The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World

by Charles C. Mann

In the last few centuries, such profound changes have occurred repeatedly. Another, possibly even bigger example: since the beginning of our species, almost every known society has been based on the subjugation of women by men.

Every whit as profound is the decline in violence. Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, societies mustered labor for the fields and controlled harvest surpluses by organizing themselves into states and empires. These promptly revealed an astonishing appetite for war.

The statistic is sobering: Germany lost a greater percentage of its people to violence in the seventeenth century than in the twentieth, despite the intervening advances in the technology of slaughter, despite being governed for more than a decade by maniacs who systematically murdered millions of their fellow citizens.

Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a still greater transformation, to Margulis’s way of thinking, because we would be pushing against Nature itself. Success would be unprecedented, biologically speaking. It would be a reverse Copernican Revolution, showing that humankind is exempt from natural processes that govern all other species.

Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, but not have the cultural resources to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to Earth. To have the potential but to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish.