Question Everything

Humanity's Impending Impasse?

Book Review

Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, by William R. Catton, Jr.

Reviewed by George Mobus

First I should confess to a strong bias toward the content of this book. As readers of my blog, Question Everything, will realize, I have been moving inexorably toward the same conclusion as the author, so you will perhaps forgive me if you think I may be suffering from a lack of sufficient critical thinking. Put bluntly, I think this is a book every thinking human being should read, and then consider for themselves.

To a growing number of people it is looking more and more like mankind is about to undergo a most unpleasant transition. One might write such views off as being what kooks and apocalyptic religious fanatics hold to, and we know they are crazy. But over the last five years many deep thinking and well respected people have been sounding some alarms that are not as easily put aside. In 2004 Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in Britain and clearly no intellectual harebrain, wrote Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning, Basic Books. In it he gives humanity about a 50/50 chance of surviving through the century. Not really good chances when you think about it.

Last year James Gustave Speth, dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, wrote a sobering call for a massive revision of capitalism and an end to growth in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, Yale University Press. Like many authors have done, he painted a picture of what was wrong and why, but then pointed to remedies that might presumably fix the problems. That is, if only our leaders and our citizens would see the light and do what is necessary we might avoid total collapse. Most of these authors offer humanity an escape hatch, but point out that we have to be willing to sacrifice substantially, in terms of material wealth, for it to work.

The realization that mankind is damaging its planet is certainly not new. Rachel Carson (The Silent Spring, 1962) may have started the trend in increasing awareness that we are doing things, in our zeal to control nature, that were starting to backfire, threatening to leave us worse off if we didn't change our ways and attitudes. Environmentalism has largely operated on this theme for decades. We've been warned of environmental degradation, global warming, and peak oil, and how these are interlinked. We've been made immanently aware of the dangers we have ourselves created.

Now William R. Catton, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Sociology at my state's other PhD granting institution, Washington State University, brings on the sequel to his first book in this genre, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, University of Illinois Press, in which he sounded an alarm being heard more frequently. Like Speth, Catton, in that earlier book, pointed out the problems as he saw them, from the viewpoint of a sociologist, and then declared that if we heed these warnings we might yet escape the worst.

In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called an population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return.

As to why we are in this state of affairs, Catton calls on several sociological theories surrounding the evolution of culture and especially the development of over-specialization or 'division of labor'. The latter was touted by Adam Smith as the reason we were so efficient in our manufactures. And Catton, like many authors who deplore modern capitalism and corporatism, recognizes that at a time this was indeed a beneficial capacity. Today, however, he says that we overdid it and that the tendency toward deep specialization has tended to dehumanize and isolate each of us from the benefit of interpersonal relations. He further argues that we have come to think of others as instruments, mere means to our own ends. This he says is the end result of taking the abstraction of money as representing wealth too far in our thinking.

This idea that once things like money and capitalism, etc. fulfilled good purposes and were good for society as a whole, but have simply been overdone in our modern technologically-driven world, is actually one of the common themes sounded by many writers. It is certainly something I have subscribed to in my evaluation of human affairs. Early in mankind's history, these inventions, these institutions, served a purpose to make man more fit as a species, to quell the negative selective forces of nature and allow humans to succeed evolutionarily. But somewhere along the line humans failed to recognize that too much of a good thing is actually bad.

The failure to recognize this is the lack of wisdom, to which I will return in a bit. But to understand how humans got so carried away it is important to recognize, as Catton and others have done, that humans, like all animals, have a biological dictate to maximize their access to energy. For humans this took the shape of learning to control fire, making clothing, building shelters, and later finding additional external energy sources to supplement their bodily abilities. This included the invention of tools and agriculture. And it essentially culminated in the discovery of fossil fuels that allow modern humans incredible power over their environment. Catton renames a subset of Homo sapiens as a 'quasi-species', Homo colossus, those being the people in developed countries who consume massive amounts of fossil fuels to motivate and control machines that do orders of magnitude more work than a human can do with muscle power alone. To achieve this we are combusting carbon to produce CO₂ and returning fossil carbon deposits to the atmosphere and oceans after sequestration for millions of years. And it is the rapidity with which this is happening which leads Catton, and others, to conclude that it is infeasible to put the brakes on for this train. That is, you can try to brake, but you won't stop in time to avoid a crash.

Unfortunately for mankind, there are now far too many of Homo colossus in the global population. And the damage is done. NASA climatologist James Hanson has claimed that the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere should not be over 350 parts per million (ppm) in order to avoid calamitous climate shifts. But we are already at 385ppm and climbing, even though the global recession has slowed the burning of fossil fuels. It just isn't enough to stop let alone reverse the growth in carbon in the air. But beyond the damage done already, and the potential damage to come due to climate changes and sea level rise, Catton sees an impending threat from the fact that we are going to run out of this magical fuel one day. Or at least we will hit a barrier where the cost of extraction exceeds the benefit of having the fuels. When that happens what becomes of Homo colossus? Indeed what happens to Homo sapiens in toto? Even though peoples in developing and underdeveloped nations don't burn the fuels directly, they still rely on the developed world for aid produced by burning those fuels.

Catton bases his analysis on the idea of carrying capacity. Fossil fuels have artificially boosted the carrying capacity of earth for human occupancy (if you ignore the damage we've done to other species). We are in overshoot, the theme of his previous book. We are like the cartoon character, Wile Coyote, who would race off a cliff in futile pursuit of the Roadrunner and would remain suspended in mid air until he realized his predicament; then it was too late and he would fall. When the fossil fuels are effectively used up, what will replace them? As things stand now, there simply is no realistic or viable alternative energy source that could scale up to the level needed by modern civilization in time to take over the job. Once again, it's the rate of change that gets us. In spite of continued pie-in-the-sky thinking by even engineers and scientist who should know better, no one has shown how real time solar energy in all of its many forms (thermal, photovoltaic, wind, even hydroelectric) will ever match the power in fossil fuels. These came from ancient photosynthesis over millions of years compressed and cooked into a convenient package over more millions of years. The scope of concentration is literally unimaginable (apparently) yet very serious people dream of capturing current solar influx and replacing fossil fuels with it. They may be serious but they are also dreamers or delusional. While in theory, the total daily influx of solar energy to the earth would provide many times over what we need to sustain our current civilization and provide development for the lesser developed nations, our systems of capture would have to cover gigantic areas of the planet. Our energy storage and distribution systems would have to be radically redesigned and rebuilt. And all of this comes just as we recognize the impacts of declining net energy from fossil fuels; those fuels being needed to subsidize the building of all that energy infrastructure.

The root cause of humanity's impending impasse, however, is not his lack of will, or cleverness, or even sufficient energy resources. The root cause is his lack of wisdom. Catton points to this on page 190, speaking about his great-grandson:

...by the time surviving members of his generation have emerged from the coming bottleneck, when he may himself have somewhere a great-grandson he will wish to visit, somehow his contemporaries will have attained the wisdom Linneus implied was characteristic of our species when he named us Homo sapiens.

(Emphasis mine)

For several years now I have been pursuing a quest to understand better why our species is not, on average, more wise. With all of the history we have experienced, with all of the science we have learned, with all the cleverness our kind has for solving local (in time and space) problems, you would think that we would have developed greater wisdom than we have in fact. What I came to realize was that the brain capacity for wisdom (which I have boiled down to: good judgment in complex social issues, strategic thinking, highly developed systems thinking, and strong moral sentiment) was a relatively new emergent capacity coupled with symbolic thinking and language and second order consciousness (conscious of being conscious) for early Homo sapiens. But it was evolved, as Catton notes, to meet the needs of the late Pleistocene existence of our species. It is not, on average, up to the task of modern complex society. One of my main conclusions is that our species is simply not sufficiently wise (or I prefer the term sapient to differentiate between a native capacity and an actualized capability) to deal with the world we have created. For a more in-depth treatment of this subject, readers are directed to my working papers at: http://faculty.washington.edu/gmobus/Background/seriesIndex.html.

It is this lack of inherent wisdom that will keep us, has kept us, from doing the right things to prevent the impending impasse. Catton's 'Prognosis for Humanity', page 206, is alarming.

...with great reluctance and regret, I am compelled to doubt that we can confidently hope to avoid a serious "crash" as the focal human experience of the 21st century—envisioned also as our species having to pass through an ecological "bottleneck".

This is by far the most explicit statement of what we would call doom of any author in the popular book trade. There have been many writers, especially in the blogosphere, who have expressed similar conclusions. But I have yet to see a writer of some eminence such as Catton go all out and claim that the end is near. Unfortunately, I happen to agree with him.

The question for me is: Will humanity come through this bottleneck with a gene pool competent to meet the challenges of a changed world AND have a stronger native capacity for sapience, for wisdom? Assuming some remnant of humanity does survive, that is no guarantee that our descendants will go on to evolve a better ability to make good, long-term judgments in that future world. Nor are we guaranteed that they will be able to reconstruct anything like modern technology-based society in order to re-achieve a species fitness allowing them to survive and thrive in the very long run.

My only complaint with Catton's thesis is that he didn't go far enough in suggesting what those of us who see this coming might do now to save our genus from extinction or, in the case of my concern, to increase the likelihood that our descendants will inherit genetic components leading to higher sapience. He assumes that some humans may survive and the future environment may select for greater wisdom. I'm not so sure that will be the case. His parting words simply express thankfulness that he lived during the epitome of human achievements in science and understanding as well as freedoms to travel the world. My question is: Now what do we do?

