All Species Go Extinct or, S**t Happens
It is a law of nature. Why would you think it any different for the only extant species of humans? We are headed for extinction, like it or not.
What is particularly ironic about our case is that we are the prime instrumental force pushing us to extinction. In the geological past external events, like comet collisions, were instrumental in causing mass extinction events. Cyanobacteria evolved from pre-existing anaerobic bacteria, generating oxygen (by photosynthesis) and thus killed off a huge number of then existing life forms (all bacteria). So there is precedence for life itself causing mass extinctions. But this is probably the first time that one species has triggered events that would lead to its own demise.
The environment of the Earth is forever changing. And that is the principal cause of species extinction. A species evolves to 'fit' a particular environment or niche. When that environment changes more than the adaptive capacity of the species then the species is no longer fit and extinction ensues. It is a very old story. More species have gone extinct over geological time than exist now. It is the rule, not the exception.
Of course the extinction of a species must be accompanied by the generation of new species that are better able to fill the niches created by the new environments. Sometimes this leads to explosive speciation (see: Cambrian explosion for an example).
The main contributor to the change of the environment in the near future is us. As Walt Kelly noted in his famous Pogo cartoon, "We have met the enemy and he is us".
Energy Decline, Climate Change, Environment Degradation; The List is Long
We have built an entire human-based ecosystem based on abundant, high-EROI energy in the form of fossil fuels. We are now dependent on our energy cocoon for existence. That is our econiche! And, unfortunately, it is based on energy flows from a finite resource that is now reaching its apex. From here on out it looks like declining net energy flows are the order of the day. That means we humans are going to have less so-called wealth in the future. Not more.
On top of that, in the process of pursuing increasing net energy in the past, when it was feasible, we burned uncounted tons of carbon, producing incredible amounts of CO2, a greenhouse gas, that is now coming back to haunt us. We are changing the very climate of the planet. And the change isn't looking to be very good for our species, and many others.
On top of that, in the process of chasing the goal of increasing our per-individual ownership of stuff in a throw-away society, we have belched out uncounted tons of garbage and pollutants. Our clever (but not sapient) command over chemistry has produced some toxins of which the effects on us and nature we are only beginning to understand. And the early evidence isn't particularly encouraging.
Overpopulation is probably our biggest 'sin'. Most of our activities, if done in small portions, would not have so grossly overwhelmed the Earth's capacity to deal. But there are so many of us, each clamoring for a piece of the action, that we have now succeeded in overcoming the planet's ability to detoxify what we produce. Congratulations humanity. You win. Earth loses.
But guess what? So do you.
We will be the first species on the planet to be the instrument of our own extinction.
Shall I Grieve For Thee?
This idea is undoubtedly repugnant to the majority of people, possibly the vast majority of readers of this blog! Very probably many have considered that Homo sapiens would 'one day' go extinct; in the very far distant future. But most of you probably haven't really, seriously, considered that the time of extinction was at hand, even possibly within your own lifetime.
But then, we don't really think much about our own personal demise, do we?
Imagine that you have just gotten a check-up with your doctor. You were experiencing some symptoms that were puzzling and your doctor ordered up some tests. Now you're in his office and he has the results. He says to you: "I'm sorry to have to tell you but you have an inoperable cancer in your brain and you have only two months to live".
How would you feel?
In all likelihood you would react with something like Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief. You would first go through a process of denial. This couldn't possibly be 'your' fate. As your doctor assures you that the test results are conclusive, you get angry. How could this happen to you? It isn't fair. Etc.
Now picture the collective reaction to species extinction. How could this happen to us?
The Earth doctors have been testing the situation for our planet and our species. And though it will be hard for most to accept, the results look pretty grim. We have sealed our own fate. We are going to die and in the not-too-distant future.
Since I have written extensively in these postings about the nature of the situation I will not go into details here. It is my considered opinion (and take that as it may be) that Homo sapiens has, so to speak, shot its wad. We gave it our best shot and came up wanting. But here is the thing. It was just part of the scheme of nature. It wasn't some cosmic comedy. We lived as we had evolved to live. We are what we are and that is all there is to it. No apologies needed. We did our best to live as we understood living. That this has led to our own demise, as a species, should not be lamented. We should not beat ourselves up for being too unwise to live in a way that would have ensured our eternal continuance. Such a thing isn't even possible.
