We care more about the broken stoplight up the street now than social unrest next year in Chechnya, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists say: Americans are far more likely to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo next year. Yet here we are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades or even centuries. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than a government’s failure to grapple with, say, climate change. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, unlike mussels,
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