A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century III

The remainder of the book was not particularly stunning to me, though I do think that the backgrounds and views of Brooks and Agosta are among the most suitable ones for this particular subject. One of my concerns with the press, voters, political leaders and public policy is that when environmental changes occur, from a scientific standpoint, the best solutions may take decades to implement simply because the belief systems held by the public are not amenable to rapid adjustment. The authors repeat the idea that I mentioned earlier while discussing the essay Biological Extinction, that GDP is not the appropriate measure to use when conditions such as climate change and mass extinctions are occurring. At the moment, the developed world is obsessed with business growth and military power, with the political leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere focusing on the economic advancement of their countries while ignoring significant changes in their habitats that could result in their deaths. It doesn't help that, from a biological standpoint, we are just a current element in the biosphere, and that our belief systems, which may have had some value thousands of years ago, do not necessarily today. Men and women who are obsessed with becoming rich and famous are, in the end, just large mammals who, like other mammals, just happen to be alive now. As Brooks and Agosta aptly point out, we are a transient part of the biosphere, which is far more resilient than any existing species; it will be around long after we're gone. The biosphere itself can't survive forever and will disappear within about five billion years. I might add that if some of the tech bros think that they can circumvent death by transforming themselves into electronic or other entities, it is my view that any departure from our familiar lives as organisms is itself a kind of death.

Brooks and Agosta do not support conventional conservation measures and have their own ideas:

...nature is not fragile. It is robust because it copes with change by changing. The notion of a delicately balanced nature is antithetical to an evolutionary system. In evolution, change is the fundamental mechanism that allows living systems to persist. The biosphere is dynamic, not static, and resilient, not brittle. Most biologists readily accept this, recognizing that any appearance of stasis in nature is an illusion. Still, the message seems to have been missed by much of conservation biology, including researchers and policy makers, and the public, which looks to conservation biology for insight and understanding. This is exemplified by two misconceptions that permeate conservation efforts. The Gaia hypothesis represents the idea that the biosphere acts as a set of coordinated subsystems working to maintain a system-level homeostasis—that mythic balance of nature. This reinforces the idea that without human interference, the biosphere would somehow exist in a timeless, unchanging state of perfection. From this emerges such nonevolutionary ideas as "returning nature to the way it was"—the rewilding of the planet typically inspired by a nostalgia for idyllic nature in a past state of "perfect balance" that never actually existed. The butterfly effect is another popular metaphor for describing the biosphere. It rests on the common misconception that ecosystems are so delicate, the extinction of even one species can cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Meteorologist Edward Lorenz proposed the metaphor in 1972 as a thought experiment in the context of predicting the weather. The idea is that small changes in one part of the system—like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil—could have large effects on the whole system—such as causing a tornado in Texas. The butterfly effect metaphor was co-opted by environmentalists as a true description of the delicate balance of nature. It represents a dire warning about the loss of any species, and the need to urgently maintain nature in its current or even some previous state. Yet nature is a complex evolutionary system, so the butterfly effect is an extremely poor metaphor to portray it.

The authors also question the ideas presented by E.O. Wilson in Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life. They don't go into much detail, but they seem to disapprove of it. Though I think that it is possible that Wilson's idea, i.e. making about half of the planet a wilderness, could work in terms of preserving biodiversity, as a practical matter it would be extremely difficult to implement. And humans might continue to damage the environment. Brooks and Agosta seem to draw heavily from their experiences at the Área de Conservación Guanacaste in Costa Rica, which they consider to be "a spectacularly successful experiment in growing an evolutionary commons and avoiding neoprotectionist approaches to conservation." Thus, their recommendations revolve around the development of human habitats in rural locations where the local ecosystems can be healthy while simultaneously supporting humans who are following sustainable practices. Drawing from history and current events, they consider cities unsustainable. Besides the fact that cities tend to make people less cooperative, they are subject to military attack (Gaza, Beirut, Tehran and Kyiv). Above all, large cities generally have unstable ecosystems, and the ones in coastal regions may soon flood due to climate change.

Actually, I was already following their recommendations without having read the book. This is easy to do if you de-civilize yourself a little and follow your hunter-gatherer instincts. The book itself is hardly a textbook on survival practices for the Anthropocene, but I think that it is a good starting point. I have no difficulty imagining a world governed by AI-assisted field biologists.

A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century II

The middle section of the book covers human history over the last 11,500 years. This is an immense timeframe as far as humans are concerned, and I am attempting to incorporate the information included here with what I already knew. We don't know much detail about anything that occurred over 5000 years ago, but the main change was the development of agriculture. This is widely seen to be the underlying cause of changes from the nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles that had facilitated the survival of humans during the last Ice Age. Agriculture led to sedentary lifestyles that gradually permitted the development of small towns and, eventually, cities. One of the strengths of humans as nomadic organisms was their ability to just move on whenever conditions became undesirable at a particular location. With the sedentary lifestyles that were facilitated by ample local food supplies, new risks emerged. One was the development and spread of new diseases. Another was the need to protect property. Besides local theft and other crimes, the risk of outright invasion gradually increased, and when a city or town was invaded, the local inhabitants often had nowhere to go. Many ancient towns and cities were abandoned, and, over the centuries, this problem has not been solved. Imagine yourself as an inhabitant of the Gaza Strip today.

There were also social changes that occurred during this period, and it would appear that societies gradually became less egalitarian. Among hunter-gatherers, it seems that women and men were treated equally, and that women may even have held positions of authority. By the time of the Bronze Age, about 6000 years ago, improved weaponry seems to have precipitated the growth of patriarchal societies and increases in violence and wars. In many parts of the world, there was a gradual shift from polytheism to monotheism. Not coincidentally, the monotheistic religions tend to be built around all-powerful male gods. The best example that I know of regarding the evolution of warlike behavior is the Yamnaya culture, which dates from the Bronze Age. They were technologically advanced for the time, and, starting in Western Asia, moved to Europe and Northern India, with the men spreading their Y-chromosomes everywhere they went. When they arrived in new regions, presumably they killed the local men. They were also the originators of the Indo-European languages, which are now spoken by nearly half the people on earth. As I wrote earlier, the Yamnaya may have been the ancestors of both the ancient Greeks and the Vikings. It is possible that Yamnaya behavior was behind the Trojan War 3000 years ago and the Viking invasions from 793 AD to 1066 AD. The Vikings liked to travel, and they discovered North America nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus. As time passed, male violence seemed to increase everywhere. This can be seen in the building of large barriers designed to keep out invaders. The Great Wall of China was built about 2000 years ago. Hadrian's Wall was built in 122 AD by the Romans to keep Picts out of England. Offa's Dyke was built in about 757 AD to keep the Welsh out of Mercia, which is now the English Midlands. As far as gene-spreading goes, because of a unique feature of his Y-chromosome, Genghis Khan, who died in 1227 AD, is thought to have 16 million male descendants. Since he was Mongolian, you can't simply say that gene-spreading occurred only in Western Asia, Europe and Northern India. In conjunction with the general increase in violent behavior, it should also be noted that cooperation gradually declined when H. sapiens increasingly encountered people who were not part of their group.

While male violence is a danger of modern life, it pales in comparison to the negative effects of human population growth. 6000 years ago, the world population was only about 7 million. 3000 years ago it was only about 50 million. In about 1800 it first reached 1 billion. By 2075, it is projected to be over 9 billion. It is the collective behavior of modern H. sapiens that has caused the Anthropocene era. This is an era of existential risk for us, though we have the tools available to avert our extinction or near-extinction. In the remaining third of the book, Brooks and Agosta will provide their solutions.

A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for The Twenty-First Century I

I've been reading this 2024 book by Daniel R. Brooks and Salvatore J. Agosta. Because it covers themes that I've discussed on this blog many times, rather than provide a detailed discussion of the book, I'm only going to mention things that interest me now. In my readings, I've come to feel that field biologists such as Brooks and Agosta are the best qualified to write books concerning how we should think about our context as organisms on Earth. Frankly, at this point I'm quite tired of scientists who come up with cute mathematical formulas that describe biological events, and then go on to be lauded as the latest scientific geniuses; my feeling is that a full understanding of biological events is well beyond human cognition. This academic phenomenon, I think, is related to Sabine Hossenfelder's dislike of string theory in physics. Mathematics, while obviously a valuable tool in the sciences, has also become a shortcut to professional advancement in the field of biology. Underlying this phenomenon is the prestige that was conferred to physicists such as Albert Einstein. I prefer field biologists who write in the scientific tradition that dates from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and can be seen in varying degrees in writers such as E.O. Wilson, Jonathan Losos, Rachel Carson, Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall, Ian Tattersall, Robert Sapolsky and Nichola Raihani. What concerns me is that we seem to have entered the Anthropocene epoch, which entails not just climate change, but the potentially preventable deaths of billions of people, when little action is being taken by many modern governments. For example, the three branches of the U.S. federal government are currently led by people who are scientifically illiterate, several other countries are theocracies, and many of the remaining countries are led by oligarchs who take no interest in science that is unrelated to their continued control of their governments. I must also point out that, in a situation like this, democracy is hardly a panacea, because most voters are scientifically illiterate and are therefore likely to vote for scientifically illiterate candidates. Furthermore, in democracies, the most popular candidates are often the ones who promise the most to voters and diligently avoid the suggestion that voters may ever have to make sacrifices.