The real issue is once we get through the grieving process, can we make appropriate provisions for our successors? Oh yes. There will be successors. Evolution isn't finished with humanity even if this particular species is finished. We will have successors. Just as we make provisions for our children after our own deaths, we must make provisions for our succeeding species. For such there will be.
What Comes Next?
Some of you may have read my review of William Catton's book, Bottleneck (HERE or on The Oil Drum or The Energy Bulletin). In case you didn't, a population bottleneck occurs when there is a major die-off of a species leaving just enough individuals to provide a breeding population. This is postulated to have occurred for humans (see this). A population bottleneck is of evolutionary significance because it tends to reduce the variability in the genome of the remaining population. On the other hand, the events that led to the causes may have radically changed the environment such that only members of the species with the traits that made them survivors would produce offspring under strong pressures for further selection. Past human evolution has been correlated with significant climate changes associated with the ice ages, the cooling and the thawing. It is entirely reasonable to assume that any human survivors from the catastrophic events that we are causing will also undergo evolutionary pressures and produce one or more new species better adapted to that future world.
I, like Catton, have become convinced that sometime within the next hundred years humankind will experience a bottleneck event of its own making. The event could take many decades as in a global collapse of civilization and slow die-off of the population dependent on high energy support from fossil fuels. It could come quickly if the increasing pressures from economic decline push someone to sending nukes skyward. I can imagine any number of scenarios that may seal our fate. I am quite convinced there is no technology that could be brought to bear within a workable time frame that would mitigate this event. I am as absolutely convinced as I think possible to be that we will fail to muster the political will and smarts to employ such a technology even if it could be shown to exist and work. The reason I am so pessimistic is because of the tipping points involved in all of dynamical processes at work. There are ecological tipping points that once passed ensure that massive species die-offs will occur through population collapses. There are climate changing tipping points that work through positive feedback loops such as the warming tundra and Arctic Ocean releasing previously frozen methane thus amplifying the greenhouse effect. There are population density tipping points in which the stresses of close-packed living increase the violence and aggressive tendencies in people. There are many sociological tipping points such as Joseph Tainter's civilization collapse due to declining marginal benefit from increasing complexity. The list goes on. Any and all of these are being reached by human actions and population numbers. One or more could break and cause the others to break as well. We have just pushed the limits of growth to the point of breaking down everything.
Once society starts down the slope of collapse, no matter how rapidly or slowly it transpires, the end result is pretty much the same. At some point in the future we will have just a few surviving pockets of humans, probably quite isolated from one another, living in extremely primitive conditions, probably just getting by. Then depending on what the climate does in the way of further changes some of these may fail to adapt and survive too. But those that do, in their isolated conditions, will begin the long slow process of allopatric speciation — the development of species characteristics in separated and reproductively isolated populations. What the world gets from that might not strike us as more advanced than our current incarnation. Indeed, in a more brutal world, it could be more like the Morlocks rather than the Eloi in H. G. Wells', The Time Machine. That is the pessimist in me.
The optimist in me sees another, though not-at-all certain, possibility. Operating on the premise that humans had been evolving higher levels of sapience (see my various writings on this from this index page) before we abrogated our mental development to cleverness in technology (esp. agriculture), we might still have an opportunity to nudge future evolution toward beings with much higher levels of that which is the basis of wisdom than we now possess on average. Hence my visions of a future society in which more sapient humans could live and thrive in tune with nature. It would be a Utopia made possible only because the human brain was evolving in the direction of greater sapience (vs. greater cleverness, which we may possess too much of now!)
Remember the part above where I mentioned how when we learn or understand that we are dying we usually finish the grief by doing something to foster our loved ones, particularly our children, after we are gone? Think of future humans as our special children. Wouldn't we want to make preparations that would help ease their futures, leave them our true wealth in our wills? If there is to be a brighter future for an even more advanced human species in some distant day, we should take steps now to help that happen. We actually do know what to do in that regard. There are no guarantees, of course. Climate change may go completely out of control and the Earth ends up looking like Venus. Or a meteor could strike the planet killing everything. But those kinds of disasters (Black Swans) notwithstanding, we should hope for the best and do what we can now. We won't be around to see the results. This is the one thing I would do on faith alone.
