Eaarth Day

Welcome to the Planet Eaarth

Bill McKibben's book, Eaarth puts it on the line. For those who don't know this is not a misspelling of EARTH, but a spelling the McKibben has used to name a different planet. It is a planet much like the late great one we called Earth, but it is not the same. Unfortunately for we humans, it is really the Earth transformed into a potentially unfavorable environment for mankind and many species alike. And we humans are the ones who did the transforming.

April 22 is designated Earth Day around the world. It is a day to observe the state of the planet and try to grasp the effects that human industry and population expansion has had on the Ecos (home). It is a day for reflection about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what should we do differently if we don't like what we see happening. My own observations lead me to suggest a renaming of the day; we may need to call it Eaarth Day. Our planet is already very different in significant ways from the Earth I knew as a child. And I think it is a different planet because people have remained stubbornly the same — selfish and self-serving at every turn.

I thought I would do some reflecting today. This is something of a summary of everything I have written in these blog pages over the last five years. This is both a lament and a work of hope. I lament that humans have come down this particular evolutionary road, the road that will lead to an evolutionary bottleneck of our own devising. I lament the mentality that is so stubbornly blind to the evidence that is there for all to see. I lament that those who are capable of seeing and understanding are so few in number and marginalized. I lament that if not myself, my children will face unimaginable challenges as the climate continues to shift into chaos and the energy needed to do the work of mitigation and adaptation declines so that humans will face the new planet's fury with just their wits and not much more than their muscles.

State of the Eaarth

I won't belabor the facts. McKibben has done an excellent job of laying out the facts regarding the state of the planet and how it got to this point. It should be enough to note the major trends which are clearly underway and for which the evidence gathers that things will get decidedly worse. The Eaarth is warming due to the emissions over the last two hundred years of carbon-based gasses into the atmosphere. These have what is called a greenhouse effect by capturing reflected light in the low to infra-red ranges and becoming more excited. In other words they trap low grade heat, which accumulates to the point of raising the temperature. Temperature variations across the face of the planet are the drivers of weather. And the long-term patterns of weather define what we call climate. Even though we talk about the average temperature increases as if the temperature everywhere was rising uniformly, this isn't the case. Temperatures are rising disproportionately, especially across latitudes. This sets up greater differentials which is what drives weather events. As the temperature of the atmosphere and surface waters of the oceans increase differentially, we get more extreme weather events, storms, hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc. more frequently and with higher extremities. The world is already experiencing massive shifts in weather patterns that are mostly not predictable based on our old climate models and past experience in weather prediction.

The amount of carbon-based gasses that have been produced by human industry have increased exponentially since the early days of the first steam engines burning coal. The emissions continue to grow year by year. And the amount that has already been put into our ecosystem is such that continued increases in average temperature are assured no matter what we do.

Ironically, it is the burning of hydrocarbon fuels which contributed to the emissions. It is ironic because those fuels are now starting to dwindle while humanity continues to expand and develop ever more consumptive economies. And these fuels are the source of over 80% of humanity's energy needs and, one could argue, nearly one hundred percent of our high-power (energy dense) fuel needs. Solar energy doesn't come close without truly humongous light apertures that are extremely costly, in both financial and energy investment terms, to build. Furthermore, it is those fuels that would be needed to move cities inland or weather harden human shelters or reorganize food production and transportation. In one fell act of profligate spending on trivia, like the Apple iPod and NASCAR racing, or poorly devised living arrangements like suburbia, we humans have squandered our inheritance and when we will need it most, it won't be available. Its resultant by-product is now that which is causing us great harm.

The most dangerous of all consequences of our behaviors will be the disruption of food production and the availability of potable water. With changes in the weather patterns and the unpredictability associated with the chaos we are seeing, cultivatable areas are going to shift and rainfall patterns will be out of sync with the needs of the kinds of crops we generally produce in our industrialized farming systems. Couple that with increasing costs and then scarcities of petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides and the picture looks terribly grim. Even if some bright bulbs are able to genetically engineer crops for, say, saltier, more alkaline soils, this will simply not be enough. It takes tremendous amounts of fossil energy to run industrial farms, and those are needed to produce the volume necessary to feed the population we have produced. This is a no-win scenario if ever there was one.

