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Pebbles in the sand walk of perpetual worries. Darwin loses faith and discovers the monster that created us. Like confessing a murder—but of what or whom? The sagacity and morality of worms. More are born than can survive. Charles Darwin Jr’s death at evolution’s dawning. Understanding mired in ignorance. Which ‘favoured races’?
The test of homeostasis—can Gaia control herself? The faint young Sun paradox. A Milankovitch failure—or a schizoid Earth? A commonwealth of virtue. Life in a country long unchanged. How women are making men in their minds’ image. Why the world is full of lonely giants. Earth’s productivity—a sort of magic pudding? May the African honeyguide frame our thinking.
If we are to prosper, we must have hope, goodwill and understanding.
It may be well to remember how perfect the sense of touch becomes in a man when born blind and deaf, as are worms. If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and of their burrows, as seems to be the case, they deserve to be called intelligent, for they then act in nearly the same manner as would a man under similar circumstances.3
More are born than can survive, and those best fitted to the circumstances into which they are born are most likely to survive and breed.
Darwin, the erstwhile divinity student, was implying that ours is a Godless world, in which every kind of barbarity is condoned by nature. Even today understanding of Darwin’s theory remains mired in confusion and prejudice, and the mangled notions thus created have a malignant impact on society.
heavens’ performance strikes me as a beautiful and illuminating way of describing Darwin’s discovery, for evolution is indeed a sort of performance, one whose theme is the electrochemical process we call life and whose stage is the entire Earth. Funded by the Sun, heavens’ performance has been running for at least 3.5 billion years, and barring cosmic catastrophe will probably run for a billion more.
some versions of social Darwinism continue to be influential. Notions about the ‘survival of the fittest’ are exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s comment in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (by which she presumably meant that each should look after his own).12 They are also evident in the field of neoclassical economics, with its belief that an unregulated market best serves humanity’s interests.
Dawkins argues that natural selection does not act primarily on us as whole organisms, but on each of the roughly twenty-three thousand genes that constitute the blueprint for our bodies. His work raises, in perhaps an even more acute manner than Darwin ever did, the moral dilemma that lies at the heart of Darwinism, for a central pillar of his reasoning is that we and other animals are mere ‘survival machines’ whose sole purpose is to ensure the perpetuation of the genes we carry.
We are far too complex to be comprehended through a reductive dissection of our parts.
We have a tendency to use ideas such as selfish gene theory to justify our own selfish and socially destructive practices. It’s significant, I think, that Dawkins’ book received wide acclaim on the eve of the 1980s—the era when greed was seen as good, and when the free market was worshipped.
As our experience with social Darwinism illustrates, we need to be eternally on guard against the siren song of self-interest if we wish t...
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Genes and ideas share at least one similarity: both reproduce, and the occasional error in reproduction provides variation. Thus, both are potentially ...
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the word mneme (pronounced ‘mnee-m’, and which is derived from the Greek word for memory) to denote a grand unifying theory of reproduction—both physical and mental.
Instead of speaking of a factor of memory, a factor of habit, or a factor of heredity…I have preferred to consider these as manifestations of a common principle, which I shall call the mnemic principle.
Dawkins’ memes are ideas that have a physical reality in our brains. They are transferrable just as genes are, and he suggests that they may be similarly selfish.
It’s often said that there are two fundamental sentiments that decide an election—hope for the future, and fear of it. If hope prevails, we’re likely to elect more generous governments and reach out to the world, but if fear prevails, we elect inward-looking, nationalistic ones.
the most important thing that the Medea hypothesis tells us is that Spencer’s notion of the survival of the fittest should be turned on its head. If Ward is correct, then the fittest are merely engines of self-destruction, which through their success ultimately obliterate both themselves and most of the species they coexist with. Medea is also a deeply dismaying hypothesis, implying as it does that life has no choice: we must either thrive by destroying others or be destroyed ourselves in turn.
while evolution by natural selection is a fearsome mechanism, it has nevertheless created a living, working planet, which includes us, with our love for each other, and our society.
And then there is me. Billions of cells cooperating seamlessly at every moment and a brain made up of a reptilian stem, a middle mammalian portion, and two highly evolved yet relatively poorly connected hemispheres somehow add up to that thing I call me.
Our world is a web of interdependencies woven so tightly it sometimes becomes love.
And from the love that sustains my family to the beetle that writes on the tree, every bit stems from evolution by natural selection.
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.