Georgi,
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I have a better idea of who the 'we' are now and I appreciate it.
I will also need to be more careful in characterizations in the future! When I mentioned 'junk' DNA it was short hand for the fact that a significant bit of previously not understood DNA segments are involved in developmental regulation. I will need to be more specific in the future.
You are right, of course. This is not my field of academic expertise and I must defer to expertise when it is shown. I have taken my cues from several Evo-Devo sources such as: Jablonka, Eva, and Lamb, Marion J., (2005). Evolution in Four Dimensions, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA. And some of Sean Carroll's writing on the subject. I also have a technical book on my self at work, the title escapes me at the moment, but it delves into a number of worked out control networks and their mechanisms of regulation in turning on and off genes during development. So no I don't have a PhD in genetics but I do try to grasp the essentials. Surprisingly the nature of these control networks is reminiscent of computer programs (of a sort). So I suppose that explains my interpretation of the work. I also try to keep abreast of happenings in computational biology.
Your claim about Science and Nature misleading readers is somewhat alarming. I've said as much about Scientific American, but that isn't exactly a peer-reviewed rag. It would be nice to know where exactly this misleading is occurring so as to be on the lookout for it in the future. Also I would guess that if it is so, the editors would like to know of their mistakes. I can't imagine they have any kind of agenda (Sci Am depends more on ad revenue than either of these two) that leads to systematic bias.
As far as "relying" on evolution, I thought I made it clear that there could be no reliance, or guarantees. I am merely suggesting nothing more than attempting a nudge in a direction with hope. The nudge I'm suggesting is based on what we understand about our species best qualities. Nothing more. Perhaps you would agree that some kind of assisted sexual selection (and I don't mean the typical eugenics) would be preferable to genetic engineering, which some have proposed. I think of what I'm suggesting as more of a gamble where we might have some say in shifting the odds. Please don't take my thoughts on this matter as some kind of proposed formula for making it happen.
In fact, the best one can say is that we face an unsolvable problem (what John Michael Greer calls a 'predicament') that will lead to a population bottleneck. That part is simple. After the bottleneck any surviving humans will be subject to some future set of selection forces we can only guess at now. That too is simple, but very fuzzy. All we might do is arrange that a significant portion of the survivors have a higher than average sapience capacity (this is yet to be worked out but not outside the realm of feasibility). Then evolution will take over and whatever happens will happen. Unfortunately it isn't a science experiment because there will not be any controls or observations of the results except by those who actually follow.
George
[Edit: The name of the book I referred to above is: The Regulatory Genome by Eric Davidson. I would be interested to know what your thoughts are regarding the quality of these authors/works.]
Posted by: George Mobus | May 19, 2010 at 06:27 AM
Dear George, your attention to all these comment threads is remarkable. Unfortunately however, it just prompts more questions and, with that said, here is my next one: how would the sapience of Homo eusapiens manifest itself with respect to sustainability? Would it involve acceptance of the need to balance the death rate with the birth rate and, if it would, how would that be wisely achieved (especially when you remember that children would replace pensions etc. as old age security plans)? In fact, given that nature appears balanced largely because of the enormous impact of competition *WITHIN* species, it seems quite clear to me that unless people are going to strictly limit themselves to replacement rate breeding policies (hard to imagine if contraception dissapears with civilisation as we know it), the wisest move, with respect to sustainability, would be to *decrease* cooperation, not increase it. Cooperation just leads to problem solving that leads to falling death rates after all, as we have perfectly demonstrated. Indeed, falling competition within our species (based on the energy excesses of fossil fuels - bacteria also cooperate more when there is plenty to go round by the way, but become more selfish when resources are limited) may actually be the source of all our problems. If we were still tribal and limiting our own numbers through inter-tribal warfare (analogous to the intra-species competition limiting all other species) we might not have pooled our knowledge about how to stop people from dying and we might not be part of an exploding population problem. In summary, if the rest of life on earth is based on high death rates involving lots of intra-species competition, how are we going to mimic that by eliminating intra-species competition?