The state of the planet is not good. Not just for humans but for a wide array of life forms that have adapted to the climate and weather patterns of the last ten thousand years. Life can adapt if the changes that are wrought happen relatively slowly. Some life forms can adapt to a wide range of climates and so might survive the rapid shifts we are experiencing now and will more so in the future. But they tend to be lower order forms, like bacteria and cockroaches. Humans are not as adaptable, biologically, as we would like to believe. Our adaptation strategy which allows us to inhabit every continent and latitude except for Antarctica (until recently) is the use of exosomatic energy flows to supplement our bodily energy budgets. Take away the energy flows and we are naked and vulnerable.

I will stick to my so-far conclusion that humanity has written its own epitaph without realizing it. “Here lies a species that didn't pay attention.” As a species we are essentially entering a moribund state even while most of our kind fail to understand this. I really don't see any evidence that it will turn out differently. We will not be able to adapt to planet Eaarth in our present form.

State of the Species Homo sapiens

We humans did this to ourselves. There is no one else to blame. Nor can we fault nature for playing a cruel hoax on us. We chose to burn fossil fuels as fast as we possibly could to gain the material wealth we just had to have.

But, of course, we are just following our biological mandate to thrive and reproduce our kind, just the same as any other species. We started from basic ignorance about how the world works (science) and so you can't really say we are to “blame” for being what we are. At least this was the case in the beginning. What our industrial economy has allowed us to do is amass a considerable amount of knowledge from science about how things do work. And today, we actually know a great deal about what we should do to lessen the potential impact of the coming situation. This is where our true weakness shows up. As a species, the vast majority of our kind have decided to ignore the science and its implications because that would mean giving up a lot of those creature material comforts and that is something our intellects (on average) are incapable of doing it seems. Instead we have collectively decided to deny that there is any problem in spite of the amassing evidence. It seems that humanity has decided that if we ignore the evidence perhaps there really isn't a problem. Besides, we've always managed to overcome nature's limits in the past.

The most pervasive form of denial that I see today is what I will call the Thomas Friedman Syndrome. It involves an unshakable belief in innovation and technology to get us out of the climate/energy bind. Friedman writes incessantly about how, if only we Americans would invest in innovation (ala the Bell Labs of the 1960s), we would find wonderful new ways to produce energy that would allow us to keep right on growing the economy and providing creature comfort wealth to an expanding population. Friedman, like so many others, have engrained in their thinking the model of increasing functionality in diminishing scales of the digital devices that so pervade our lives today. Computer and communications technologies have benefited from the development of solid state devices that allow more information per unit of energy (matter too) to be processed per unit of time. Moore's Law (named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel Corp.) is really not a law of nature but a heuristic that describes how more processing power comes from shrinking the transistor elements and wires that can be etched into a slab of silicon. It works for electronics because it deals with information. It cannot be applied, even in principle, to matter and energy which are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Friedman's call for Energy Technology (ET) sounds like a rationale that says, if we could do this for computers, surely we can do it for energy production. He is, of course, tragically wrong.

I'm not sure how to characterize the other major mental breakdown that seems to have overtaken our species. The symptoms are seen in the irreparably broken American political and governance systems, but are also seen in those systems in just about every other nation-state in the world today. Our politics is a charade. It is a total farce from the nomination of candidates right through the elections and into the governance process. What we Americans are witnessing today that passes as a legitimate political process is pathetic. I just don't know what else to say.

The Republican candidates were a mix of every imaginable clown saying every imaginable lie in order to win votes. Even the man left standing now, Mitt Romney, is a caricature for all that is corrupt and vain about the Republican party and the conservative agenda. And this appears to be the best the Republicans can do. Is it better or worse than George W. Bush? It almost doesn't matter. Bush turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. We are suffering long after his reign and so is the Middle East. So is the rest of the world. Republican economics is based on greed and selfishness to the extreme. They favor the very rich and provide exceedingly weak rationalisms based on the known untrue claim that the rich are the “job creators”. They have one formula for curing the economic ills and that is lower taxes (especially for the wealthy). Their ideas are morally corrupt compared with the ideals, espoused by so many of them, in the Christian religion. Up is down. Right is left. War is peace. And on and on.

