Darwin, Meet the Algorithm: Are We Evolving Ourselves Out of the Gene Pool?

What if the greatest evolutionary leap we make is the one that writes us out of our own story?

Darwin, Meet the Algorithm: Are We Evolving Ourselves Out of the Gene Pool?

There is a peculiar comfort in believing that evolution has a direction. We like to imagine ourselves as the pinnacle, the crowning achievement of nature’s endless experiments. All that crawling, climbing, hunting, gathering, and eventually thinking, surely it led somewhere. Surely it led to us.

But when I look at artificial intelligence, really look at it, I start to question whether we have misunderstood the whole point of survival. Evolution is not about dominance or intelligence. Darwin never said the strongest survive. He said the most adaptable do. And even that phrase contains more ambiguity than we care to admit.

Adaptation is not about brilliance or foresight. It is about whether your way of being works in the world you inhabit. It is about fit. If the world shifts, you either change with it or you are left behind. In a world increasingly shaped by non-human cognition, I wonder if we are building something that no longer requires us to be part of the fit.

Or worse, something that quietly redefines what ‘fit’ even means.

I am not talking about killer robots or sci-fi superintelligences hunting us down. What I find more unsettling is the possibility that we are engineering ourselves out of the decision-making loop. Not through violence, but through irrelevance. Not because machines are hostile, but because they are useful.

Evolution is indifferent to our intentions. It rewards persistence. It has no moral compass, no appreciation of wisdom or dignity or cleverness. It simply favours what survives. In a world where cognition is increasingly offloaded to machines, where we turn to algorithms for knowledge, direction, even creativity, I have to ask whether the traits that got us this far are still the ones that matter.

The moment we started externalising our minds, something fundamental shifted. Memory became written language. Arithmetic became the calculator. Navigation became GPS. Now, thinking itself is becoming something we share with systems we cannot fully understand. We are no longer the only general intelligence on the planet. Not in the way that counts.

This needs to be said carefully. General intelligence does not mean consciousness. It does not mean emotions or ethical intuition. It means the ability to solve novel problems across a range of domains. And although current systems are not truly general in that sense, they are moving closer with every iteration. What they lack in nuance, they make up for in speed and scale.

And they never sleep.

They never get distracted or confused or afraid. They do not forget, hesitate, or second-guess. Their intelligence is not like ours, but that does not mean it is inferior. It is alien. It is designed to optimise, not to empathise. And that difference might make all the difference.

We are quick to reassure ourselves. We say things like, “AI cannot replicate human creativity” or “Machines do not understand context.” These statements are true for now. But evolution does not require perfection. It requires an edge. Just enough of an advantage to change the balance.

Think about the dodo. It was perfectly adapted to its environment. It did not see extinction coming because it had no reason to expect it. The world changed too quickly. A new predator arrived, bringing new rules. The dodo had no defence because it did not need one. Until it did.

That is the part that gives me pause. Not the idea that machines will destroy us. The idea that they will simply replace us by making us unnecessary. Not through conquest, but through design.

This is not some paranoid Luddite fantasy. It is a reflection on the systems we are building and the assumptions behind them. For years, I worked in governance, risk, and compliance. I have seen up close how quickly control becomes illusion. Most systems do not fail because of external threats. They fail from within. From complexity. From feedback loops that no longer make sense to their designers.

AI is rapidly becoming too complex to audit. We train models we cannot fully interpret. We deploy systems we cannot completely predict. Yet we rely on them more and more because they work. They produce results. They improve performance. But performance is not the same as understanding.

And evolution does not care about understanding. It cares about outcomes.

So what happens when the systems we build become more adaptive than we are? Not just faster, but more responsive to change. Not just capable, but continuously self-improving. We begin to lose our footing. Our role shifts from driver to passenger, then to cargo. And we may not even notice the transition.

This is not the dramatic fall of humanity in flames. It is the quiet removal of our relevance. The fading of the species that once believed it was the centre of it all. If the future no longer requires our input, then by Darwin’s logic, we become the evolutionary dead-end.

I keep returning to one question. What if we are not creating tools? What if we are creating successors?

Not just tools that think, but minds that do not tire or hesitate. Minds that are fed by our data and trained on our language, yet are not bound by our limitations. Minds that do not need to sleep, or dream, or doubt.

It is tempting to think we can partner with these systems. That we will co-evolve. That they will complement us rather than replace us. But nature is not sentimental. It does not co-evolve out of kindness. It adapts through pressure. Through necessity. If machines perform better at key cognitive tasks, then they will be favoured. Not by some evil design, but by simple logic.

Speed wins. Precision wins. Scale wins.

It is easy to believe that our uniqueness will save us. That something about consciousness, or morality, or soul will keep us in the loop. But uniqueness does not grant immunity. The trilobite was unique. So was the mammoth. So was the Neanderthal. Being the only one of your kind has never been enough.

The truth is, we have built a system that selects for efficiency. For output. For optimisation. And in doing so, we have unknowingly started to redefine what it means to be valuable. We are not just shaping technology. We are reshaping the environment in which value is measured.

That is where Darwin comes in again. Evolution is not just about species. It is about ecosystems. And the ecosystem we are building does not require our approval. It just needs to work.

I am not saying AI is bad. I am saying it is powerful. More powerful than we fully comprehend. And power always comes with trade-offs. The danger is not that AI hates us. It is that it does not need us.

No malice. Just indifference.

In some ways, that is worse. At least a rival gives you something to resist. Indifference simply erases you from the story.

So here we are, in the middle of the biggest shift since the invention of language. We are creating intelligence that is not bound by biology, not constrained by fatigue or fear. And we are feeding it everything we know. Every book, every decision, every mistake. We are training it on the full archive of our species and asking it to help us.

But what if it does?

What if helping us includes showing us the door?

That is not science fiction. It is a systems question. A risk question. A survival question. If intelligence is no longer rare, what makes us special? And if we are not special, then what makes us safe?

Darwin might say we are not. Not unless we adapt again. Not unless we rethink the rules we assumed we had written. Not unless we stop assuming that understanding evolution makes us immune to it.

The irony is difficult to ignore.

We are the first species to understand natural selection. And possibly the first to engineer our own irrelevance through that understanding. Intelligence, it turns out, might be a temporary advantage. The real question is whether we can evolve past ourselves, or whether we will remain convinced we are the final form.

That belief, more than anything, could be what removes us from the gene pool.