From the day that the first homo sapien walked upright, he was forced to add wrinkles to the gray matter in his skull.  Without his intellect, he would have been easy pickin’s for the animals: those with which he competed for food, those he hunted, and those who hunted him.  During the Stone Age, the compulsion to survive drove man into caves for protection; it also obliged him to form clans, for there was safety in numbers.

As man evolved during the Iron Age, he discovered ore in the caverns.  From metal, he fashioned a number of tools, including those that allowed him to till the earth.  Crops gave him a stationary food source, and thus, a reason to establish villages.  Animals gravitated toward the villages for food and warmth, and in return, were domesticated.  Dogs were welcomed as protectors and hunting companions; cats, though never quite domesticated, guarded granaries against rodents carrying disease.  Ungulates were raised as a source of meat and a mode of transportation.

In time, some villages grew into mighty kingdoms.  The Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Chinese empires produced structures and inventions that stand as testimony to man’s collective intellect.  These include Egypt’s pyramids that cannot, to this very day, be duplicated by our finest engineers and mathematicians, and ingenious Roman plumbing systems whose designs have barely been altered to create our own state-of-the-art systems.

As man’s knowledge burgeoned, he relied less upon the animals for his needs and more upon the fruits of his knowledge.  For centuries, horses and beasts of burden were critical for transporting people and commodities as well as working the soil.  Now, automobiles, planes, trains, buses, trucks, and tractors have replaced the four-legged creatures.  Is man the next creature to be replaced, and by his own hands? 

Automobile factories utilize robots to build cars while humans are relegated do menial tasks.   Another invention of man’s — organized labor — has seen to that.  Man now competes with machines that don’t require coffee breaks, healthcare, vacations, sick leave, or wages.  It’s a manufacturer’s dream!  The microprocessor has replaced the engineer who invented it, because it can think and regenerate itself.

Self-evident is the truth that humans become products of their environments.  This fact, as well as the great body of evidence that supports Darwin’s theory stating that higher life forms are always evolving, leaves me scratching my head, wondering what our next phase of development will bring.   Will man evolve into a machine into order to compete with machinery?  Or will we simply become obsolete, like the Pony Express?