And then there are the Democrats. The incumbent president is, I'm sorry to say, no better than his Republican rival; he's just bad in different ways. The Democrats and their progressive base start with a very different philosophy with respect to care for their fellow human beings. They are less individualistic thinking and are willing to see that not everyone really does have the opportunity to become wealthy if they would just put their minds to it. As such they have basically good hearts as far as it seems to me. But they apparently lack any intelligence since they sincerely think that if we just take care of everyone who can't take care of themselves everything will work out. At least that is the way they look on paper. If you were to take a closer look at what they have actually done when they held the power you would see a different face.

Democrats are every bit as smitten with the economic growth/prosperity theory as are Republicans. They only differ in terms of what they think the best path forward should be. The Democrats are OK with raising taxes but want more government spending to boost the economy and increase the number of jobs (in theory). They are sticking with the vision of a vast middle class of happy consumers whose taxes (under a progressive tax rate scheme) would help pay for government and basic services for those less fortunate. Nice sentiment, perhaps, but totally unrealistic. The American success story was really based on cheap fossil energy being extracted and applied through new machines to produce more, and ever more novel, products and services. But the Democrats pretty much buy into the same fantasy that the Republicans do, that a growing global economy is the key to happiness for everyone. They are every bit as ignorant of the real nature of physical reality as are the Republicans.

In truth, all humans have a basic, native intelligence that could let them understand the realities of natural law and the consequences of our past and continuing actions. But something else is preventing them from exercising those gray cells properly. In order to admit of past mistakes and learn why we are in our current predicament, as prelude to thinking up mitigation strategies, we need to have wisdom. We need to be much more sapient beings in order to override our baser instincts and to guide our intellects in learning and deciding. And that is exactly why we are in the predicament in the first place. As a species we lack the native capacity to obtain and use wisdom to the extent needed to prevent our doing stupid things, or at least compensate appropriately if we do.

Human beings lack the level of sapience needed to cope with the predicament. They lacked it historically which is why we have the situations we have today, and they lack it now to provide a guide in deciding how to best deal with the predicaments we face. Ergo, nature will impose its laws on us at last, and our species, like so many before us, will go extinct.

Which leads me to the hope. I offer none for Homo sapiens. We have sealed our own fates and, indeed, our own coffins. Rather I have hope for evolution to continue to work its magic! Just because our species will expire does not mean our genus will too. Evolution has a history of fits and starts on Earth. Our planet has never been the absolute same planet over the course of geological time. It has always been in flux as far as climate and conditions have been concerned. So in that sense what is coming is actually nothing new in form. What is different is the speed with which the changes will overcome us. It is that rate of change that will create the problems for us and other species. But change is exactly what drives speciation. It has been implicated in the evolution of humans and this coming change will most likely result in yet another round of speciation for the genus Homo. There will be a few who have the right traits to allow them to adapt to whatever changes ensue. They will be, in a sense, pre selected for survival and procreation. They will be the parents of a new incipient species of humanity better suited for some future environment.

What those traits will be is not something we can predict. Evolution is a highly stochastic, chaotic process and the law-like parts of it we understand do not yield reliable predictions regarding what will be fit and what won't. Even so, my money is on one trait that seems to me advantageous under a wide variety of conditions, and that is wisdom. Sapience — long-range, strategic, systemic thinking coupled with strong group moral sentiments — is the basis for acquiring and using wisdom. The higher sapient beings in our population are probably not in denial and are, indeed, currently laying plans for how to survive an evolutionary bottleneck. If mostly highly sapient beings survive and produce offspring that carry that trait, then there may yet be a new kind of human with a capacity to think more wisely than we have. Perhaps there will one day be happy, adapted inhabitants of Eaarth.

Comments

[Focis]

Humans lived on all continents long before fossil fuels were discovered.

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Marvellous summation of "everything" George, thanks for posting it here.

This is the digital material that, should future historians exist and manage to recover it, will show that not everyone was blind to what was coming.

My personal puzzle is trying to square the evolutionary process - survival of the so-called fittest - with the emergence of a more sapient strand of our genus after the bottleneck. It seems to me that if we believe in evolutionary process, where we have got to as Homo sapiens is the burgeoning of exactly the type of selfish, me-first creatures that have caused the current predicament where we are about to fall off the cliff. If Nature was served by the evolution of more sapient humans, wouldn't people like you George be in the ascendancy and have already moderated the self-serving abuse of energy resources?