Parts of the book discuss the biosphere and ecosystems:

The biosphere is robust, responsive, and resilient. There are, however, limits to the evolvability of its species. Darwinian evolution produces prodigious amounts of potential to cope with change, but it cannot anticipate the future. Organisms might appear to do so, yet only in the sense that conservative inheritance provides a means of "predicting" that tomorrow will be mostly like yesterday and today. Day-to-day, this tends to be a sufficient strategy for survival. Most of the time tomorrow is like today, but periodically, this fails. As Darwin and Wallace recognized, extinction is a fundamental part of evolution....When the environment is stable, evolution is survival of the fit with the fittest dominating numerically. When the environment changes, evolution is survival of the fit with the fittest becoming less numerous or going extinct, replaced by variants that were less fit in the previous environment. If by chance no variant is fit enough to cope with the change, then despite whatever preexisting potential the system may have had, it will go extinct....The biosphere is dynamic and resilient. Its ecosystems will not fall apart if some species are lost. The robustness of ecosystems to perturbations increases as additional levels of complexity emerge, and high levels of complexity is a hallmark of the biosphere. That complexity is embodied in the diversification of species and the interactions they form with each other. The conservative nature of inheritance and capacities for ecological fitting ensure enormous amounts of potential within the biosphere at any time. If the loss of a few species or even the breakdown of some ecosystems could cause the entire biosphere to collapse, life on this planet would have disappeared long ago.

There is also discussion of mass extinctions:

Paleontologists have identified five episodes that they call the great mass extinctions. Narratives focusing on what was lost give the impression of a biosphere teetering dangerously close to the gambler's ruin. But in a Darwinian world, so long as some life survives, much evolutionary potential is preserved. The most recent mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, for example, led not only to an explosion of mammal diversity including us but also the diversification of the few dinosaur species that survived into what we now call birds. By concentrating on the aftermath of the great mass extinction events, the potential for evolutionary renewal becomes apparent. Mass extinctions are mass evolutionary resets producing new diversity following close encounters with the gambler's ruin.

The evolution of the genus Homo is discussed. The genus is about 2.3 to 2.8 million years old. H. sapiens is about 300,000 years old. The authors describe the origin of H. sapiens in much the same way as the authors of other books I've read, but their description is slightly more nuanced. At first we lived at the edges of savannahs in Africa but also spent time in forests. Initially, the savannahs were extremely dangerous to humans because of the presence of large predators. Over thousands of years, the surviving humans developed bipedal gait, language, large brains, tool-making skills and a high level of cooperation. It sounds as if there may have been a few Homo species that have never been identified. It also seems that our understanding of the migrations out of Africa is probably incomplete. The movements and their timing outside of Africa are also unclear. The genetic data isn't always available, because genes don't preserve well in the hotter regions of Africa. We do know that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. But there is also a strong possibility that there were several other Homo species that have never been identified and are now extinct. We may never know all of the details of our evolutionary background, but it would appear that our ancestors gradually acquired slightly greater skills and were eventually more adaptive than the other Homo species. Before the last Ice Age, they were able to make a variety of tools and were able to make complex objects such as ocean-going rafts. When different groups of hunter-gatherers met, there initially were not hostilities, and trading and intermarrying began. Sometimes they would run into different Homo species. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was probably correct at least in the sense that at times in the past, when resources were readily available and populations were relatively low, there were fewer hostilities between different members of the Homo genus.

As far as I've read, I'm up to the Last Glacial Period, which started about 100,000 years ago, peaked about 20,000-25,000 years ago and ended about 11,500 years ago. During this period, all of the known Homo species except H. sapiens became extinct . We may be in the process of moving from an apocalyptic cold period to an apocalyptic hot period. I will continue reading and will have one or two more posts.