Kevin Rigley 22 March 2026

James Shapiro is right to say that neo-Darwinism is too passive. The old orthodoxy has always depended on a strangely lifeless picture of life: random mutations drift upward from below, selection trims the waste, and complexity somehow appears as if by patient statistical accident. Shapiro is right to revolt against that story. Organisms are not dead matter waiting to be sculpted. Cells repair, restructure, transpose, edit, and reorganise. Life is active. But Shapiro’s correction still does not go far enough, because it risks replacing one simplification with another. Neo-Darwinism made the organism too passive; Shapiro makes it too central. In both cases, the environment is treated as though it were either a static filter or a passive stage. It is neither.

Darwin’s deepest insight was never really about genes. It was about persistence. The environment selects what persists. That remains true. But humans have introduced a dangerous novelty into that equation: through metacognition, language, institutions, and technology, we do not merely adapt to environments — we build them. And once we build them, those environments begin selecting back. That is the point the modern argument keeps missing. The real evolutionary drama is no longer just in mutation, nor even in biological self-modification. It is in the recursive loop by which human minds alter the conditions of development, and those altered conditions determine which traits can now endure.

This is why the Anthropocene matters far beyond climate or pollution. It is not just an environmental age; it is a selection age. We have changed food, sleep, speed, schooling, sensory load, family structure, stress rhythms, and social expectations. We have saturated childhood with novelty while stripping away recovery. We have created developmental ecologies unlike any in human history, then pretended to be surprised when different forms of cognition begin to stabilise within them. Rising divergence in neurotype is not simply a story of better diagnosis, nor of hidden genes finally being revealed. It is also the mark of an environment that has been radically rewritten. If neurotypes are emergent, then the modern world is not merely detecting them — it is helping select what can persist.

This is where both Shapiro and neo-Darwinism fail in different ways. One says evolution is driven by random variation, the other says it is driven by self-modifying organisms. But both understate the most disturbing truth: humans have made selection recursive. We have internalised Darwinian pressure into our own systems of living. We now engineer the developmental conditions that determine what kinds of minds, bodies, thresholds, and vulnerabilities are more likely to endure. The selector is no longer “nature” out there. It is the world we have built around ourselves.

That means the old comfort of blaming genes, or even praising biological creativity, is no longer enough. The real question is harsher. What kind of environment are we making, and what kind of human being does it reward with persistence? Until we ask that, we will keep telling flattering stories about evolution while ignoring the fact that we are now among its chief instruments. We have not escaped Darwin. We have become one of his mechanisms.