our selves as humans? How do we measure the evolution of our humanness?

Our society seems to have settled on certain answers, measured by wealth, intelligence, influence, education, achievement and power. These have become the visible markers of development.

But all this, I argue, neither proves nor disproves human development. They tell us something about a person, about the development of faculties, about superiority or inferiority. They stand in isolation and maybe have traits that inspire a generation. But they do not have a binding force that brings about a connection quite instinctively.

Let me place my thoughts like this, to represent that binding force: a forest does not wake up every morning trying to become greener. It simply expresses its nature. Its silence, wildness and abundance, its quiet beauty — these are not achievements; they are expressions of what it already is. And we are instantly attracted to it, almost feel like we are not separate from it.

So too a flower does not compete to become beautiful. It unfolds. In doing so, it attracts without effort. The sky does not strive to become vast. Vastness is simply its nature. The innocence of a child is no different. A baby does not learn how to be innocent. That innocence is intrinsic. It is precisely that effortless quality that draws us towards it. A mother's bond with her child is not built upon logic or social expectation. Before there is language, before there is duty, there is an instinctive connection.

Nature seems to possess this mysterious quality everywhere. Its greatest expressions do not arise from becoming something else. They arise from completely being what they already are.

If every form in nature is most beautiful when it fully expresses its intrinsic nature, what is the intrinsic nature of a human being? Perhaps it is the capacity to welcome another life as though it were not entirely separate from our own. I don't say this simply because it feels poetic — I say it because empathy, of all our capacities, is the one that actually dissolves the very separation the other markers leave untouched. Intelligence can be hoarded. Wealth can be hoarded. Even influence, in its own way, is something we hold apart from others. Empathy cannot be hoarded. The moment it is real, someone else's inner world has already entered ours.

I believe that this expansion and connectedness begins with the development of empathy, and the degree to which empathy manifests within us is one of the clearest measures of our evolution — not in the Darwinian sense, but in the evolution of our humanness, our consciousness, and our capacity to live beyond the confines of the self. Empathy is not merely a learned social skill, but an innate human potential that, when uncovered, has the same effortless quality as beauty in nature. It is not something we develop through evolution the way we develop wealth or intelligence or power, but something we explore, because it was always there in us.

Psychology tells us that we all begin life from a deeply egocentric perspective. This is not a flaw; it is simply the nature of early development. The infant experiences the world almost entirely in relation to itself. Gradually, as the brain matures, something remarkable begins to happen. We become capable of recognising that another person has an inner world that is every bit as real as our own.

To me, that is one of the most extraordinary developments a human being undergoes. The question is whether this development continues.

Or whether many of us simply grow older. We chase our desires, dreams and ambitions. We marry and raise children, care for ageing parents, fulfil responsibilities. We sacrifice.

But how much of this comes from genuinely understanding another person's experience, and how much comes simply from playing the roles society has assigned to us? A mother is expected to sacrifice. A father is expected to provide. A child is expected to obey. We perform these roles because they are deeply woven into our culture. But fulfilling a role is not necessarily the same as seeing another as a human being.

There are people of extraordinary intelligence who remain emotionally inaccessible to those closest to them. There are immensely successful people who have mastered the art of building businesses but never quite learned how to enter another person's experience. And there are people with very little, by society's standards, who possess an extraordinary sensitivity towards those around them. My point is not that wealth or success diminish empathy, nor that poverty somehow produces it. External success and inner development are not always travelling in the same direction.

Modern psychology suggests that mature development involves a gradual movement away from egocentrism. Our ability to take another person's perspective increases. Our moral concern expands beyond ourselves. We become capable of relating to experiences that are not our own. Our behaviour becomes increasingly cooperative and less centred exclusively around personal gain. Another person's inner experience becomes psychologically real to us.

An objection often raised is that empathy directed toward one individual or one group can sometimes blind us to unintended consequences for a larger population. But we are talking of something deeper here — like expanding our sense of limited-ness, where we start taking decisions guided by empathy, not forcefully driven by it. Empathy is often confused with agreement or indiscriminate kindness. It is neither. Empathy does not tell us what decision to make. It merely ensures that, before making it, another person's experience has become part of our field of awareness.

Perhaps the day another person's experience becomes psychologically real to me is the day something profoundly human begins to evolve. I am not speaking about becoming naïve, self-sacrificing or incapable of setting boundaries.

I am speaking about something much simpler: the gradual expansion of the boundaries of the self. A life that begins with "me" slowly grows to include "you." Then "us." Perhaps, eventually, all of humanity.

Empathy is evidence that the boundaries of the self have expanded beyond egocentrism. Maybe this is the evolution we rarely acknowledge, because it cannot be measured by income, qualifications, popularity or influence. It reveals itself only in the extent to which another person's experience ceases to be separate from our own.

I do not say empathy is the final stage of human development, but it surely is the first, according to me. I believe there may be many stages beyond it. But I do believe it marks a profound threshold. Because until another person's inner world becomes as real to me as my own, I remain confined within the smallest version of myself.

Maybe we have been measuring human evolution using the wrong instruments all along. I'd like for us as a society to explore this while we are racing headlong into technological advancement, and try not to forget what we are intrinsically meant to be — like that flower, that child, that forest.