I have to applaud Catton for writing so honestly about what he has concluded. I have contemplated writing a book on the evolution of what I call eusapience, true sapience, as the future of the genus Homo. Necessarily, the species sapiens must go extinct to allow the rise of a new, wiser, species of humans. And an evolutionary bottleneck would be the most likely mechanism for this to happen. But I have hesitated, realizing this is a message no one wants to hear! Every other author of books on end-of-the-world scenarios at least offers that if we would only come to our senses... the world won't end. William Catton does not do this. Sorry for the spoiler but you should know in advance. Thus this probably isn't a book easily digested by everyone, even though I think everyone who believes themselves to be a critical thinker should read it.

The reviewer is an Associate Professor of Computing and Software Systems at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is currently on sabbatical leave studying biophysical economics and energy-related issues at the State University of New York, Environmental Sciences and Forestry in Syracuse NY. His blog is Question Everything at: http://questioneverything.typepad.com

The Evolution of Sapience

Finally! Part 5 of my series on the sapience is available here. I apologize for the long delay, but as some of you know I had been preparing for my sabbatical, coming here to Syracuse NY to SUNY-ESF to study energy return on energy investment with Charlie Hall and his students. And believe me, Charlie has kept me hopping.

So here it is: Abstract

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Dylan Thomas

The Emergence and Development of Sapience

The story of sapience and its conjoined twin, second-order consciousness (awareness of being aware), is told in the evolution of hierarchical control, both within the individual human brain and in the societal matrix in which humans operate. It is the emergence of elaborated strategic management of the self, coordination management (tactical and logistical) in the social group, and the begriming of strategic management for the group. Humanity finds itself in an awkward adolescence of consciousness. We have emerged from ape-hood as beings with superior future-thinking, mental models of both ourselves and others, and the language facility to share abstractions. But we are not fully mature sapient adults, on average. As a species we are only somewhat sapient. I suspect the story of our species' evolution has more chapters to open.

In this final installment I want to consider that story in terms of the evolution of sapience in our genus, Homo, its current status with respect to the degree to which it is expressed in modern populations, and its future potential as the next stage in human evolution.

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The whole series can be gotten in the index page.

Transitions?

We are in what I suspect will be the most fundamental transition Homo sapiens has ever experienced. By transition I mean a change in the ways of living so radical it constitutes a revolution.

Preceded by the language revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the so-called information revolution, the current transition is hard to characterize by one single name — an evocative sound bite. If I were to try to describe it succinctly it might be called the "Evolution Revolution"! Our world is changing, mostly at our own hands, so much that the only possible transition we can make is a rapid evolution. And by that I do not mean cultural evolution alone. I mean primarily evolution of our species.

The reason is that evolution, that is speciation, takes place under emerging (and long-term) stressful conditions that select for fitness in dealing with them. Fitness means individuals having certain traits, either behavioral or physical (or both) are better able to cope with the new conditions and procreate more successfully than their less fit conspecifics. Individuals having a genetic head start, meaning possessing a specific allele^** that endows them with slightly better coping capacity, have a good chance of passing that allele on to their offspring, and over generations even better versions of the allele may emerge. Then the continuing selection pressure will assure that the allele starts to dominate in the population. Another scenario is that a drastic change in the environment can result in active selection against most members of the population NOT possessing a favorable allele, leaving only those whose "pre-adaptation" allows them to survive. Of course if no such allele exists than it can spell extinction for that species.

The fact is that our world is changing rapidly and those changes are leading to highly stressful conditions for us and many other species. Are we on the verge of an evolutionary revolution as a result? Can Homo sapiens produce a new, better adapted species — adapted to what the world is becoming? The answer depends on whether or not there are individuals in the population who have pre-adapted allelic forms¹. The two main questions about this transition are: How rapidly will the changes occur? and How radical will they be?

There is a great deal of uncertainty about the changes in the physical environment due to climate changes resulting from global warming. Even though we have some startling and frightening empirical data on things like polar ice cap melting, we are still struggling with the validity of our models that produce various scenario projections regarding how bad and how soon. However, there is another major threat looming that may very well have a sooner and much more drastic impact on our species in terms of a change so radical that it could lead to an evolutionary revolution. That threat comes from the decline in net energy available to support our complex, high energy civilization.

Many people in economics and politics are starting to, at least vaguely, grasp the significance of something like peak oil production. For many people, affected by Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", the initial concern has been on raising CO₂ atmospheric (and oceanic) concentrations due to burning fossil fuels and leading to a general average heating of the world's fluidic systems. Now it turns out that we have been burning those fossil fuels at accelerated rates for the last 100 years (or more) and depleting a non-renewable reservoir at a phenomenal rate. Now we learn that it is taking increasing amounts of energy to do the work of getting the raw fuels out of the ground, leaving less net energy to do the work of the rest of the economy. On top of that, and because of it, we are finding it increasingly unprofitable to get that next unit of energy out. It now looks pretty much like we have reached the peak of production of oil, and will before long reach the same limits for natural gas and coal! After the peak things don't look promising. As I've written elsewhere in these blogs, except for nuclear power, there is no other (renewable) energy source that comes close to fossil fuels for the purposes of running the kind of economy we have gotten used to (or as I claim, spoiled by!)

The talk among these economists (e.g. Paul Krugman), commentators (e.g. Tom Friedman), and politicians (e.g. Barack Obama) now is of a transition from a high energy (carbon-based) civilization to a low energy one. In the minds of all too many people this is imagined as a civilization that in not much different from today but perhaps with more localization of production, smaller communities, using locally generated electricity from solar and wind. These communities will be dotted all over the world to replace dense urban centers which require transportation of all essential commodities from distant production centers (though imagined to be not too distant). Some urban visionaries imagine such centers will persist but the transportation bringing stuff in will be electrified rail, powered by giant thermal solar generators out in the desert. In most cases the scenarios accommodate the 9+ billion population that the UN projects for 2050. It isn't clear to me though what these visionaries picture for grappling with climate change. I think many of the same people believe that we will, as part of that transition (to smaller carbon footprints), fix global warming and avert climate disasters.

We are in a transition alright. But I seriously doubt that it will be the one these many hopeful people envision.

Human beings are extremely adaptive. As a species we have shown remarkable capacity to adapt to so many kinds of environments and events over history. We are extremely clever. We are inventive and often insightful when it comes to making do with what we have to work with. There is no doubt that humans have the capacity to accommodate a wide range of stressful conditions. But there is one very significant difference between all prior historical experience and what we are about to experience. For all of history the net flow of energy has been increasing in volume and power. Much of our pre-history and history is a story of finding and learning to exploit new, more potent sources of energy to supplement our simple physiological conversion of food into new biomass and the ability to move and do work. We discovered how to control fire, how to plant and harvest seeds, how to manipulate animals, how to harness water and wind for mechanical power, etc. With the discovery of fossil fuels, however, we really broke into the bank. And today we have a global population of 6.7 billion people, most of whom depend either directly or indirectly on the burning of fossil fuels for their incomes. We can't even build a nuclear reactor without a significant input from coal and oil! And the bank vault is getting spare. Oh sure there is still plenty of oil, coal, and gas underground. The problem is it is getting harder and harder to get to it. Simple laws of physics. And the principle of picking the low-hanging fruit first. It takes much more work (and hence energy) to pick the apples high in the tree. Similarly, it takes much more work to get at those diminishing supplies of fossil fuels.

What is true about not being able to build a reactor without fossil fuel is also the case for alternative energy capture equipment. As of right now you can't build wind turbines or solar panels and deliver them to suitable collection sites without fossil fuels². Then there is the problem of scale. Currently fossil fuels account for more than 80% of the energy flow in the US (somewhat less in other OECD countries). Hydroelectric and nuclear for about 19% and the new alternatives about 1%. How do you go from that low base to virtually replace the 80% (a lot of which is transportation) in just a decade or two. That is what it will take because the projections for the decline in fossil fuel availability indicate that after about two more decades fossil fuels will be prohibitively expensive³. Some commentators and politicians imagine a WWII-level effort to ramp up production of alternative power systems because of this. What it would more likely require is an order of magnitude greater than WWII effort AND redirecting most of the current energy flow from fossil fuels to the effort. The rationing of fuels for such an effort will make the rationing of rubber and fuels during WWII look like a cake walk.

More and more, the likely scenario is looking to me like an accelerating downward spiral (and this doesn't take into account truly foolish reactions of violence and attempts to grab resources through war — you know, like what we are doing now!) that will diminish civilization to a meager shadow of itself, if anything that you could call civilization remains at all. And the really devastating news is that such a scenario has horrific consequences for the vast majority of people in the world. The current population cannot be sustained without massive inputs of high power energy. Modern farming depends entirely on huge inputs from fossil fuels. So does the health care system everywhere (no matter how funded). Indeed, all of our infrastructure and protection services (fire, police, etc.) could not operate without equipment (manufactured using fossil fuels) and transportation.

It is a matter of time and resources. It looks increasingly like we have not enough of either. And then there really is the human psychology factor. How will we humans react to a declining energy world? Will we roll over and die without some kind of reaction? Not likely. Will we thrash out trying to preserve our own skins and screw civil behavior? Certainly an imaginable reaction. But if the rate of energy decline is fast enough there won't be time for even hoarders to get a leg up. There won't be energy supplies to fuel an army, navy, or certainly not an air force! There aren't even enough horses to have a mounted cavalry.