I have started to detest the term "fittest" because it seems that it defines the clique of greedy bastards who are running the show worldwide. I personally have no interest in proving my "fitness" by jumping into the pig trough of self-aggrandisement at the expense of others.

It is my last hope that sapience does become the new fitness, but I have severe doubts. Human history tells me that when push comes to shove, the greed-infested power clique will decimate the sapient ones so as to extinguish the idea that there is an alternative way to progress on this flawed planet.

What say you George?

Thanks and best wishes, Oliver

[Pyrolysium]

The big problem is that no matter how sapient we behave nothing will happens before we go through the bottleneck. With the remaining population we will be forged to stay alive in a energy low environment. Preparation is the best thing to do now, try things out practice skills and develop energy efficient way to do things.
With the enormous masses of humans born since in the baby-boom still alive processing human corpses will be big task. At Pyrolysium we are developing methods and awareness to pyrolyse corpses with concentrated solar-power and prevent 120 kilo CO2 compared to a typical cremation with natural gas.

[Aboc Zed]

George,

Excellent assessment of the present situation.

And I agree with your conclusion that fate of Homo Sapiens Sapiens is sealed.

To your point about wisdom and sapience being key to future evolution of genus homo I will add that in the immediate future we can see the trends.

First, it is self-selection of the elites to be the 1% survivor as they are those whop have much beter access to the benefits of civilization and they are expected to retain that access over the breakdown and collapse regardless of how long it will take to manifest. In other words in the long run it will be children of 1% that will survive and reproduce.

Second point is about science in government. As you say the vast majority of humans do not understand science and reject it in favour of fath based un-reason that helps them to cope with human condition. This is natural outcome of evolution and we cannot blame them for that. Because of this we can clearly see that democracy that is rull by ignorant majority will never produce sustainable socio-economic system. So it will evolve into something "better" like everything else.

This brings me to my third and final point:
It seems to me that the only way to further evolution of homo sapiens into homo cogitans is to bring science into government. The only way we can do this is by one of two actions. One is educationg 1% on top. It is hard task since 1% are busy fighting off lessers under them. The other is for those men and women who understand science to _evolve_ into becoming government. This one seems to me doable even if it is clearly intra-generational and long term effort. This is why I will keep looking for those who understand this and will be willing to act upon this understanding.

[Aboc Zed]

@Oliver,

Truly sapient will not be decimated by the "fittest". In fact they _are_ among the fittest already. They will survive and they will change the way the homo genus is organized. They will do it all the way while the nature takes care of overpopulation thru war, hunger and desease. And even if the technology will be not fossil fuel powered it will still be in place and belief-free science will "run the show".

There is no contradiction here at all.

Because in Nature "contradiction" does not exist.

[Bruce]

Oliver, what if the "fitness" and "sapience" required to survive the bottleneck constitutes what we refer to as "selfish" and "greedy"? If only a small fraction of the human ape population is required to survive and reproduce to carry on the evolution of human apes, might they not be predisposed to "greed" and "selfishness" in the context of their own self-selected interests and defending those interests at whatever costs against the multiples of "unfit" competitors?

Might they not attempt to secure as large a share of the vital resources per capita as they can before the worst of the conditions of the bottleneck occur?

What if the self-selecting nature of evolution has heretofore demonstrated that these "selfish", "greedy" b@stards are the precursor human apes who will successfully adapt to conditions of scarce resources and survive the bottleneck?

And add to the b@stards' evolutionary conditioning a rationalist, techno-scientific predisposition such that they systematically, and one might say ruthlessly, apply experimentation and best practices, if you will, to the challenges posed by the bottleneck.

And then imagine a dominant plurality or majority of this kind of individual and associated groups forming the basis of governance, social conditioning, division of labor, resource allocation, and distribution of income and wealth for what remains of the remnant "fittest" population.

Then consider that the overwhelming majority of the human ape population today is techno-scientifically ignorant, superstitious/mythmagical in their thinking, largely cognitively unreachable, and woefully unprepared for the bottleneck and the emerging high-tech, scientific society that could serve as a solution to the inevitable bottleneck for the remnant few.

