Why do we falsely conflate progress with evolution?

The conflation of technology with biology is a complex false extrapolation coming from the most basic instinct, the fear of death, without which we would not last very long. In other words the fear of death is the most basic level of survival instinct. 

But it is important to remember instinct is the non-cognitive part of the brain, and we do not have direct access to it. We don't have to think about making our heart beat, it just does. Multiply that times a zillion to get some notion of the complexity of biology, and the "biological brain", or instinct, that drives all life on the only biological planet we are aware of.

But we may be only dimly aware of it moment to moment when we stop to consider the damage we are doing to biological diversity, here, on the only biosphere we are aware of. And we do this basically unconsciously, in the sense we are "driven" by instinct. So this basic "drive force" is instinct, not reason. The best we can do is to try and understand this unconscious "drive force" using our capacity for reason.

And it's important to understand how we conflate progress with evolution in order to understand human potentials and limitations.

It's also important to understand that in this day of seemingly limitless human potential we also seem to have a pretty dim understanding of human limitation.

Remember Dirty Harry? And the famous line, "Man's got to understand his limitations."

https://youtu.be/uki4lrLzRaU

The problem with not understanding limitation is one is apt to confuse fiction with reality. We might, for example, go picking fights that will get us killed. How many action movies are based on the idea of limitlessness? All of them. Science fiction movies? Yep, them too.

Now let's spend a few moments considering the difference between evolution, or biology, and progress, or technology.

Big brain humans, sapiens, arrived after millions of years of evolution from our ape ancestors, about 150,000 years ago. Technology progressed slowly with the creation of crude hunter gathering tools from 150,000 years ago until agriculture and civilization began, about 10,000 years ago. At that point technological progress began speeding up a bit. So technological progress was glacially slow the first 140,000 years of us sapiens on the planet, then a bit faster with the onset of agriculture.

But then, with the onset of the industrial revolution, about 230 years ago, the progress curve literally went vertical.

Let's also make note of an important part of understanding human limits: from the point we sapiens first appeared 150,000 years ago to now there has been very little if any evolution in our physiology or brain capacity. 

It is said if a hunter gatherer mother could magically transport her baby into a current modern family, as that baby grew into an adult there would be no distinguishable difference between 150,000 years ago human and current human. Human capacities, physiology and brain size, are the same.

Biological evolution is very (very) slow, but technological progress has been a rocket ride.

There are two types of growth curves, logarithmic and exponential:

The problem with exponential growth progressions is they have a nasty habit of collapsing at some point. The reason is the rate of progression cannot be maintained. If you look at the exponential curve just above you see for that for the rate of growth to continue it would have to start curving backwards at some point, which is impossible because time does not go backward (except in science fiction). 

And it can't turn into a vertical because that would mean all future progress would happen right now! Again, a "time" impossibility (except in science fiction).

Are you beginning to see why science fiction is so compelling. It's a mythology that makes us limitless, which also confers immortality, where a single individual biological life is never ended by mortality, or anything else.

But, it is impossible because biology is created by "we know not what". In the science fiction world we may be able to take command of biology at some point. Cool, no more destruction of the ecology, we would simply re-engineer biology to do what we want. And what is that? To cut to the chase, primarily, to live forever. 

An ironic paradox of impossibility.

To look at it another way we humans are afraid of biology (in an example of the instinctual and unconscious fear of death) because we ourselves are 100% biological (and how ironic is it that we are afraid of what we are completely?) Technological replacements of damaged biological body parts with titanium (knees hips or whatever) does not change the fact we are 100% biological, to think it does is a science fiction.

And to think we can take command of biology will prove to be another science fiction, but one that probably won't be broadly realized as such until we have continued to do more damage to global biology, and ourselves.

Health can only be acquired by learning, accepting, and following the laws of nature, which are not all that complex. And the attempt to re-write the laws of nature will backfire, perhaps precipitously.

The great Leonard Cohen wrote and sang "there ain't no cure for love", an oblique reference to the power of biology to "drive" us in ways we may sometimes wish we did not have to go.

https://youtu.be/gM7vULqs31Q

Even if so, it's not a completely horrible idea to live in actual reality, to the extent possible.

So, to sum up, we have a mostly unconscious wish (drive) for immorality which "plays out" in the conflation of biology with technology. Wishful thinking wants to think that with tech biology can become completely malleable to us. This ignores that biology is bigger than us, that we are created solely by biology, that we are it and only it, and completely "bounded" by it.

And technology is equal parts construction and destruction. The mythology of our day is the destructivity of technology is de minimis and the constructively of tech is de maximus.

Good luck to all us sapiens, it would seem that we could use some right about now. Let us remember also the most beautiful thing extant in our world is biology, and we are that.