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it’s not so much our technology, but what we believe, that will determine our fate.
Darwin himself hardly ever used the word, preferring ‘descent with modification’.
Our world is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.
If competition is evolution’s motive
force, then the cooperative world is its legacy. And legacies are important, for they can endure long after the force that created them ceases to be.
Alfred Russel Wallace, I believe, was the first modern scientist to comprehend how essential cooperation is to our survival.
I believe that coevolution, in both a biological and a cultural sense, is critical to our hopes for sustainability. Indeed, I think that our environmental problems ultimately stem from having escaped coevolution’s grip, for we humans have a gypsy history, and as we’ve spread across the globe we’ve broken free of environmental constraint and destroyed many coevolutionary bonds that lie at the heart of productive ecosystems.
Studies of the Y-chromosome reveal that all people alive today are descended from a single male who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago.55 This genetic Adam, it’s reasonable to deduce, was dark-skinned, tall, slender, and possessed epicanthi, the folds over the corner of the eyes commonly seen in people from Asia.
Y-chromosome studies also reveal that it’s only over the last ten thousand years that humans from outside Africa were able to migrate back into their ancestral homeland, presumably because they had developed agriculture and animal husbandry.
as meeting the ‘other’ on an equal footing. There’s as much diversity of thought, mannerism and emotion in a small New Guinean village as there is in the entire world, and in this commonality lies the foundations of our universal human civilisation, as well as its hopes for a future. The
glue that holds complex superorganisms together is not genetic, but social—yet it is enhanced by a sufficiently narrow genetic base to enable universal understanding.
therein lies a paradox—one which is shared with the ants—that while agricultural societies are powerful, they are composed almost entirely of incompetent individuals.
This tendency towards civilised imbecility has left its physical mark on us. It’s a fact that every member of the mini-ecosystems we have created has lost much brain matter. For goats and pigs it’s around a third when compared to their wild ancestors. For horses, dogs and
cats it may be a little less.88 But, most surprising of all, humans have also lost brain mass. One study estimates that men have lost around 10 per cent, and women 14 per cent of their brain mass when compared to ice-age ancestors.89 It’s easy to see why.
If you doubt how far
our civilisation has turned us into helpless, self-domesticated livestock, just look at the world around you. Does it seem to have lost its commonsense? It frequently seems so to me. And how often does a visionary leader arise among us? So few are truly wise that it seems a whole generation can pass without such a presence.
The division of labour delivers one great good in that it provides the glue for
our civilisation. It is the glue of trade, a process which makes both parties wealthier than they were before, and the force it must supplant is that of the warrior with an imperative simply to take.
to sup from the table of labours divided is so valuable that it’s even worth risking death for.
And once our voluntary surrender to the competencies of others has gone so far, we find that we simply cannot exist outside a civilisation.
In advanced human societies internal strife is suppressed by government, which reserves to itself the right to violence.
Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.101
Overall, it’s been estimated that diseases such as smallpox killed between 90 and 95 per cent of the population of the New World.115
There may be as many as 4.7 million women with elevated levels of mercury, which puts 322,000 newborns at risk of mercury-related brain damage each year.
A 2007 study across nine countries revealed a ‘very strong’ correlation between high lead levels in preschool children and subsequent crime rates, with murder showing a particularly strong correlation with the more severe cases of childhood
lead poisoning.
Over the last two hundred years, humans have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by a whopping 30 per cent.
the Medea hypothesis, which states that life itself periodically brings about the destruction of life, and that long-term ecological stability is impossible.
With cheap and convenient contraception widely available,
the mnemes of a large portion of humanity have immense power, and it seems that they’ve engineered a profound reversal of evolutionary principle as it’s understood in brutal Neo-Darwinian terms. At its heart the demographic transition represents the triumph of the individual against the tyranny of the selfish gene.
A stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers makes a sustainable future possible, and if we achieve it then Wallace’s vision of a perfection of t...
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At its most extreme, it manifests with mnemes expressed in ideas like ‘I’ve nothing to lose’ or ‘I’ve no future’. While these sentiments may lead to a sort of moral paralysis, our genes do not give up. Instead, in their search for immortality, they seek to squeeze as much as possible out of us before we
crash and burn. And that can be very bad for us, our society and our planet.
we hate losing money more than we enjoy gaining it—an
important insight for those promoting efficient use of resources, for example.
It seems that, as our prospects diminish, the power of our selfish genes over our mnemes increases.
you’re concerned about our future, it’s not just desirable that we eradicate poverty in the developing world, create more equal societies and never let ourselves fight another war; it’s imperative, for the discount factor tells us that failure to do so may cost us the Earth.
Brains are notoriously selfish organs. They give themselves priority access to everything they require—from blood-flow to warmth, nutrients and oxygen. During times of bodily stress, our brains will shut down one organ after
another, even to the point of damaging them—before depriving themselves. Brains are also greedy. They make up just 2 per cent of our body weight, yet take 20 per cent of the energy we use.
Economists who argue that we should apply a high discount rate to the analysis of spending on climate change are essentially arguing that it’s best to leave future generations to fend for themselves,
I am certain of one thing—if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.