If you were among today's "greedy" b@astards, on what basis would you risk compromising your survival and adaptive reproductive prospects by giving up per capita a growing share of the concentrated wealth, income, privilege, and power you will surely need in surplus to survive and carry on beyond the bottleneck?

If you were to concede that the overwhelming majority of us and our progeny will not likely survive the bottleneck, then there is a point during one's realization that (1) requires conceding this fact and deciding what to do thereafter, which might include attempting to align oneself with, or ingratiate oneself to, the "greedy" b@astards; (2) denying it and carrying on, hoping that the bottleneck conditions won't adversely affect you and yours; (3) emotionally reacting against the seeming unfairness or inequity of the situation and wasting one's vital energy raging against the overwhelming forces of entropy and evolution; (4) conceding the likelihood, knowing one is unprepared and ill-equipped, and then (a) grabbing whatever one can get as quickly as possible, realizing the futility of it all, (b) resigning to it all and living each day as one's last, or (c) detaching oneself emotionally and embracing the myriad potential rationalist, techno-scientific solutions for a remnant of the human ape population beyond the bottleneck.

For the sake of discussion, what if the foregoing is the most likely scenario we face and thus the most prudent choice is to self-identify with and act in such a way as to encourage the rationalist, techno-scientific solutions and future for a remnant of human apes?

How would you relate or appeal to the "fitter" techno-scientific fellow human apes? Would you resent or envy them? Embrace and support their efforts? Oppose them? How would you like them to relate to you? Would you prefer that they be honest with you, even brutally so if necessary? Deceive you so as not to frighten you? Patronize you so as to make it easier to charm and deceive you and carry on the necessary work?

I do not ask these questions to inflame but hopefully to clarify one's thinking, including my own.

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Interesting questions Bruce.

I will need to think about them before responding.

For the moment, I have a single question for your perusal. Are you equating the sapient 'fit' humans who will survive the bottleneck with the current greed-infested 1%? (The latter include a large number of dolts with inherited wealth.)

If you are equating them, I respectfully bow out of such a post-bottleneck world.

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Thanks AZ.

The truly sapient of whom you speak are indeed among the fittest. But my puzzlement continues as to the sapience of the '1%' who hold all the power over resources that may enable them to thwart the true sapients' passage through the bottleneck.

[Aboc Zed]

Oliver,

one way of thinking about 1%, sapience and sustainability is in terms of Venn diagram

Set A = "1% that are on top of the pecking order pyramid"

Set B = "sapient survivors of the population bottleneck that over evolutionary horizon will eventually vestigialize pecking order and re-organize into trully sustainable poplupation of homo genus"

Set C = "all individuals from evolving genus homo that exibit higher than average sapience"

The applicable relationship is

B = A "LOGICAL AND OPERATOR" C

99% are simplly not in the picture

it absolutely does not matter how we self-identify

we may think we are 1% when in fact we are 99%

the error of assessing oneself to belong to 99% when one is in fact is 1% is very hard to imagine but in theory possible too

[George Mobus]

Just a quick note of clarification of my thinking on this WRT: the "fittest" and evolution of sapience.

By definition the fitness of a species is in relation to the conditions of the environment. Change the conditions and what was once fit may not be so any longer. Furthermore, change the conditions such that some extreme variant of a genotype possesses the phenotypic characteristics that form a better match to the new environment and you have the conditions for a bottleneck event.

That the current selfish b@stards, as Bruce calls them, have been the most fit is really still arguable. They are not the ones producing the most offspring which is the other requirement for evolution to proceed in some particular trajectory. Moreover, the environment is about to undergo a significant change. The techno-scientific "solutions" that Bruce mentions are not likely to carry into this new environment, so if the greedy b@stards are banking on their wealth and purchasing power to protect them, I suspect they are in for a rude awakening. As a side note, most of the rich people I know (a few, and no name dropping at this time!) are not preparing for a bottleneck event. They sincerely believe they can go on this way forever.

My speculations on the survivability and future fitness of higher sapience is based on two basic aspects. The first is that the environment is about to change drastically requiring something more than mere cleverness to survive. Many people assume that that additional something is more like what they imagine humans used to be like, i.e. ferocious competitors. That is, the bottleneck should select for less civilized individuals. But this view is based on the conception of primitive humans as brutish beasts in the Hobbesian sense. We now understand that certain triggers can bring out the beast in all of us, but that isn't the only means by which our evolutionary success was produced. A more complete view of natural selection applied to humans is the multi-level selection theory which is gaining ground evidence-wise. Group selection, in which those groups who had more strategic thinking appear to have been the more successful. In my book this is part of the beginning of real sapience.

And that leads to my second point which is that I see evolution as having a trajectory that includes the emergence of sociality (the predominance of cooperation over competition seen first in biological systems as endosymbiosis. All forms of cooperative group behavior have been set in the model of sociality at every level in the biological world and I have a strong suspicion that we have been witness, without really realizing it, to its evolution in our own bio-cultural co-evolution.

In other words, I think the trajectory strongly suggests a future hominid species that is far more motivated by cooperation than competition (even though the latter never is completely eliminated). Sapience provides a mechanism for overriding our baser instincts, so to speak. It has the ability to down modulate the effects of the limbic, reactive systems to grant more time for contemplative reasoning. It also provides the tacit knowledge base (gained over a lifetime) to guide that reasoning in more fruitful directions.

So my hope stands. The change in the conditions of the environment - mostly the radical and swift changes in climate along with the loss of high powered energy fuels - will trigger a return to selection for higher sapience and not an imagined, devolved brutishness.

Hope this clarifies the concept a bit.

PS. Focis, while what you say is true, and I interpret the short comment as an assertion that humans will survive quite well, the fact is that when humans migrated out of Africa there were far fewer of them and the environment had not been so drastically depleted of resources. Moreover, those peoples had no expectations of having creature comforts that would drive them mad to learn such were being taken away from them. Modern humans are spoiled by what we have produced through technology and energy. I suspect the average low-sapient individual will not react well to losing those comforts. On a more scientific note, all populations of any species that have overshot the long-term carrying capacity of their environments have crashed. Some have crashed so badly the have gone extinct.

George

[Aboc Zed]

George,

Thanks for clarification.

I totally agree with you on the point of emerging eusociality and cooperation being more important than competition. Most recent book by EO Wilson comes to mind on this topic.

Still I would maintain that in order for this trend to matter it is to manifest among 1% on the top.

Yes most of the so called "rich people" probably are not sapient enough and not eusocial enough yet.

But they will learn over collapse and the more sapient "scientists" around them will help direct the group learning experience.

Since the homo species as a whole needs to "learn" eusociality to be truly sustainable I argue that our educational efforts ashould be spent on 1% not on 99%.

And in fact it is happening whether we like it or not because all scientists, if they are "smart-enough" to propell themselves high enough to be closer to the top and survive the bottleneck event by taking advantage of existing albeit actively disentegrating power-structures.

I think what Bruce and I are sazying is the continuity of "knowledge" the organic matter accumulates in DNA that program the types of social organization and ultimately eusociality.

The pecking order of warm bloded verterbrates as social organization clearly is more advanced that social organizzation (or non-existance of such) of cold-blooded

I therefore think that Nature is not going to waste the concentration of power by 1%.

It will modify it into eusociality when the species finally "learn" it as a organism-whole.

[Anywhere But Here Is Better]

Thank you George for the clear follow-up.

I am much more at ease now, because I can rekindle my hope that cooperative sapients will emerge to replace selfish non-thinkers at the top of the tree post-bottleneck. It is this intelligent social cooperation that I have dreamt of since I am became self-aware and simultaneously disgusted by the way humankind has been functioning (if we can call it that) at brutish level.

If we both find ourselves on the other side of the bottleneck, I will be delighted to share my precious potable water with you. Cheers!

[Bruce]

Priorities of higher "education" in the US.

[Tom]

i'm still not seeing ANY long term survival for our species or a host of others we (formerly, after the bottleneck is over) relied on for food. Animals, plants and marine species may be able to adapt "in time" (though the evidence so far is that they won't) but the pervasive pollution and changed climate conditions (unreliable growing seasons and chaotic weather), combined with lack of available energy will finish most of life off in short order (less than a few centuries). i sincerely hope i'm wrong, as i too have grandchildren.

[Alexander Carpenter]

Just a minor quibble, and not focusing on the sadly overemphasized AGW silliness in this entry (which distracts from the industrial toxicity and mechanical disruption that are really devastating the biosphere):

Evolution at large is not stochastic, it is chaotic. Only a narrow and artificial focus on the small incremental molecular-scale aspects of evolution called neo-Darwinism even remotely merit being characterized as stochastic.

Overall, evolution is not random, and all the aspects of it are inter-connected in the web of life, which is not teleological and thereby not sapient (by definition). Whatever overlay of "sapience" we humans can muster is dust in the wind, except possibly in very long time-frames during which selection events ("die-off") might concentrate sapience in the survivors.

The trouble is that history shows us that such selection events and processes tend to select against sapience and concentrate high-status individuals and groups whose ruthlessness and narcissism have been and will continue to be destructive to all others (but they are in control!).

Too bad for all the rest of us, and all other organisms as well.

[George Mobus]

Aboc,

But they will learn over collapse and the more sapient "scientists" around them will help direct the group learning experience.

Since the homo species as a whole needs to "learn" eusociality to be truly sustainable I argue that our educational efforts ashould be spent on 1% not on 99%.

Emphasis mine.

This is the part I don't get. How can anyone "learn" sapience. It isn't learnable. It is native to the genetics for brain development.

In my view there is a range of sapience from very little (the vast majority of humanity I suspect) to very high (without being a different species altogether). This is no different than, say, intelligence. It is determined by a range of alleles or, more likely, a range of non-coding, genetic control sites. There is no way anyone can "learn" to be sapient. They can only, at best, learn to exercise what they have.

And I seriously doubt that anyone who fits into the category of the so-called 1% (in the socio-economic classes) comes close to being high sapients. Though intelligence and sapience are highly correlated (i.e. highly sapient people tend to have high intelligence scores) it is only from the standpoint of sapience. You can have very clever, intelligent people who will rob you blind (like the Wall Street crowd) who are not high sapients. I've described this in my papers. Citation of work done by Sternberg, et al.

So I don't really understand your and Bruce's belief that the 1% are a) more fit for survival in the future world, and b) that some of them are somehow sapient. I just don't think this is so.

--------------------------------------
Anywhere,

Thanks for the sentiment. But I don't expect to find myself on the other side for a variety of reasons. I will be post another episode of the path soon in which I explain what I think are reasonable demographics for the survivors.

-------------------------------------
Bruce,

Well, less competition for my department then! It really is crazy, in terms of the perceptions of the marketplace. But I have personally endured the stupidity of some former administrators who tried their best to diminish our program at UWT. Their gone and the new administration is four-square behind us. My job seems more secure for the time being!

----------------------------------
Tom,

Of course your conjecture may be as valid as mine. You have your reasons for believing that humanity will simply go extinct. But neither of us can claim our visions are the most probable. Evolution has an interesting history of doing the least expected!

Many prior mass dieoffs have left evidence of just how resilient life itself is. I'm sure that the climate changes we think are going to be a part of this scenario are going to severely decimate many mega-fauna and many plant species, but I don't think it will be as severe as some of the prior situations (e.g. particularly the dinosaur-killing event circa 65 mya). But, who really can say?

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Alexander,

There are a lot of authoritative-sounding claims in your short comment! Since chaos is very hard to demonstrate for even modestly dimensioned systems it seems a bit much to claim such a fine distinction between chaos and stochastic processes. Perhaps you would enlighten us with some references?

WRT: "evolution is not random" I did provide a link in my last comment RE: evolution's trajectory. In that work I address the role of random events in the matrix of auto-organization, emergence, and selective environments.

I would really like to see this evidence, "...that history shows us that such selection events and processes tend to select against sapience and concentrate high-status individuals and groups whose ruthlessness and narcissism have been and will continue to be destructive to all others (but they are in control!)." Sounds awfully Hobbesian. If you are really talking about hominin (pre-historical) evolution I'm afraid the evidence is quite the other way. I've written it all down if you care to look.

George

[Sky]

Personally, I think people are "hard wired" for the kinds of short term oriented behavior and cognitive limits that have prevented mitigation or otherwise rational living habits. Some people are capable of seeing ahead, and it is frustrating and frightening for them, because they are too few to effect changes that would improve long term prospects. It's a systemic problem in which behavioral instincts collectively lead to a result that, on a larger scale, do not appear to be well suited for long term success. Evolution is an ongoing process... :-P

[Aboc Zed]

George,

Bad choice of word on my part. Indeed "sapience" cannot be learnt. It can evolve and manifest.

what I wanted to say was that sapience will evolve and manifest within 1% at the top and 9% near the top.

You believe sapience will emerge after collapse of fossil fuel technological civilization from the bits and pieces from all over the place.

I think that the structure of 1-9 -90 will be shrinking as a whole but still be in place even as civilization collapses.

In this I agree with Alexander Carpenter but he thinks sapience will never happen because 1-9-90 structure will persist to the point of no returen after which there will be no basis for any further evolution of homo genus but simply extinction.

I think evolution of homo genus will not stop and even after first, second, third or permanent "collapse" it will continue and final I think the planet wil be scortched beyond recognition by that time and now of us would what to live in that kind of world. But our distant descendants will have no choice - that would be the only kind of planet they would inherit from us.

[Sari]

What is the likelihood of a runaway GH effect reducing the earth to a venus-like planet? Now that the oceans are bubbling with methane, how will even a small remnant of humanity survive GW?

[George Mobus]

Sky

Evolution is an ongoing process.

Indeed. And one that is extremely hard to predict, full of surprises. I would so much like to witness the outcome. But life is short...

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Aboc,

You believe sapience will emerge after collapse of fossil fuel technological civilization...

Just to clarify: Sapience has already "emerged" in human beings. But it comes in a range of "strengths". The distribution is very likely a highly skewed one, toward the low end, with a thin tail out toward the high end.

My conjecture is that higher sapience will become a more fit trait during and after the bottleneck event. Thus it won't so much emerge as simply come to dominate in the true evolutionary sense.

I'm still mystified by your focus on what we call the 1% (or 9% if you like). These are categories applied to wealth holders. There is no necessary connection that I can see between holding wealth and higher sapience. Indeed I would argue the opposite. I strongly suspect that one feature of higher sapience is a recognition of the corrupting influence of excess wealth and an eschewing of the kinds of things one has to do to obtain it. Ergo, I strongly doubt that there is much high sapience within the 1%ers.

I notice you like to make predictions about what will happen in the far future. For my part I am not really concerned with the distant future, AFA what things will be like. There are way too many factors and variables to consider. My focus is on the nature of sapience, especially in its stronger form, in the here and now. And my interest is in how that might be preserved through the bottleneck. I don't take an activist approach because, by definition (mine anyway) highly sapient people are already considering what they have to do. My only concern is to sketch out some possible survival strategies and scenarios. Anyone who is truly highly sapient will know what to do.

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Sari,

The Earth has been through a number of hot-cold cycles involving methane and carbon dioxide. There is a long term cycle of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans and back into geological capture that has gone on since the beginning of life. There is evidence of a worst case scenario but it turns out to be about what the dinosaurs experienced. That period was one of the lushest as far as plant and animal life (not to mention bacteria!) is concerned.

The Venus scenario arises from very different geophysical/atmospheric histories. I seriously doubt that anything even close to that would happen on Earth.

I suspect that the methane escape will, as in past times, cause a significant rise in Earth temperatures but nothing close to that on Venus. What is really problematic is the rate of temperature increase due to the rapid burning of carbon fuels by humans. The rate of rise is stressing many species (and including our own) in ways that make it hard to imagine them adapting rapidly enough to compensate. Macroscopic life will certainly not be able to adapt genetically in the time scale we are projecting. The only salvation for living things is behavioral and territorial adaptation, which we are already seeing in many species. Rats and cockroaches should do well! Migratory animals might do OK in some instances as they change their migration patterns in accord with the temperature gradients as they develop.

But I do not think there will be a time when the temperature rise is "runaway" in the sense of scorching the planet the way Venus is scorched.

Humans are a semi-migratory species. There will be environments that are not so hostile that some humans can't survive. It will just be very different, what survival will mean.

George