I am also obliged to ask how anybody or any species can wisely limit their own reproduction and consumption on a dynamic planet with an unpredictable future? We have had an easy time of it since the end of the last ice age but nobody knows when the next asteroid will strike or the next supervolcano will erupt or the next supervirus will decimate the population and there is absolutely no doubt that more units means more chances of something surviving black swan events like these. Would we have such a severe population bottleneck if Toba erupted tomorrow for example? I would suggest not and I think it would be terribly unwise to limit reproduction in the good times while we cannot predict the future. It's an odds game and cautious reticence is not a very clever way to play it in my opinion.
Essentially, I think nature probably knows best and if nature has spent the last 4 billion years promoting species that just go for it, and if that is exactly what we are doing despite the contrary suggestions of those who think it unwise, perhaps it is time to start asking whether it might actually be the best strategy. I know there is a deep need to think we can be wiser than nature, but I am a long way from being convinced.
Kind regards,
Matthew
PS, I agree that there are large differences between us and other animals by the way, but are the differences between us and chimpanzees really greater than the differences between blue whales and bumble bees? I would suggest not and, as it seems to me, difference is not actually a difference at all; it’s a similarity. It’s a consistent part of nature and I think our continuing need to credit ourselves with the world’s most different difference is just a little bit self-important.
Posted by: Matthew Watkinson | May 19, 2010 at 10:33 AM
Matthew (and adding to my short comment above),
There are natural ways of birth control other than the extremes of infanticide or abstinence. 1) Nonpenetrative sex could be satisfying enough. 2) There are contraceptive herbs, e.g. wild carrot seeds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daucus_carota 3) Some plants cause relatively harmless uterine contractions and can be used as "morning after" early abortion, e.g. mugwort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_vulgaris
4) Diaphragms, sponges soaked with medicine, etc. were known already to the Egyptians.
Posted by: Florifulgurator | May 19, 2010 at 12:37 PM
Dear Florifulgurator, birth control is a minor issue (I am aware that there are substitutes, including the mere act of breast feeding normally, i.e. four years on the hip as demonstrated by the bushmen (who have also been required to kill one of any twins born in the past (and possibly today?) because of the need to continue working during this long contraceptive nursing period)). My point is that resisting population growth, which must surely be the key to sustainability, directly contradicts the biological imperative that has served life extremely well for almost 4 billion years: i.e. "be fruitful and multiply" (in a biological sense rather than a biblical sense - although it would mean the Bible was right after all on this point). Competition created by fruitful multiplication is the basis of the entire system and yet some of us are now deciding that we think it's wrong. We want to eliminate competition even though it's the entire basis for evolution. It culls the weak and keeps populations well adapted and healthy and we think we can do a better job. Personally, I wish there could be another, fairer way, but natural selection is selective by definition and the pursuit of equality and fairness directly flies in the face of all nature's wisdom. I will therefore repeat my original question: how will sappience manifest in a system that has worked for 4 billion years specifically because it is unfair? How can wisdom involve inversion of everything nature stands for?
Kind regards,
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Watkinson | May 20, 2010 at 02:27 AM
Matthew,
I will try to respond to both of your latest comments here.
Prompting questions is the objective of the blog!
In reading your comments I get the impression (and correct me if I am wrong) that you strongly feel that the role of competition between and among species is essential to achieve anything we might call sustainability. In truth, I am not so sure the issue is sustainability if we are referring to a true and everlasting steady state condition. My own observation is that nothing really stays the same, which, of course, is the point of evolution. I suppose you are referring to the population dynamics of a given species, and in particular that of future humans who, if sufficiently wise in their ways, would not tend toward overpopulation and thus put humanity right back in the situation we are in now.