If a sufficiently superior and arrogant species arose and pursued a winner-take-all philosophy, it would be game over for us all.
the sum of unconscious cooperation of all life that has given form to our living Earth. It’s not that living things choose to cooperate, but that evolution has shaped them to do so. It also shows that the living and non-living parts of Earth are inextricably interwoven.
In the churches and universities, in contrast, Earth was seen as a stage upon which the great moral drama of good and evil was being played out, at the end of which we would be consigned to either heaven or hell. And it was a stage over which we had been granted dominion, to treat as we liked—a view that the magnates of the industrial revolution would exploit for their own ends.
the deep interconnectedness central to the Gaia hypothesis presents a profound challenge to our current economic model, for it explains that there are both limits to growth, and no ‘away’ to throw anything to.
At the most elemental level, we living beings are not even properly things, but rather processes. A dead creature is in every respect identical to a live one, except that the electrochemical processes that motivate it have ceased. Life is a performance—heavens’ performance—which is fed and held in place, and eventually extinguished, by fundamental laws of chemistry and physics.
we are all self-choreographed extravaganzas of electrochemical reaction, and it is in the combined impacts of those reactions, across all of life, that Gaia itself is forged.
if we wish to keep our planet fit for life, some of the most routine and humble things we do must change. For as long as we’ve existed our conception of waste disposal has simply been shifting objectionable matter from one of Earth’s organs to another.
On a small scale, this approach to waste disposal works pretty well. But it most decidedly will not do in the twenty-first century, for the very essence of much pollution derives from human actions that weaken the elemental imbalance between Earth’s organs.
we are in ourselves virtual planets of Gaian complexity.
My body to be carried to Brazil…It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures…and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will
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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.
What we have done is combine cultural evolution with technology in a way that allows us to mimic key aspects of evolution by natural selection, and speed it up ten thousand times. Thus we make spears rather than evolve fangs, and weave clothes rather than grow furry coats; and it’s this ability, which has been with us from the very beginning, that makes humans so formidable.
Adam and Eve, it seems, never met, being separated by ninety thousand years.
In today’s world, social disruption—in particular, conflict flowing from poverty and inequality of opportunity—is the greatest threat to the survival of the last of the megafauna, such as the rhinoceros and elephant.
people blessed with healthy, diverse ecosystems are likely to endure and prosper. I say this because environments with intact keystone species are more productive, and therefore better habitats for humans. When human groups come into conflict, those from superior habitats, who are better fed and sheltered, are likely to prevail.
man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.74
Perhaps we are destined to be either Medean or Gaian and never anything in between, and if so Fromm’s biophilia describes our only pathway to survival, which is towards a future in which human and environmental health are inextricably linked.
When viewed in the fullness of geological time, humanity’s rise from hunter-gatherer societies to twenty-first-century civilisation appears instantaneous, so swift that a million years from now little or no evidence of it will remain in the geological record.
we’ve been very good at living as if our family, our clan or our nation is the only truly civilised and ‘proper’ group of people on Earth, and believing this has enabled us to kill and rob and maim each other without seeing that we are thus damaging ourselves. Nothing is as challenging to such a belief 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.
They learned also how to select only the finest, most tractable males to father the next generation, and so they shaped dogs, cats, cattle and sheep—even creatures whose anatomy was not so conveniently arranged—into what they are today. We in effect became the most powerful of evolutionary forces, bending natural selection to our own ends, and so creating creatures the likes of which had never existed before and which could survive only in a miniature ecosystem of our own making.
while agricultural societies are powerful, they are composed almost entirely of incompetent individuals.
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.
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations…generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment…
while we sit in our air-conditioned homes and eat, drink and make merry like cattle in a feedlot without the slightest thought about the consequences of our consumption of water, food and energy, we only hasten the destruction—in the long term—of our kind.
once our voluntary surrender to the competencies of others has gone so far, we find that we simply cannot exist outside a civilisation. The division of labour thrives where there is peace and security, and is imperilled where crime and civil strife reign.
the gun-toting US, which has the highest homicide rate in the developed world (around 5.4 per hundred thousand per year).96
Only in the twentieth century has democracy lived up to its name, encompassing all adult members of a society. And as it has done so it has provided a more powerful superorganismic glue than any before—self-interest. That’s because the rights of the individual are inextricably bound up with the democratic process, and those rights include protections for those wishing to keep the benefits of their labour. Looking at the spread of democracy in the modern world, it’s tempting to think that it has now found the strength to resist tyranny.