Some people have envisioned a future in which we simply regress back through the 19th, then 18th, then 17th centuries, and so on, until we reach some kind of equilibrium, perhaps a pre-Roman style civilization. After all they didn't have fossil fuels like we do. Maybe we could live like they did before the collapse of the Roman Empire? Right. Really?

The transition we are entering is global and fundamentally different from anything our species has faced before. There is no where else to go now. We can't escape to some different continent. We can't even leave our gravitational well without significant energy. This is it. We are stuck in this world with the consequences of our own past excesses and that is all there is to the story.

I can imagine a future world where the population is down to a sustainable level using real-time solar energy capture to sustain a suitable civilization, even a technological one. It is feasible for humans to exist, have their comforts, their entertainments, arts, and leisure thanks to energy supplementation beyond food and shelter, at appropriate population size and in steady-state. But getting from where we are to that ideal future is going to involve a revolution — an evolution revolution.

The stresses are going to be substantial. I suspect that the selection forces are going to be primarily directed at selecting against most current failings of human nature. I have written extensively about how we humans today are, ourselves, what I think is a transition species. We set on the path toward truly sapient beings, but we're at best a work in progress. The brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, needs further physical development to boost our moral sentiments, our strategic thinking abilities, and our abilities to regulate our limbic emotions. We need to become a much wiser version of what we are now. And by 'we' I mean our genus Homo since I mean that the brain needs actual genetic improvements. Our distant progeny would be a new species, one I have dubbed Homo eusapiens, man the truly wise. I have evidence-based reasons for believing that the pre-adapted alleles are available in the population of humanity. Perhaps they are sparse, perhaps only in a weak form, but the potential is there. We just have to find them.

If this scenario is even partially correct then it leaves a very important question for those of us who are thinking about what to do so save humanity. If we can see our real objective as saving our genus and realizing that our species has to evolve to meet the new environment of tomorrow, then what should we be doing now to help make survival more likely? Or do we just give up on that and either fight for our own hopeless survival or roll over and accept the extinction of Homo?

As our species is now, smart, creative, and with the glimmer of high moral sentiments, do we have the capability of facing reality when it means our demise? Do we have the courage to set aside our own selfish desires to imagine our kind going on until the Sun dies. Do we have the moral fortitude to accept the science we have embraced even when it tells us we are finished and it's time for a new start with a more adapted species? Can we, or many of us anyway, do the right thing and help prepare for a distant future that we will never see?

All of us know, as individuals, that we are mortal. As we approach the end years we come to accept that mortality and, if we are concerned at all for our surviving families, we take steps to help them carry on after we are gone. This is a natural part of life that all of us face. Some probably better than others, of course. But it makes sense to plan for the futures of those we leave by investing our resources in their future. Why should it be different for us as a species?

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^** Wikipedia article with some possible problems, read carefully! I thought it fairly stated the definition and description well enough to save me some typing!

¹ We are talking not just about a single allele (a single gene), but most likely several important ones. Not only that we have to consider various versions of the short snippets of DNA that are not protein-coding, but part of the elaborate gene expression control program we now know to exist in much of what we used to call 'junk' DNA, the huge segments between protein-coding sections. Small changes in these control segments can have major impacts on when genes are expressed during development and hence produce significant changes in phenotypes with very little difference in genotypes. Our genome differs from that of chimpanzees by less than expected by the gross differences in behavior and body form. Part of the explanation may well involve subtle but important differences in the control networks for development.

² I have heard there are attempts to construct manufacturing facilities for both solar cells and wind turbines using electricity generated by these technologies! I hope a lot more of this is tried. However, we shouldn't get too excited until those technologies are also being used to extract the raw materials, ship them, drive the final assembly, ship the final products, and account for their installation. The shipping is particularly interesting since it means using electrified vehicles that can be recharged based on electricity production by, say some windmill somewhere, putting the electricity into the grid. Running the main manufacturing plant using your own product is a step in the right direction, but so much more needs to be done.

³ A complicating factor is that many exporting nations (for oil in particular) are increasingly using their own products even while production rates are not rising or are even declining. That means countries dependent on imports of energy are going to be hurting far more quickly than those that can produce some portion of their energy needs.

Are we guilty of over abstraction?

What makes humans different from other animals?

All mammals and birds form representations of things in the world in their brains. It is doubtful that other animals assign "names" to these things. The representation in neural encoding is its own index. This is essentially what we mean when we say we see something in our mind's eye. We are activating the representation directly. But, we humans go beyond this direct representation and also assign an abstract, second order representation to index the thing-itself representation. That is we give it a name, a more compact representation, presumably encoded in the language area of neocortex (as opposed to the visual cortex). This is the basis of language ability — to be able to talk about the thing or hear someone else talk about the thing. [We might interpret the fact that some chimpanzees, gorillas, and even parrots(!) have been trained to associate symbols (hand language or symbols on a computer screen) with very primitive language expression that these animals have some simple abstraction capacity. After all, our capacity to form true abstractions had to start somewhere.]

Arguably, however, an even more significant differences between human and all other animal mentation is the capacity for recursive abstraction. That is, we not only assign abstract symbols (like words or pictographs) to represent real things, relations, and events in the world, but we also manipulate those abstract representations coming up with even more abstract symbols to represent relations between our abstract representations! For example, we can classify all words referring to objects as "nouns", the name for all such words is an abstraction once removed from the object abstractions (names of things). Moreover, we can manipulate these abstractions of abstractions to form even higher order abstractions, e.g. we can talk about grammars as rules for how to use nouns (and verbs, etc.) without any reference at all to the basic word representations and certainly no reference to specific 'thing' representations. Our ability to create new abstractions from combinations of lower-level abstractions is seemingly endless. It is based on a recursive operation that is one of the new tricks that the human brain has mastered. We use it to build mental models of the world and conceptualize rules for how that world works. Our creativity allows us to construct novel manipulations and play "What-If" games in our heads.

The problem with recursion is knowing when to stop!

Could it be that we have gone overboard? Is one of humanity's mental problems in dealing with the real world (e.g. denial of global warming) that we have a tendency to go too far in abstracting already existing abstractions? Essentially what I am asking is, have we gotten so abstract in our ways of thinking that we can no longer refer back to what is happening in the real world for confirmation that our beliefs are veridical? It would be like saying that we have constructed mental representations of names for things that don't actually exist, but now we think of those things as a reality in themselves. Consider how easily people cut off in their minds the linkage between the steak wrapped in plastic in the butcher's case and the steer that was raised in miserable conditions, that had to be slaughtered, butchered, and transported in many pieces to the grocery store for them to buy and consume. None of this is abstract, yet it is easy to ignore when picking out that perfect cut for the barbecue. The grocery store as our source of food is a metaphorical abstraction. We've been so good at creating and manipulating abstractions that we now believe in non-metaphorical realities that do not conform to physical reality. Unlike other metaphorical realities, fictions, we create for merely entertainment value, these realities are accepted as actual reality. And we are willing to risk our existence on those beliefs. I want to explore this conjecture a bit more.

First I will give you a couple of examples of 'good' recursive abstraction, that is where the process is generally a 'good' thing and in which there is always a way to reference back to physical reality, thus assuring veridicality. Then I will offer some examples of where I think we might be too inclined to over-abstraction with a result that is problematic, and we can discuss the consequences of the latter.

I've already mentioned language as an expression of recursive abstraction. Our ability to form complex sentences that go beyond merely describing things and beyond describing relations between things, but can also describe higher-order abstractions (like the noun) and relations between these, is at the root of some of our crowning glories in the expansion of knowledge. Two examples come immediately to mind. Mathematics and science are spectacular achievements based on the ability to abstract and manipulate abstractions forming higher-order abstractions. In my series on I expound on the ultimate abstraction of science and math in the sense of being able to describe these in a completely abstract form.

Mathematics is a system of symbols used as abstractions, for example using variables to represent some parameters or equations and relations to represent relationships, with a well developed set of rules for manipulating these symbols so as to derive other abstractions. Mathematics, in all its various forms, is a formal language. Formal means that the use of the rules is very strict (consistent). Interestingly, there is a slight (and surprising) hitch in mathematics that fortunately only shows up at the fringes — that the system might be consistent, but it cannot be complete, or vice versa, (see: Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem) in the sense that one can prove all true theorems in the same system. That little hitch isn't much of a problem for the practical use of mathematics, but it is interesting to pure mathematicians and philosophers. Even with this interesting hiccup, math is still an extremely useful, productive way to drive abstraction to stratospheric levels.

Math is the language of science. All of the sciences use mathematics in multiple different ways to express statements about the nature of the world at all levels. This can be as simple as algebraic expressions relating various variables in a dynamic process (e.g. Newton's Laws of Motion, F = ma), or as complex as mathematical models of complex processes composed of multiple partial differential equations (calculus) that can only be solved by advanced computation. Computer models are, in some sense, the penultimate in abstractions since they are the result of the aggregation of more abstraction than any one human mind can accomplish and no single human could ever 'run' such simulations in their heads.

