We were talking about the next species to come. The species after Homo sapiens. She said she hoped its defining characteristic would be a new sixth sense. And when I asked her what sense that might be she said, “A sense of guilt.”

I formulated the idea that there already were members of the next species living here on our little planet. After all, it’s not always the case that a new species pops suddenly and distinctly into its new existence precisely at the time when the old dies out. We now know that both can survive, at least for a while, along different evolutionary paths. I thought of all the good things good people are doing against the tide of so much bad. And so I said, “Maybe there are already some of them amongst us. Some of the next species who have this intuitive sixth sense of guilt of which you speak.”

And she smiled with that melancholy blue-eyed smile of a beautiful vegetarian cat-rescuing pacifist and answered, “Yes. Perhaps a relative few.”

I wanted to believe that the current species could develop, en masse, this sixth sense of which she spoke—this sensitivity to how one living organism affects another’s sole chance at life and living, a deeper appreciation for the profundity of nature at is best, a longing for fairness and equality in a decidedly unjust world. But the televised jabber of the nightly news interrupted the formation of my thought, the scenes of disparity and avarice and rampant destruction undermining the premise before it was fully laid. And I recalled the simple logic of that aspect of the theory that says that more often than not, when evolutionary branches sprout new offshoots, only one or the other survives. “Then it’s probably only a question of time,” I said over the blaring shock of the broadcasted news. “A question of time before the new humanoid species or the old predominates and the fate of the world is determined.”

And she said, “Yes. It makes me feel guilty just to think about it.”