Unfortunately, to fully explain what I am thinking here would require something like a book. So I am going to cut to the chase on these arguments about competition vs. cooperation. One of my recent works (which actually will be captured in a book!) in systems science is a typology for systems that classifies systems in three types: Mech-systems, Bio-systems, and Eco-systems (see: http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2009/08/the-science-of-systems-9.html for a summary review). One of the defining characteristics in this classification is the two dimensional competition-cooperation plane (please refer to the diagrams in the article to see the relationships). Mech-systems have, in general, very high cooperation among the parts. We want our machines to work smoothly. Bio-systems are generally in the mid ground, some competition occurs among subsystems, especially under stressful conditions, but more cooperation can be found during smooth functioning. This is, in fact, the result of the evolution of multicellular life! And this was entirely natural, that competition as the main modus operandi should give way to much greater cooperation via the evolution of hierarchical controls (mainly logistical and tactical level).
Eco-systems, in contrast, are generally dominated by competition, which is what you point to repeatedly. Those systems are in the highest state of flux with respect to composition and relative abundances of species. This is the realm, in fact, in which species populations are the predominant organizing principle. This is the realm in which one can argue that competition is the 'best' mechanism of control (sort of like what some people imagine the 'free market' to be in economic terms).
Now I assert that the situation that gave rise to multicellular organisms represents a transition -- an evolution -- from dominant competition mechanisms to dominant cooperation mechanisms as the organizing and sustaining principle with regard to the individual system. Nature, in other words, had 'learned' how to create a new form of life in which more potential could be realized by having cooperation predominate. This was a case of emergence in its truest sense. A new form of living was made possible and a potential for much greater behavioral repertoires realized by cells starting to cooperate with one another rather than always merely competing.
So, my point is that nature has already demonstrated that cooperation is a viable organizing principle achieved by the evolution of higher-order management mechanisms. I submit to you, that the evolution of the human brain represents exactly this same emergence but at the level of human organization. Our cultures represent the first, and in our non-eusapient state, glimmers of the developing dominance of cooperation over competition in what one might almost call a super-organism in the making.
However, as I said, this is just a first tentative step. My whole point about the continued evolution toward eusapience is that the latter represents a mental state in which all humans will find their maximum self-actualization in a predominantly cooperative organization of culture. This will mean, for example, that our current ideas about capitalism, free markets, etc. will be moot. Competition is still an organizing principle in current non-eusapient human society as evidenced in our political (not governance) system, our commercial systems, even in our religious systems. On the other hand, cooperation is emerging more strongly as humans have continued to evolve mentally, as evidenced by the mere fact that you have multi-individual (like multicellular) organizations that have higher level control structures to manage a generally cooperative internal environment. Where things go wrong internally is analogous to where they go wrong in all Bio-systems, failures in individual mental states (like failures in cellular level regulation) lead to (usually petty) competitions. In Bio-systems, like our bodies, this causes disease -- cancer.
I suggest to you that humans are part of an emergence that is on-going and far from stable. That emergence is the conversion of human social systems from a strange mix of competition and cooperation toward one more dominated by cooperation and facilitated by the further evolution of the prefrontal cortex to enhance sapience (which, in the literature on wisdom, demonstrates the dominance of cooperation through moral motivations). I conjecture that truly eusapient beings will form much more stable Bio-systems at the social level than we can imagine today from the examples of our more chaotic (in-transition) versions.
And it is all completely natural. We are not abandoning nature, nor 'thinking' ourselves smarter than nature or that we can beat the system. No. We are part of an on-going evolutionary experiment the trajectory of which we can see, if we look with open eyes, is leading humanity toward a new form of existence. Yes, I do think future humans will achieve something like sustainability by virtue of being more unlike mere animals in having far more developed sapience. That is, if the experiment succeeds. If not, then humanity will go extinct in a final way, the way of the dodo bird.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | May 20, 2010 at 07:32 AM
The Regulatory Genome is a great book that gives a very good overview of the mechanisms and evolution of developmental gene regulation. The problem with it is that the nice circuit diagrams that make so much sense are the result of very detailed studies of groups of several genes, while the genome is much more than that and the reality of gene regulation is vastly more complicated than what those diagrams may make it look like, and we don't really understand it at present. So it is a great oversimplification in many ways
A very good book on the subject of evolution and its mechanisms that I would recommend is The Origins of Genome Architecture by Michael Lynch. As the title says, it focuses mostly on the evolution of genome architecture, but it spends a lot of time explaining the principles behind and the quite surprising findings of modern evolutionary biology which is much more firmly rooted into molecular biology than what is typically presented in popular writings, and those are relevant to all levels of organismal organization. The somewhat surprising and quite unsettling but nevertheless rock solid result from the marriage between molecular genetics and evolutionary theory is that depending on the characteristics of the population (such as the effective population size), evolution may result in nonadaptive or even maladaptive traits being fixed and this is much more true for large and complex organisms such as us than it is for bacteria.