Math and science can be viewed as systems of extreme abstraction that have been shown repeatedly to 'work' in the sense of producing practical results. Philosophy is another formal system of abstraction that preceded math and science (at least the logic part of philosophy is formal), but taken as a whole is too dependent on ambiguous language and mentation (argument) to produce consistent results. How many schools of philosophy that have been at odds with one another have been started? The branches of science and math don't compete with one another. And when there are seeming incompatibilities between any two or more sub-branches, there are formal methods for resolving the conflict. Again, these have proven to work time after time. So, while I consider philosophy to be an important endeavor to keep the mind sharp and working well, it is not an adequate method of recursive abstraction that is reliable or always tracked back to the grounding in reality.

Now for some examples of rather poor abstraction that has gotten us into some serious trouble.

My first example is money. Once long ago, the value of things could be determined rather straightforwardly based on the thing's contribution to survival and perhaps (after survival was assured) pleasure. But gross things, like cows and bushels of barley, are difficult to trade and even keep track of. So somewhere in Mesopotamia sometime after agriculture got going, some bright bulbs started creating markers (symbols pressed into clay slabs) representing quantities of goods of value (see: Wikipedia's History of Money). The markers were abstractions. They worked because the represented something real in the minds of the farmers and accountants. Simple enough. People in Sumer and Ur and throughout the Middle East as well as other parts of the world, developed trading methods based on the markers. You deposited your quantity of barley in a granary, received a 'chit' marking the 'value' and later you could use the chit to buy back your grains or convert the value into something else you needed. It still worked because it wasn't that far from the old direct barter system — just a hell of a lot more convenient.

But things have gotten bizarre since then! One of my earlier blogs provided a different way of looking at money (What is money, really?) as being information about the amount of usable energy that was available to do useful work — a physicist's perspective, if you will. This viewpoint actually takes us back to the original idea that money (those markers in clay tablets) ought to represent the actual survival/enjoyment value of things rather than some abstract market value that no one has a clue about connection to reality. I will be writing a good deal more about money in its current incarnation, especially in its form called debt, in future blogs. Here I just want to point out how incredibly abstract we have gotten in our thinking about wealth, denominated in monetary terms. Tell me, exactly what is a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) worth in terms of survival/enjoyment value? Our financial economy system (as opposed to the so-called 'real' economy where we make things that we use to survive and enjoy) has gotten so over abstracted that no one, not the economists, not the boys on Wall Street, or the investment bankers, or the politicians, or the Fed chairman and his minions — no one knows what the hell anything is worth any more. And it has had a devastating effect on valuation of real things like houses and infrastructure. Today's concept of money is so abstract (in fact money is treated as a commodity without any intrinsic value at all!) that the reality of the financial world is as much about religious beliefs as about anything called economic science (the latter now widely acknowledged as an oxymoron).

Stay tuned over the next several weeks as I steep myself in biophysical economics and explore the evolution of our conceptualization of money and how disconnected from physical reality it has gotten.

While we are on the topic of economics (as a study) lets mention that that particular discipline has gotten so out of touch with reality that the practitioners' guidance of policy decisions, by poor deluded politicians, has become downright dangerous. Nay, not just dangerous, suicidal! As I read Paul Krugman's Sept. 2^nd article in the New York Times it became abundantly clear to me that NO economists, even the ones who supposedly predicted this economic debacle, has any real idea about what is going on. Krugman, at least, understands that markets are not perfect, but he falls short of recognizing that the real underlying problems with the economy is that we have finally reached fundamental limits to growth and resource extraction. Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is apparently a Keynesian. someone who believe that the government should pump lots of "money" into the economy to save jobs and stimulate spending! My god, what a delusion! A formula for disaster if ever there was one, given that net energy flow into the economy is declining. Krugman, like all non-biophysical/ecological economists believes in growth. And he has his own ideas (different from the Obama crowd) as to how that can be accomplished.

Economics is one of those fields that deals in over abstraction. Early economists like Leon Walras were entranced by the spectacular achievements of physics with its mathematical models. Some have coined the term "physics envy" to describe the desire that economists had for developing elegant mathematical formulations describing the "laws" of economics, and this is probably accurate to some degree. Economists are enthralled with the perfection of mathematics as a method for abstracting the underlying processes of economic activity and then manipulating those abstractions (in accordance with strict mathematical rules) to make predictive pronouncements about the way the economy works and will work in the future.

The problem is that none of these deep thinkers bothered to check whether their math made sense! Until people like Kahneman and Tversky started questioning the basic assumptions of rational agents in the standard models of economics (see: Behavioral economics) there was very little attempt (within classical economics) to check with reality (to be fair many economics PhD candidates spent years collecting data from favorable periods that seemed to confirm economic models, but there are statistics and then there are statistics!).

Today economics is a religion rather than a science. Anything that doesn't conform to orthodoxy is not recognized (the psychological data about how humans are anything but rational agents is getting harder and harder to ignore!) Politicians have yet to figure this out so, for the time being, economists still have power (look at Bernanke, Geithner, and Summers as examples). But it can't last forever. Physical reality has a way of forcing itself into our consciousness even when we try hard to ignore it.

Incidentally, the so-called Nobel prize in economics is actually not recognized as a true Nobel science award. It is called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It is highly regarded by economists, naturally, but is not now, nor ever was a recognition for 'scientific achievement'. Just so you know.

Well, speaking of religion...

One of the most profound and dangerous abstractions humans have engaged in is convincing themselves, and firmly believing, that they are something so special in the world that they have transcended nature completely. The human mind, as epitomized in Descartes' philosophy, for example, and in the teachings of most religions, is beyond natural law. We have extraordinary powers of reason and mentation that do not depend on bodily functions to exist. We have convinced ourselves that we have an immortal soul that exists beyond the death of the body. Never mind that no one has ever shown this with evidence. But just about everybody believes it. Those who claim it isn't so are called atheists, and I have to wonder how they know any more than believers what the 'truth' is.

I will be the first to proclaim that humans are unique in the animal kingdom. We have evolved an extraordinary brain that can do things, like recursive abstraction, that, apparently, no other animal has achieved on this planet. As such we are to be congratulated for participating in a new round of emergence. We operate under a new set of dynamical laws that give rise to new behaviors and new organizations. Congratulations Homo sapiens. But don't let it go to your heads (damn, too late).

We are still nothing more than a part of natural evolution. We are still completely dependent on all the organization that underlies our unique position. And because we were too immature to recognize this relationship with nature, we made some horrendous mistakes. We are facing some of the worst of them right now. The globe is warming. The energy is running out. And we simply don't know what to do about it. We are still having collective trouble believing that we aren't those transcendent beings divorced from mere physical reality. But that lesson is about to be learned.

We learned the trick of recursive abstraction. We learned it so well that we abstracted ourselves and our activities from reality and severed the connection (in our minds) so that we could do whatever we liked or could imagine doing. We found it expedient to go to war and kill, to rob and steal the wealth of others, to disrupt the more peaceful indigenous peoples, to destroy ecosystems and species of animals (and plants) wantonly. All because we were above it all. We abstracted our existence and simply forgot about physical reality.

And, in due course, we are going to find out what the consequences of over abstraction will be.

Recursive abstraction is a good thing, really. You just need to know when to stop.

Getting serious

Warning: More than a few of you will vehemently disagree with my POV. But see my challenge at the end.

What is developing politically and economically, especially in the United States, is not at all encouraging.

Politically, in the US, the Obama administration is beginning to make misstep after misstep. They started with a flawed view of economic reality in believing in the financial gurus and neo-classical economics, especially the notion of growth as the basis for prosperity. We now know, well those of us who are actually not blinded by ideological beliefs, that growth in the real economy is absolutely essential to maintaining the illusory wealth in the Ponzi scheme called banking and finance. Rich bankers and Wall Streeters get to take home fabulous bonuses on the backs of workers who produce real goods and services. Perpetual growth is not only impossible in theory, any growth is no longer physically possible because we are in decline with respect to the availability of net energy able to do economic work. The financial world is beginning to crumble. The short term ups that we see in the stock market, the slowing of decline in GDP (always suspect since the government decides just what numbers go into calculating GDP), and other so-called green shoots, are just part of the noisy, chaotic collapse. In fact, if you want a good model of how the economy is collapsing  even when there are temporary supposed recoveries, look at the effects of global warming on climate variability. They are very similar non-linear, complex dynamic processes that have chaotic behavior. One thing you shouldn't do in a chaotic system is try to predict long-term trends from short-term observations.

An example of an Obama misstep is his handling of the health care reform process. Apparently he 'learned' a lesson from the Clinton experience and doesn't want to appear to be pushing his own design. He wants to leave it to Congress to come up with the plan. And he hopes it will be bi-partisan. Neither wish will be fulfilled and whatever does emerge will be, as typical these days, meaningless, ineffective, and a complete waste of everybody's time, including the press. Oh wait, they already waste their time, don't they. [Incidentally, my predictions are based on long-term observations!!!]

To be fair, Obama isn't a dictator. Maybe he would do things differently if he had any real power. The Congress, on the other hand, actually is in a position to do something useful with health care, energy, and regulating financial institutions (though only the second one is not a waste of time). But they won't. Between K-Street money and the partisan, ideological, and idiotic rhetoric, the Congress has proven itself completely incompetent. So, of course, they will not resign and let someone capable take over (see below about incompetent managers).

That leaves the electorate: The well-educated, knowledgeable, thoughtful, and conscientious electorate. Oh, right, I'm thinking of a different planet.

We should, but won't, face a reality. Representative democracy has failed, along with its co-conspirator capitalism. Virtually any form of democracy is likely to fail when the electorate gets too fat and lazy, and too ignorant to care or know that they need to care. The only way I can think to explain the failures of Congress and the White House is that we, the people, are incompetent to deal with the complexities of modern problems and governance. I don't just mean not knowledgeable enough, I mean not smart or wise enough. The average American, and I'm betting the average world citizen, does not have the brain capacity to handle what needs to be handled in order for any kind of citizen-influenced governance process to work. This includes the Communist Chinese and other autocratic regimes -- if you don't think their decision making isn't influenced by the wants and desires of the populace then you don't understand political power, or why revolutions happen.

OK, I realize I am trash talking my own species. I realize that people can and will call me a human hater (only proving my point since I'm actually trying to suggest something constructive AND feasible). I realize that this is NOT an uplifting message or hopeful encouragement to try harder. I am claiming that humankind has reached its evolutionary level of incompetence and most everyone is going to take offense at that. But I am compelled to tell the story as I honestly see it (and hope I am completely whacko). Because, if I am right, the only way we have a chance at some kind of future on this planet is to be brutally honest and open to reality as it is, not as we wish it were. If I am right, then I hope humans have just enough intelligence to use science to dig out the truth of the matter and the moral courage to face that truth. In other words, I hope we are sapient enough to realize an evolutionary truth.

Not only will Homo sapiens go extinct, but actually should do so!

I've been suggesting, throughout this blog space, that the evidence is adequate to show that Homo sapiens is not sufficiently competent in terms of managing its own cleverness. It does not possess a sufficient capacity for native wisdom (judgment) to guide either aggregate decision making (supposed democratic) or dictatorial (supposed benevolent) governance of the overly complex and now dangerous system we have created ourselves. As a species we simply have too little brain power when it comes to sapience relative to what is needed to manage our affairs. As a result we are ruining the planet for too many current living organisms and for ourselves.

Incompetent managers rarely resign when the first signs of incompetence (and failure of the enterprise) start to show up. Indeed most such managers keep making the same or worse mistakes until the whole thing blows up and they are forced out (remember Enron and other such examples? Imagine Ken Lay resigning early on and admitting he'd blown it?) That is probably what is going to happen to humanity. We are so taken with ourselves that we are incapable of admitting we've blown it and are making a huge mess of things. The more typical response, the one we are seeing from the Obama administration and cheered on by those not poisoned with right-wing ideology, is to ignore the warning signs and work desperately to restore the very processes that are at the root of our problems -- the so-called business as usual (BAU) -- and can readily be seen to be causing so much damage to our whole world. [Actually even the right-wingers hope BAU is restored, they just want it done their way, or they want Obama to fail so they can get back in power and really rev up the market solution to everything. Or so they claim.]

So it is with the whole human species. We cannot possibly admit to our own incompetence it seems. And that inability means that, like Enron (as a harbinger), our whole social structure will collapse and just as climate change along with global habitat failures, like adequate drinking water, put maximum stress on humanity. Though we might like to 'believe' that humans are resilient and adaptable, we cannot know that the world in the not-too-distant future will be one we can adapt to without our access to abundant high-grade energy sources. We humans, as de facto managers of the Ecos, will keep telling ourselves that we can fix this (with new technology) just like Ken Lay kept assuring everyone that Enron stocks would continue to climb (even while selling off his own shares!)

Virtually everyone on this planet (except, likely, those who have read this far!) believes that economic growth is the key to future happiness. They buy into something called 'sustainable growth' without even thinking what an oxymoron that is. They don't grasp the significance of population growth or the house of cards structure of modern banking and finance. The majority of people (living in cities now) don't have a clue where their food comes from, and even many who grow the food don't realize just how much fossil fuel goes into growing, processing, and delivering that food to the cities.

Our education systems, again especially in the US, but emulated by other countries unfortunately, do not teach understanding and promote wisdom. They teach rule systems within subject domains and test students to see how well they've incorporated the rules into their brains. They teach elementary facts and then test to see if students can use the rules, like logic, to derive simple relations between facts. They do not teach first principles and meaning, for the most part. There are those few who make brave attempts to do so; I've known a few. But they are rare and often not appreciated, especially since I'm not sure most students could actually learn this deeper form of knowledge anyway. The majority of students I have come in contact with (thankfully there are the happy minority) prefer learning rules and facts. Memorization is much easier than true critical thinking. And it is certainly easier to demonstrate competence on exams (and easier for teachers to construct exams and grade them!)

As I cast my gaze about I have to ask, in what realm of human endeavor do we find real competence? Where are the competent managers of Homo sapiens' affairs? If they don't exist (please, anybody, show them to me), then explain to me why a bumbling, dangerous species like ours deserves to continue?

Extinction of the species need not mean extinction of the genus. In many taxa, at the genus level, there are many species with reasonably wide distribution so that if calamity falls to one, the others survive and might even produce some new species to take the place of the old (fill an empty niche). In the case of Homo we are, unfortunately from an evolutionary standpoint, all there is. And we are the only symbolic reasoning, true language communicating, and sapient specimens in the whole Hominidae family. Neanderthals might have been a lot like us but they don't seem to be around any more. So we're it. If humanity is going to have a shot at a future in a world we have very little understanding of, we had better find a way to evolve into competent managers.

I wish I could say that we could 'learn' to be competent, and I know many of you sincerely believe we can, but I suggest that the preponderance of evidence is against this possibility. We've had a very long time to show that we are learning from our mistakes (and we've made so many over the millennia) but the current situation globally just seems to show that we've really learned very little. This, even though we have libraries full of history books documenting those mistakes in great detail. We've had many bright individuals who have analyzed and taken meaning from history. They have pointed to what we should learn from those mistakes and still we keep making them over and over again. We need to be better than we are as a whole population, not just as a few visionaries who are unable to move the masses. I am convinced that our current species is not able to do this by learning alone. We must evolve a better brain. And I think we can do this. As to how, that is something that we must pursue scientifically. There are several options. Unfortunately, the one option I think is most likely is that there will be no collective action in this direction, we will remain in denial right up to the end. But as in the semi-normal distribution of any physical/mental trait there are always exceptional (right tail for those of you familiar with statistical distributions) variants, in this case, of high sapience. Those who 'see' the future will prepare for it. The likelihood of a massive evolutionary bottleneck (population collapse) seems to grow higher with each passing day and every political/economic misstep. With some luck (a non-zero probability) those prepared for that collapse and what follows may get through the bottleneck, form a breeding population, and (again with luck) adapt to the changing world. In a sense this is just ordinary evolution at work. We, as a species, will not have intentionally done anything to affect the outcome.

To me that is sad because it can just as easily go bad for Homo. The most brutal minimally sapient versions could survive and humanity would end up devolving to some former less intelligent form. There are no guarantees in the evolution business. But it will be what it will be. I would prefer to see us face up to a moral responsibility thrust on us as the scientific species and take a proactive stance with regard to ensuring the survival of the genus.

I challenge humanity -- and all readers of this blog -- to prove me wrong! Do so by not letting what looks to be overwhelming human nature cause us to crash and burn. Note this is not an invitation for commentators to provide endless speculations about technology saving us, or pointing out companies that seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough in solar energy, or pointing at some bill in Congress that just might have some hope in it. We've all heard all the anecdotes, and claims, and ideologies, and beliefs, and exuberant hopefulness. No more of that here.

I want action. Actually demonstrate by doing. Show me how to move humanity toward substantive and scalable action. That last part is important. What needs to be done needs to be done now. We need to be sucking CO₂ out of the air rather than talking about how we might slow down putting it into the air. We need to be reducing the population world-wide right now rather than projecting that one day, because more people will be richer (just how is that to happen exactly?) and women will get education that the population growth will slow down and then decline. We need to be conserving to extremes what fossil fuels we have left in order to bootstrap our future (much smaller) civilization into a truly sustainable energy flow rather than wasting what we have on trying to sustain an inherently unsustainable financed consumption-based economy. Show me how to get the vast majority of human beings working on this agenda within the next two to five years.

I sincerely hope someone out there can prove that I am wrong in my somewhat speculative (but evidence-based)  conclusions about the most likely scenario for the future. But it cannot be a proof by idle chatter. I have all of history (not to mention the principles of physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology) to demonstrate that mankind is on a collision course with nature. You will need to come up with something pretty bloody brilliant to show how this course can be changed with this species effectively staying the same as it is now. Good luck.

Meanwhile I will continue to think about what we might be doing if we have to start over and have basically more sapient people taking charge!

What is "sustainability"?

The Magic Word

I have been thinking about this word, sustainability, a lot lately. How could one not? It is used everywhere these days. Sustainable development, sustainable energy, sustainable growth! Everyone, it seems, is on the sustainability bandwagon, and I have been no exception.

I developed a model which I call that sustainability criterion for renewable energy production. The criterion is simple enough, a renewable energy production facility (e.g. solar, wind, etc.) is sustainable only if it produces enough excess energy above that required for economic work to replicate itself before its useful life is ended. Of course this doesn't meant that every solar panel has to somehow reproduce another solar panel every, say, 20 years. What it does mean is that in the aggregate of all renewable energy producers and the physical plants that produce those producers, there has to be enough energy produced to produce the next generation of energy producers. On the whole, then, the combined energy outputs of all renewable sources has to serve the economic work process plus provide energy to run the processes that continue to produce the energy capture and conversion equipment.

Currently solar panels and wind mills/generators are manufactured using existing energy infrastructure which mostly comes from fossil fuels. Eventually, when the fossil fuels are no longer available all of these energy producers will need to supply their own reproduction energy just as biological systems must do. To be sustainable, in the sense that life has sustained itself on this planet for billions of years by capturing more energy than just what was needed for maintenance, our invented energy capture/production equipment will have to do the same.

This is a systems-based definition of sustainability. Virtually every profession and perspective will define the term somewhat differently based on their particular view of things. For example, a sustainable business model will reflect the values and beliefs held by capitalists who foresee sales and profits going on and on into the far future. You know, like General Motors! I've even lately heard the term used in the context of education — sustainable education invokes the notion that we can keep the machinery of school-based education (teachers and students) going on forever, with good 'outcomes'.

'Sustainable' has become one of those words that can mean pretty much whatever we want it to depending on who is using it and under what context they're doing so. Too many of these implied meanings seem contradictory at times. At some point it becomes a meaningless word.

The dictionary definition basically says that it means to support or keep going. No real time frame is mentioned. I think most people apply this general concept to whatever is being claimed is sustainable. We'll keep the business going. We'll keep the education system going. And so on.

But there is also a hint of the notion that we won't be able to keep the business going unless we do something special to the model (process) that makes it sustainable. We need to change something about education in order that it becomes sustainable. Our energy systems and economy need to be altered so as to be sustainable long into the future. And that, it seems to me, is where things get pretty fuzzy.

I'd suggest we take the systems perspective on this issue. In this approach we view that which is to be sustained as a process. It has boundaries through which inputs and outputs travel. It gets energy, materials, and information from its environment and pumps out heat and wastes and 'products'. In most cases the question resolves to: "can this process continue to pump out that product as long into the future as we wish?" From this perspective it is clear that three things need to be settled before an answer can be gotten. First, the inputs are resources and we need to know if there are essentially endless supplies of these. Second, are the internal workings of the process such that the ratio of product to waste (and energy to heat) is maintainable for all time? Are there possibly flaws in the inner workings that will cause a steady degradation of output over time? Third, will the environment continue to carry off the product(s) and wastes so that they do not build up and clog the flow through?

This may seem like an oversimplification of the whole problem, but it is only a matter of accounting and measuring in reasonable units of time. Every process has these characteristics even if there are millions of inputs and outputs; even if the inner workings are mind bogglingly complex and stochastic. All of that may make the question harder to answer, but it does not alter the fact that an answer is possible. And, necessary.

Several things can impact the long-term sustainability of a process. If the resources are finite then the draw down of them clearly makes the process unsustainable. In some cases, alternative inputs might be substituted, but if they too are finite then this just delays the inevitable. If the process is one that grows, then several things can go wrong. The growth itself may involve slight errors in replicating key sub-processes causing the internal workings to go awry. If the rate of influx of even an infinite resource is fixed then at some point the growth will outstrip the resource input and the system will neither be able to continue to grow, nor will it be able to have any kind of margin of error, so to speak, should something go wrong. A related problem is if the growth of a process means an increase in product/wastes output relative to the absorbing rate of the environment then the process can be choked in its own output.

If we take this systems approach to characterizing the meaning of sustainability then it becomes clear that claims of sustainable this or sustainable that need to be verified by demonstrating that all of the factors above are met. This will take research, careful observation, careful measurements, and careful use of language! Of course the bandwagon is rolling already. The word, like the word "green" has taken on a life of its own devoid of any thoughtfulness and so it is unlikely that the powers that be will insist on some kind of standard usage that includes validation of claims made. Sustainability is a fad, so the likelihood that it will be a terribly useful guide to policy decisions is rather small. Just label something as sustainable and everyone will applaud.

Of course, in the really long perspective nothing is sustainable! If sustainable means keeping something the same forever (or a really long time) it is actually an unachievable status in the real world. Everything is changing and evolving. I mentioned that life has sustained itself through the trick of capturing more energy than it needs to just maintain. That is how it grows. But the life on Earth today is vastly different from life a half billion years ago. What has endured is the energy flow through driving the internal workings. Those, in turn have been subject to copy errors and because all processes (cells, for example) are embedded in complicated environments that put stresses on them, they are subject to selection for those errors that happily confer some advantage. Life is sustained as long as energy flows, but species, and higher taxonomic categories as well, are not sustainable. Indeed they should not be sustainable in the very long run.

Our current social systems, our economic and political models, even our organizational forms and family units, are presently undergoing huge stresses from an environment we ironically had a great deal to do with creating. Nothing that we have or are is truly sustainable. Everything, including us, will change or go extinct in the long run. And the long run may not be as long as most of us think.

We cannot sustain our current version of social order and economic activity. We look for ways to fix the inherent flaws (like increasing regulation over capital markets) to make what we do now sustainable. But it is largely a vain effort. We are all inherently conservatives who want the world we have known to stay the same. We want to go on building so-called wealth and having kids to give it to. We want everything to be as it was for our lives. We believe our experiences were valid and should be sustained for all time. But we are wrong.

We should not be looking to sustain what we have, just for the sake of keeping it going. We should look for ways to stabilize the parts that work, to buy time and keep the change from being overly destructive. But we need to embrace evolution. We need to let go of institutions that are dilapidated, that are actually causing us more pain than good. What we need to do is look at our processes as described above and make wise decisions about resource flows based on what is and is not renewable. We need to evaluate the internal workings, our economic models and our population size, relative to both the resource issues and the piling up of wastes at our feet and in our water.

Life abides. It is sustainable. Processes change. We should recognize this and live by it. We should not believe that we are going to keep everything exactly the same for the indefinite future. That doesn't mean it is OK to be a destructive force or cause damaging changes (as with our over production of CO₂). But it does mean we have to think through our institutions, our processes and our values guided by nature's design and be able to change those as seems wise, rather than slavishly follow some vague concept called sustainability out of a foolish desire to preserve a status quo. Right now people are wasting valuable time trying to figure out how we can generate liquid fuels out of vegetation in order to keep driving our cars. They talk about sustainable fuel production trying to make the idea of maintaining our lifestyles seem reasonable. They want to build giant solar arrays that will rob the Ecos of some of its fair share of light so that we can maintain our consumption of electricity (indeed without addressing the population growth this is more than just maintenance). Human life, in this mode of thinking, is not sustainable. And if we persist, neither might be a livable planet.

A Sapient Society - Reflections

Upon Reflection

On Monday I posted a wild idea for a sapient society, actually a sort of architectural framework for how a society of any scale might be functionally organized to reflect a human-centered yet Ecos-balanced approach to living. At the time I thought this was sort of radical, but then on reflection I realized that this organization is exactly what we evolved in the first place!

Ancient tribes of humans had something of this architecture in their structure. The core has always been the collective knowledge of generations and the wisdom of the elders. Certain individuals performed duties of governance, education, communications, etc. And most everybody participated in the operational functions of living, collecting food, wood, constructing shelters, etc. In other words, we humans have always been constructed to work in social structures like this. Large (120-150 people) or small (20-30 people), tribes have been the social and cultural context for human evolution for a really long time.

We just kind of screwed up when agriculture allowed us to start modifying this basic plan and growing our social units beyond a comfortable size.

No one was to blame really. It wasn't anyone's fault that we didn't have the foresight to see the kind of problems that would emerge from restructuring our normal social organization in order to more efficiently accommodate the needs of a farming life. We are, after all, adaptive. Agriculture put emphasis on a different set of skills from tribal living. The knowledge core (my university of noesis) had to become much more focused on specialization. Schools and trade guilds were invented to fulfill the disciplinarian role of education, to make specialists for efficiency purposes. The stored knowledge and wisdom became oriented toward seasonal time scales. Governance started to rely more heavily on a top-down autocratic kind of command and control rather than guidance.

What was missing was knowledge about ourselves, about our humanness. Early civilization was built on the best guesses anyone could make about how to best organize. All of these civilizations were 'self-organizing' with whatever knowledge of human nature seemed available. And, too, don't forget that a lot of causal explanation for human nature and the way the world worked was based on the belief in unseen spirits and gods. Let's face it, we were pretty ignorant about an awful lot having to do with our own natures. What developed was a kluge of organization, a Rube Goldberg design working with the best tools we had at the time. That included slavery and war. That included giving in to materialism (remember we evolved in an environment of scarcity, so when technology started producing plenty we got greedy) and creating unnecessary opulence. We created kings and priests and generals and overlords.

Deep in the human psyche we have always had the desire to organize for mutual support and cooperation. All of our failed and semi-successful attempts to set up commerce and a polity have, at root, been attempts to embody the utopian ideal of the tribal organization.

Things just got too big and too complicated before we really understood. All of our 'isms' and 'ists' are nothing more than groping, sometimes desperate, searches for the way back to humanity. Socialism isn't bad. Capitalism isn't bad. Even fascism isn't inherently bad in the sense that it seeks organization around a 'knowledge' core. The problem with all of them is that those cores (state control, free markets, and their various combinations with a 'ruling class') were not based on wisdom and knowledge/understanding of the larger meaning of human existence. The state was created in a vain attempt to support the individuals but ended up turning humans into machines and instruments.

I'm not calling for anything really new in the 'new social order'. I'm calling for something very old, very primordial in human consciousness. The only thing new is a better (though hardly complete) understanding of what it means to be human. We now understand that we are not angels or separate from nature, but an integral part of the grand evolutionary story. We're just part of the latest chapter. And we have our faults and foibles as cognitive creatures just as any species has its weaknesses when it comes to natural selection. We now know that we screwed up when we put wisdom on the back burner in favor of material wealth. But we also know we did it out of ignorance and can forgive ourselves.

That is, we can forgive ourselves if we have learned anything from our mistakes and resolve to correct those mistakes. That is almost certainly the only way we will win forgiveness from nature.

Can we devise new tribes? Can we organize new social arrangements along the lines I've outlined? Are there among us those who can live human lives recognizing a core of wisdom and knowledge and understanding as the organizing principle? Can we begin, in some small ways to recapture our humanity without giving up appropriate technology (like communications)? Or am I still just a dreamer of utopia?

A Sapient Society

A Whole New Social Order

After the Fall

Our current social order is not sustainable. Our economic system is based on a false set of premises — that we can extract all we want from the environment, pump all the waste we want into the environment, and all make our wealth by speculating with currency tokens. And all of this without any consequence other than that we are all enjoying more material wealth. Our political and moral positions admit that our societies must grow both in numbers of persons and in terms of how much consumption each person accounts for.

This is a monstrous lie. The world is finite. And we, as a part of the world, have reached, nay exceeded, our fair share of space and resources. Fairness, here, means that our existence does not threaten the existence of the vast majority of the biota. As things stand now, our existence, and the way we insist on living, has triggered the sixth great extinction event.

What is ironic about this is that we are almost certainly one of the species that is threatened since our existence actually does depend on the existence of the biota as it has been for the last many millions of years. And we are destroying much of that biota. Our actions have set in motion slow but inexorable forces that will accelerate the degradation of the natural world as time goes on.

But that will take many centuries, maybe even millennia to work out. What will actually happen very much sooner is that we will loose our capacity to do the kind of economic work that has been the hallmark of modern civilization and upon which our civilization utterly depends. Our world, even the less developed nations, run on fossil fuels that provide the most compact source of high power that mankind has yet exploited [NOTE: nuclear fission might be considered more compact, but its uses are primarily stationary and is still restricted to a very small percentage of the total energy consumed in the world.] And the net power availability of fossil fuels is starting to decline. For oil it is declining at an alarming rate and oil is the king pin energy source since it takes diesel fuel, for example, to mine and transport coal. Hence, all fossil fuel energy sources will go into decline even though there will still be lots of fossil fuels left in underground!

Our current form of social organization, our forms of governance, our economic processes, and our approaches to education of the younger generations cannot stand for much longer. We are on the verge of a social collapse and if I had to guess I would say within the next decade. Our world order is in a chaotic state and in such a state anything can happen. Even a slight event can trigger a complete phase transition. And no particular path to the bottom is predictable, only that the collapse will take us to the bottom.

For myself I maintain an optimism that lets me think the collapse will not be so catastrophic that mankind will destroy itself completely, say in a nuclear winter scenario. I do think very many helpless humans will suffer horrendous deaths from all manner of catastrophe, but there will also be survivors, even areas of the world where some small semblance of civility will remain. Indeed, those wise enough to foresee this may make special preparations (I'm not necessarily talking the typical survivalist story here).

If so, we will need to consider a new social order upon which to build a new society that may live in balance within the Ecos.

An Architecture for Social Structure

A human centered social structure

What we seem to have forgotten in our haste to create physical nirvana is that we are human beings and not just pieces of a giant wealth making machine. The latter is something that can easily ignore the rest of the Ecos and destroy nature in the name of progress without care. But if we remember that at the center of our human endeavors are real human beings who are not just cogs in a wheel but living beings that touch and interact with nature, indeed need nature in order to survive, we may become more human-centered. And human-centeredness doesn't mean hubris. It means we value ourselves as living, feeling, thinking beings first while still recognizing that all of those qualities obtain from being a part of the Ecos, not separate from it.

The key insight into how society might be arranged so as to optimize the human presence in this world is that we as a species are a product of the tripartite co-evolution of individual minds (development and learning), genetic pools, and group culture. We, as individuals, are a product of our genetic inheritance, our cultural inheritance, and our knowledge inheritance — our conceptual constructions or mental models.

An individual human being is an incredibly adaptive system, one whose behaviors can change and cover a wide range of responses to environmental change. The human capacity to learn is at the heart of our future. So, too, our societies have an inherent capacity for adaptation even if more sluggish than individual adaptation. Institutions are stable over multiple generations because they are more conservative in terms of organizational learning and changing as the environment changes. For most of human history this has been a strength. Where human individuals came and went, institutions endured, changing only slowly. In the quickened pace of our current social milieu this tendency may have become a liability, however.

Finally, with the advent of our understanding of the mechanisms of genetics and epigenetic controls we are beginning to grasp the nature of evolutionary adaptation, that which takes the longest time scale for change. And we have discovered that it is feasible (at least it appears to be so) that we can directly intervene in the genetic adaptation process to meet the challenges of this rapidly changing world.

We stand on the verge of reconciling these three very different time domains of adaptation in order to coordinate the future potential of human kind in the Ecos.

A society that is centered on the greatest human strength would have as its core value learning and adaptation even while maintaining a framework of time-proven knowledge. This is a succinct description of a university.

The university is a confluence of schools, laboratories and libraries where knowledge is gained, modified as evidence dictates, is taught to the younger generations, and is stored and maintained for ready retrieval upon need. A university is not just a "social construct". It is a natural extension of the human brain and mind. It is the societal mind, having all of the functions and qualities of an extended mind, along with the mechanical means to obtain, store, retrieve, and process knowledge for the good of the collective. It is, or should be, the seat of wisdom and understanding and open to all who seek that understanding.

A university of noesis (mind and knowledge) would form the core structure for a sapient society (Fig. 1). Rather than our current conceptualization of a government, 'running things', the university would be the guide for how best to coordinate the organization of the rest of the social structure. The governing board of the university would be a council of wise elders, not chosen by democratic vote, but by lifelong evidence of growing wisdom and moral stability. They would be selected as in a meritocracy with no set number of members and a rotating chairmanship. The university would be the strategic mind of the society. Not a central planner (as so many too often confuse this form of governance with the failed model of Soviet bureaucracy), but a strategic vision setting body, and all that that implies.

Figure 1. An architecture for a new social order. The University of Noesis is the core as described in the text. It would include the strategic element of a hierarchical, distributed control governance. The next outer shell contains the tactical and logistical functions for the entire society. Note that aesthetics, the appreciation of beauty, and the enjoyment systems are a part of this layer as these are as important as communications and education to the support and growth of every member of the society. The outer shell contains the operational systems that keep the society well and developing internally. The exergy and food systems are of primary importance but interfaces for other social systems and the rest of the Ecos are also part of this shell. The system is not closed, but the inflows and outflows of matter and other people are kept in balance.

The principle idea in Fig. 1 is that a social system must naturally incorporate a hierarchical and distributed control subsystem for all of its essential activities. This is accomplished naturally with the concentric rings shown in the figure. The outer ring contains the operational level activities that make life possible and provide for the material wealth the society needs. The middle ring provides the coordination control (logistical and tactical support) to keep the society operating smoothly and to provide rapid adaptive responses to changes in the overall environment (for example defense includes repairing storm damage). The inner core captures the highest value of human life — knowing and understanding — for the individual in the context of the society. The highest purpose of this social architecture is that all members have access to all knowledge that they might desire and that their lives are devoted primarily to self-actualization. The education and communications subsystems are devoted to ensuring all citizens as much access as they desire to the core.

The only cost one has to pay to be a member of society is to perform work as needed to maintain the structure. The bulk of 'jobs' will most likely fall under the exergy and food production categories. But any job that helps to maintain the structure so that energy flow is used most wisely (e.g. in helping construct energy efficient housing) counts. And as long as energy flows, everything else is free! Of course in a large enough grouping of such a social unit, some form of money token may be used to facilitate trade, but the monetary units would be based on exergy units and so would not become a basis for speculation or overvaluation.

Feasible????

As I am sure many of you are now saying to yourself, 'but this is just utopianism, this is nothing more than a hippy commune!' Well, I'd like to believe it is a little more sophisticated than that. And I think it employs a good deal more subtlety in terms of its governance and economic underpinnings than your run-of-the-mill commune. For example, this is advanced not just as a model of a small community (though that it certainly is) but, by extension in scale it is a model for larger, indeed, globlal community organization. Note the import/export/immigration/emigration aspects. These allow any number of small communities to link up with one another and to form aggregate concentric shell-organized meta-societies. The model applies at all scales because it is based on distributed hierarchical control as I have described it elsewhere.

And do not worry that I have gone off the deep end in dreaming. I recognize that what I have just described (and you have to recognize that this is in the context of all my previous writing) is completely infeasible because of one overriding factor — human nature. Or rather, the low sapient nature of our current species. We, in general, are simply not wise enough to form these kinds of communities, or communities of communities (as with so many of my concepts this architecture is self-similar at multiple scales!!!). If we were, it would already be done!

No, I do not expect that anyone will rush out and try to set up such a community in the wilderness somewhere with the dream that they will create utopia. What I want to do is point out that under the right conditions of human consciousness and eusapience I think this organization might actually be the natural consequence of societal living. If humanity were to evolve into a more sapient creature, I suspect this kind of social organization would be the norm.

Rather I offer it as a vision of what could be at some distant future time, after the fall of our current social order, and after evolution has had a chance to select for greater sapience among the survivors. One possible scenario might have it that some highly sapient individuals will seek one another out sometime before the fall and organize a means of ensuring their own survival. This could lead to a very interesting evolutionary bottleneck phenomenon whereby the gene pool of the survivors would have greater representation of whatever genetic (or epigenetic) factors are involved in sapience inheritance. Wishful thinking? Probably. Feasible? Possibly.

I can hope, can't I?

Reflections on Earth Day

Sustainability

What does it really mean? It has become the watchword of our age. Every company wants to get on the band wagon, or is it a gravy train? What does it mean to be green? Governments promote greenness and sustainability but only so far as these (whatever they are) can be achieved by markets and entrepreneurship.

Should sustainability mean enduring? And does it translate to something like keeping the world the same as it has been over the history of humanity? Does it mean keeping things as they are forever?

The more I read articles about these terms the more I wonder if everyone is on the same page!

Much of the environmental movement's sentiment has centered on preservation. It seems to me there are two very different motivations behind the idea of preservation. One is that we want the world to stay exactly the same as it has been and we conceive of the world that our great grandchildren will inherit will look exactly the same as it does to us. Much of the anger in those concerned with conservation seems to be directed at those people and processes that they perceive as threatening to destroy the world as it has been in human memory. We rail against human-caused species extinctions, pollution, and, now, climate change. We call for actions that will stop these behaviors. Many people see the acts of harm to the world caused by other people and they want to save the world. Those other people are too blind to see the harm. Most of them only see the gains for human convenience and comfort. They don't grasp the desire to keep the natural world undisturbed.

But another sense of preservation is not regarding the state of the world, but rather the potential of the world. What we should be concerned about is not that the world stay the same, but that it retains a potential to become whatever it can become. In other words we should want to preserve the capacity for the world to evolve. And by 'we', here, I mean humanity.

We evolved in a world that had been undergoing many kinds of changes since its birth 4.5+ billion years ago. Life emerged and evolved on a very different kind of planet than the one we inhabit today. What makes us think that things need to stay the same? Is evolution over? Are we the end of the road?

In my last post I tried to point out that evolution involves a system undergoing internal reorganization under the influence of energy flow. Our world has been jolted by an increase in the flow of energy due to tapping the underground reserves of fossil fuels. This increase in energy flow, over just the real-time flow of solar energy, is what allowed our advanced cultures with our substantial technologies to evolve. Unfortunately, those very technologies and combustion products of the fossil fuel revolution have substantially threatened our natural world in the ways decried by environmentalists. Along with our propensity to do what all life does given the chance, namely propagate our kind beyond the carrying capacity of the globe, the impulse of energy due to mankind has led to habitat destruction, pollution that cannot be detoxified by the natural world, and changing the climate in ways we probably won't like.

Now that we appear to be at the peak of oil production and soon to be at the peak of all energy production, it would seem that energy flow through our world is about to diminish. This might seem like good news for the natural world, and I can't argue with that. But it is decidedly bad news for humanity if we don't make some important decisions soon. It could literally spell the end of human evolution and the presence of second-order conscious, abstract symbol processing life on the planet. Unless you hate the human kind (and I think there are some aligned with environmentalism who do) this counts as devolution for the planet as a whole. It diminishes the potential for evolution of yet higher consciousness.

My personal sense of sustainability and preservation has to do with an active choice to preserve humanity's future options while reducing the harmful effects of mankind on the natural environment. To my mind these go hand in hand. I am less concerned with the fact that we have become the agents of change on the planet, not unlike prior climatic shifts or even meteors have been. We are responsible for changing the environment in ways that will have evolutionary consequences; of that I am convinced. But I think we were just doing what was natural to our kind and not evil in intent. Unwise, perhaps; at least we have most often acted out of lack of wisdom and understanding. But what has been done is done. What we need to do now is make some wise choices about what to do next. And that will be the hard part.

Moral Conundrum

I was sorry that the re-make of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" carried that name and tried to make some smaltzy nods to the original (Klatu and GORT). In general I think the movie had some major holes in it for trying to play to our nostalgia for the post-WWII fears that gave rise to the original. But never mind. The central message of the movie was, I think, still compelling. It could have warranted a completely different story line with a completely different title, say "The Universal Fitness Test".

In the new version Klatu tells the heroine that "... if you [humanity] live, the Earth dies. If you die, the Earth lives." Therein lies a moral conundrum. Certainly if humanity were to attempt to continue to live the way it has, the destruction to the Ecos could be planet killing. The movie's premise is that mankind could go on in this manner and the Earth would die as a result. But Earth is a rare complex-life supporting planet, something to be preserved. Ergo, mankind, being a threat to that preservation, must be destroyed. One sentient life form sets out to eradicate another (apparently less sentient!) and save the Earth.

It makes for nice drama. But the reality is that we cannot go on as we have. It is physically impossible to go much further than we have already because we are going to be extracting and using much less fossil fuels as the years progress. In fact, our numbers will decline dramatically, our bad influences on nature will diminish, and we will be reduced to a scattered few tribes reverting to primitive lives. We will have changed the climate, certainly, but no more so than other climate shifting events have done in the past. Evolution will carry on in the natural world. Mass extinction will happen but so will later effusive speciation as new forms learn to exploit new econiches. Earth abides. It will just be yet another different planet.

Can mankind survive this throwback? Possibly. But what a shame if we end up as we started, using stone tools and animal pelts to keep warm. What concerns me more is that mankind will not merely go meekly into that new stone age, but will commit species suicide. Earth will become a global Easter Island scenario.

Either way a great many of the products of evolution to date will be lost, and may never recover (it takes millions of years to cook fossil fuels in the crust). Our possession of technologies, our capacity to use concentrated energy for useful work, these are not evil things even though their profligate use has caused much destruction. It has always been a lack of wisdom that has allowed us to misuse and abuse our cleverness that resulted in these problems.

My one hope is that we can manage to preserve the potential for humanity to evolve into a wiser species. To do so will more than likely involve some very hard choices. We are faced with the overcrowded life boat drama. The boat can only hold X number of survivors, but there are 2X people scrambling to get in. Left to this situation, the boat will capsize and sink and everybody will drown. What do you do? If everybody drowns there is no more future.

We have already started a process in motion that I do not believe can be stopped. There are so many very good people out there who earnestly hope that it can. They believe that it must be stopped; that we must prevent climate change and species extinctions, etc. My heart goes out to all. But once it becomes clear that our species is incapable of changing its own nature and that we will die insisting on maintaining our lifestyle, then maybe they will understand that the only solution to Earth's problem is evolution of the genus Homo. Our species, Homo sapiens needs to go the way of Homo neanderthalis as a wiser species, our descendant, makes its debut. In the meantime we need to preserve the potential for that to happen.

Happy Birthday Charlie and Abe

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago on this date. His masterpiece work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection was publish just a tad under fifty years later. And the world has not be the same since.

Abe Lincoln was born that same day and became the 16^th President of the United States in 1861. And the world has not been the same since.

It was a good day, in a good year, on both sides of the Big Pond.

Not having much in common with lawyers or politicians, I tend to relate better to Darwin than Lincoln. And especially since the fundamental case for how natural evolution accounts for the emergence of the wealth of biodiversity in our world, I am happy to admit I feel a deep reverance for Darwin. In my mind his explication of natural selection operating on variations in the population of a species to generate "...endless forms most beautiful..." is one of the most important advances in human understanding of the natural world, perhaps the most important. Evolution by the generation of variation (by, it turns out, many mechanism, some not so random) followed by selection for fitness (on, also it turns out, several different levels) has proven to be the key to understanding so much. Even outside the strict field of biological evolution; for example in chemical and social dynamics the basic premise of Darwinian evolution can be found operating. The origin of life problem, while not actually a Darwinian form of evolution, nevertheless involves physical characteristics of a chemical environment that favors some configurations and energy states over others. The mechanical details of how those states obtain is quite different from mutations in DNA, for example, but the overarching principle of emergence of more 'fit' organization is still operative. What is missing in the origin of life work is finding the means by which early precursor molecules could autocatalyze more of their own kind (make copies) which could, at some level of complexity, harbor variations on which selection could operate. Biophysicist who are working on this problem feel they are close to possible answers.

It is fair to say that culture and societies evolve by selection of favored practices and institutions. These are readily observed to be copied with variation and then compete for mind space or economic advantage. Richard Dawkins even invented a unit of mental/social evolution called a meme to provide at least a conceptual unit for cultural selection to work on.

Darwin was the guy (well, one of the guys, Alfred Russel Wallace was a contemporary of Darwin's who came up with essentially the same idea at about the same time) who made the conceptual leap linking variation and selection to the idea of how evolution could operate. Tons of books and articles have been written about Darwin and his accomplishment, so I won't even try to extol him further here. I just want to say Happy Birthday and thanks for helping me and those who open their minds to understand how the world came to be.

[Edited, 2/13/09: Abe took office in 1861 not 1891 as I had originally typed it. Thanks to Larry Shultz's comment below for bringing that to my attention.]