Anyway, when I said the Nature and Science often mislead their readers about the subject of junk DNA, I had the editorials; in mind; the papers themselves tend to be a lot more cautious in their argumentation and interpretations (although not always), and they are not a direct product of Nature and Science. But nobody outside the scientific community reads the actual papers so it almost doesn't matter, the damage gets done anyway.
I absolutely do agree with you that we have to make everything possible so that the people who go through the bottleneck are a lot more sapient than the average member of the current population. You may define sapience somewhat differently than I do which is where the disagreement arises from, but I think that we have a much better chance at making sure this happens by targeting the cultural aspect of the problem than the genetic. The genetics may eventually come to the rescue but we are not sure this is even possible and the time needed is certainly much longer than what the duration of the bottleneck will be.
The reason I am so pessimistic is that to achieve that cultural sapience will require preserving a lot of knowledge about and understanding of the world around us and making sure everyone in those surviving groups has it. And I have little hope for this happening given that the vast majority of people don't have it right now, and when I go through the collapse scenarios that seem likely right now , I see little selective pressure towards differential survival of the people with knowledge and sapience and the people without, or if there is such pressure, it is in the opposite of the desired direction.
In general, this is a very hard problem to solve because if not everyone is genetically sapient, and you have to rely on cultural suppression of deep animal instincts, then it is very difficult to maintain a population at a sapient level. And it will have to be all populations in the world because the non-sapient ones will most likely very quickly outcompete the sapient ones, for obvious reasons.
There is one other thing though. Let's assume that we can somehow successfully get through the bottleneck in a much better cultural shape than now. Then what? Are we going to be able to create another technologically advanced civilization on a planet with greatly depleted mineral resources that are absolutely necessary for that purpose. How much knowledge will have survived and what the starting point will be? Hopefully, the answer to these questions will be of the "there will be enough resources and knowledge to make things happen" kind, but they may be negative just as well.
And on a deeper philosophical level - why are we even trying to prevent collapse/make sure humanity makes it past the bottleneck? I have spent a lot of time fighting creationists on the net and in person, and there are some objections they raise that actually make sense - if there is no God and the world is a cold heartless place governed by the laws of physics, then what sense does it make to keep going? The answer is that we keep going because this is probably the most fundamental biological instincts of all - life started with molecules that replicated themselves, and obviously the ones that didn't never made it past that point, so there is a very strong urge in all of us to pass our genes to the next generation. So maybe those of us who see that uncontrolled reproduction is a disaster and spend a lot of their time trying to explain it to the rest of the species, are driven exactly by this. We see that such a strategy is disastrous for the species as a whole, which will result in our genes completely disappearing at some point, which is a harm much greater than the benefit of making a lot of copies of them in the short term.
Now in the very long term, we are all extinct anyway, unless we find a way to get out of this planet. This may or may not be possible, but it is certainly worth pursuing because the alternative is sure death. Which, however, takes an advanced technological civilization, and if we leave a planet that will be unable to support another such civilization, even at much smaller numbers and total environmental impact, then the whole things becomes quite hopeless...
I hope I am wrong
Posted by: Georgi Marinov | May 20, 2010 at 08:38 AM
Georgi, like you I'm quite anti-religious - if religion is defined as supernaturalism. My plan/suggestion to preserve some of our scientific achievements is to build some sort of naturalistic religion, philosophic Buddhism serving the paradigm (but the biosphere at large has essence, no Śūnyatā there).
My motivation of survival actually is the great beauty of Nature. It is not cold and heartless. It is screamingly magnificient. How dull are the gods and paradises of old religions, compared to reality. E.g. meditating Life as an epiphenomenon of nonequilibrium thermodynamics makes life look even more marvelous. ...
Posted by: Florifulgurator | May 20, 2010 at 12:45 PM
Nature us magnificent, I am not saying it isn't. But it is very hard to build a rational argument about why we should be aiming to preserve the environment and prevent collapse based on this premise. In fact, you can't really do that. This is why I try to build it stating from "We have to do this to survive because survival is the most fundamental instinct we have", which is a lot more difficult to argue with.
Posted by: Georgi Marinov | May 20, 2010 at 12:57 PM
All very interesting stuff. I need to have a think about the evolution of cooperation a bit more I think. I can't seem to shake the feeling that cooperation evolves as a function of competition, i.e. it is restricted cooperation, or tribalism. I can't shake the feeling that cooperation essentially combines a few individuals to make a collective tribal organism that is still part of a competitive world. Cooperation within corporations is like cooperation within a termite mound for example. Taken in isolation it all looks very lovely, but it exists as a function of competition with other termites etc. rather than as an end in itself. I think enemies make organisms work together, not sapience or moral beliefs.
Anyway, thanks for a very interesting discussion.
Kind regards,
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Watkinson | May 21, 2010 at 12:30 AM
I am still of the opinion that if mankind were to fade to extinction over a few decades due to some mass 'infertility event', then it would not be a cause for mourning. The more I look at the world, the more I am convinced that even if the vast majority of the population thinks of itself as 'happy' or contented, it does not outweigh the personal misery, terror and tragic ruined lives that some poor conscious creatures are condemned to.
Of course it is built into us to want to survive, and to imagine that we somehow have meaning; that our ceaseless re-arrangement of moloecules, electrons and photons into patterns that trigger certain responses in the wiring of our brains has intrinsic value, but unfortunately it doesn't.
If the global birthrate dropped to zero because some new synthetic bacterium had been released into the wild that had had unexpected effects on our biology, how would you feel? I think we could all look forward to getting older together in a gentler world. Personally, I think it would provide a poignant and fitting end to it all.
Posted by: David | May 21, 2010 at 01:23 AM
One last thing: universal cooperation within a species would require universal specialisation, but is this really likely, or even sensible? Surely diversity of survival strategies is more sensible than unification and that makes blanket cooperation unwise. In fact, isn't diversification of survival strategies an inevitable consequence of evolution? If it is, the entropy of human evolution will always involve diversification away from blanket cooperation, regardless of who survives the bottleneck. If there is a niche for treachery/crime, it will more than likely be filled. The suggestion that wise humans will suddenly stop diversifying doesn't make any sense to me. What is being discussed here is a reduction in survival strategies but nobody can predict the future and that makes limiting the options terribly unwise in my opinion.
Thanks for your time.
Kind regards,
Matthew
Posted by: Matthew Watkinson | May 21, 2010 at 01:26 AM
Florifulgurator ( what the heck does this mean anyway?),
Here is the Mantra for the New Age Religion that is needed:
"There is only one God the Universe and Science is his Prophet and Mathematics is his language."
Posted by: porge | May 21, 2010 at 05:38 AM
(hanging <i>-tag perhaps closed )
Porge, Florifulgurator is not Jupiter Fulgurator (the lighning bolt throwing god). Florifulgurator means "Man fulgurating flowers", fulguration being emergence in Konrad Lorenz' language.
I hate that mantra, actually... There is one "divine" thing, the biosphere, in the sense that it gives and sustains our lives, and coincidentally is quite a beautiful place. My mantra is from James Lovelock 2007: "We should be the heart and mind of the Earth not its malady."
Posted by: Florifulgurator | May 21, 2010 at 12:29 PM
one more try on the i:
Posted by: Florifulgurator | May 21, 2010 at 12:32 PM
My fault on the , I must have forgotten the '/' in the closing '' so two of those appeared, and apparently they propagated through all the posts
Posted by: Georgi Marinov | May 21, 2010 at 06:11 PM
Georgi,
The Lynch book sounds good. I will look into it. Thanks for that pointer.
I'd be curious as to what your definition might be. I wouldn't claim mine is comprehensive by any means. Though I will confess I have spent many hours looking for additional considerations, primarily in the psychology of wisdom literature.
RE: your pessimism about preserving knowledge. I suspect there will need to be a great deal of thought given to the priorities of what needs to be passed on vs. what is interesting to us now, in this time, that would not be of much use to future humans, given the constraints on their energy availability. But in addition, I know of some efforts to find ways (and media) of encoding knowledge in an encrypted form and very efficiently. The media problem is a materials problem. What sort of material might last for thousands of years? At least one effort I have read about involves DNA! Ever hear of this?
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You know I'm not so sure about the 'obvious reasons' part. We have all probably imagined a devolved state of the human condition - the Olduvai theory, for example. But my suspicion is that the nature of the environment in the distant future will be extremely different from the current one, due to climate change and bio diversity loss. Under those circumstances I'm not sure brute force will be adequate for survival. I think it will take much more cleverness and wisdom to adapt to those conditions. Ergo, the truly sapient might be better fit than the devolved brutes. At least that is a hope (and not too unreasonable as a conjecture) that makes it worth doing something now.
I don't think anyone, certainly not me, could answer questions about what will be possible vis a vis future technological societies. For a truly sapient species that might not be the issue at all. Presumably some kind of technology would be needed to increase fitness but it might not include iPods!
Hope for some kind of human presence on the planet lies exactly in the extinction of Homo sapiens! Only by H. sapiens, with its rapacious ways and capacity to negate normal biological controls on populations, leaving the scene can the Earth survive. But before they do they can seed the beginning of a new species of Homo. My hope is that eusapience represents the continuance of the emergence of a supra-biological phenomenon, one that could transcend the biological imperative. But, admittedly, it is hope, not certainty.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | May 22, 2010 at 10:22 AM
Matthew,
Enemies, or a challenging environment do indeed set the conditions for the need for cooperation within a biological unit! But the mechanisms for creating that cooperation are nonetheless real and have evolved to serve that purpose.
The evolution of sociality in humans is just such a phenomenon. I posit that stronger sapience helps make that sociality more effective. I don't think of sapience as a spandrel (a la Gould). Rather I suspect that the functional components that I identified in my working papers were already evolving in primates and that the fortuitous rapid expansion of Brodmann area 10 helped integrate them further. And as a result, humans evolved language and an ability to think about the future (plan) and do it all with a strong moral sentiment operating in the background. From an evolutionary standpoint, that seems to have worked well, but just not well enough to address current conditions.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | May 22, 2010 at 10:35 AM
David,
The whole point of this post is that Homo sapiens must go extinct! But that doesn't mean that Homo needs to go extinct. If the problem is with the incompetence of the current species, then the solution is that that species must go, of course.
But why condemn the genus for the failings of the species in this modern world? Can't you possibly imagine a 'better' species more in tune with the Ecos? If not why? Do you need to judge everything by the experience you've had with this species?
How would I feel if humanity were going into final extinction? Sad. Profoundly sad. Human evolution represents something bigger than just biology. I don't know what all it implies, but humans have transcended the ordinary biological rules. Granted we have overstepped our place in the order of things. But that doesn't mean that the genus should be done.
Try to see the possibilities and not just the disappointments.
George
Posted by: George Mobus | May 22, 2010 at 10:43 AM
Matthew (again),
Don't put words in my mouth ;^)
How did the evolution of higher cooperation in the emergence of multicellular life stop diversification? Quite the opposite. It appears that multicellularity enabled far greater diversity, but at a new level of organization. Indeed, that diversification required greater diversification of the cellular substrates.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, David,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." with a nod to Hamlet (Shakespeare).
George
Posted by: George Mobus | May 22, 2010 at 10:56 AM
I read more and more references to Kubler-Ross. JH Kunstler's blog from June 7, 2010 says: "All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and "green" cars is just a form of "bargaining" on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief."
How much of everything we collectively do is bargaining on a societal level?
Since we can't wrap our brains around the complex wicked problems, we end up bargaining within ourselves for what we're willing to accept as reality.
I guess some are just better at bargaining than others.
Posted by: t0wnp1ann3r | June 09, 2010 at 12:43 PM