You Wouldn't Even Be Here If...

Consider This Conjecture

Over the years I have addressed the notion that human beings are equivalent to cancer in the Ecos because we are busily grabbing up every resource in sight and destroying the tissues of the Ecos, the various ecosystems of the planet. In several venues I have argued that this analogy is not really helpful because it casts our species as an evil for which the only cure is to cut it out. I have also argued that the analogy is not really apt in the first place because humans have not just destroyed. They have discovered some incredible knowledge, applied it to make life better for themselves, and created magnificent art and music along the way. Cancers don't think about stuff they just eat. They don't create works of intrinsic value. And they don't create cells within that stop to ask, “are we being like cancers in the way we are affecting the Ecos?”

A lot of the argument hinges on the fact, undeniable, that we have gone into population overshoot. By definition that means there is some, much smaller, population size that should be sustainable. Cancers kill by first invading a tissue and then reproducing without bound while sucking up all of the nutrients, thus killing the healthy tissue. From the outside it does look like this is our modus operandi, I admit. However, there is evidence that with affluence comes a lowered birth rate, suggesting that there are some inherent, though not understood, balancing feedback controls in place. What has complicated the situation is that on top of expanding the population we are also increasing our consumption of resources per capita. The two combined lead to the kind of phenomenon we are witnessing.

But suppose that humans had taken a different course of evolution, had developed higher sapience along with higher intelligence and creativity, and proceeded cautiously when being inventive. Suppose they had developed the wisdom to recognize the dangers of over population and over consumption and had taken steps to prevent the population bomb and conspicuous consumption. What kind of society would we have today? And would it be in any sense better than we have produced?

Given a global carrying capacity estimated at fewer than five hundred million people society and the world would certainly look very different from what we have. Many of you, and I, probably think that would have been a much better world to live in. The only problem is that we would not be here! The only reason you, dear reader, and I exist is because the world of human cultures developed the way they did. If we hadn't had population overshoot none of us would be here. There would be humans, of course, just none of US.

You may be thinking (very abstractly of course, because we are here) that that would still be a good thing. But here is another thing to ponder. Variation in the gene pool is a function of size of the population. The larger the population the more opportunities there are for a substantially better variant allele of any given gene to arise. Better still more opportunities for a better variant of a control element in the networks controlling the development of brains to emerge and lead to — you guessed it — higher sapience!

But That Alternative Evolution Didn't Happen, So...

In other words, the world of mankind developed the way it did and that is a fact we have to accept. The brain structures necessary for higher sapience more than likely could not have evolved alongside intelligence and creativity because its emergence in the genus Homo came much later than the latter two. Indeed because of the way Broadmann area 10 interacts with all other areas of the prefrontal cortex, the emergence of sapience, minimal as it might have been, was probably like an afterburner burst to the existing circuits for cleverness. Brain circuits develop to larger sizes as much because of stimulation during development as of genetic predisposition. A new circuit stimulating lots of other circuits during embryogenesis may have well been part of what caused the brains of sapiens to expand so much.

There is no point in lamenting the way evolution brought us to this point. Either the further non-development of sapience was an accident of timing or a necessity, either way that is what seems to have happened and there is no use crying about it.

Of course it is true that we have a mess on our hands and that cleaning it up is what nature will get around to shortly. We can cry about that, but not as victims, just unhappy bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real question is how do we face a collapse of civilization and a more than likely (IMHO) bottleneck event with dignity and solace? In part, I think, we draw solace from recognizing that we are not a cancer per se, that things developed as they did because there was not another pathway open to evolution's persistent exploration of design space. And because, as it turns out, the overpopulation situation actually makes it more likely that some very highly sapient varietals have already emerged. Wish them luck.

But if you want to stick with the cancer analogy then at least look at a phenomenon that more closely resembles how a cancer comes about in the first place - mutations in key genes in susceptible cells that then causes them to grow out of control. Specifically cast your eyes on capitalism as a meme that effectively mutates the thinking of people, turning them into over consumers and profiteers. It is the relentless drive to grow profits that pushes us to do what we do. And that meme has metastasized globally. That is the real disease.

The original capitalism arose as a means to aggregate enough excess harvest so as to re-invest in capital equipment (before formal depreciation entered the scene) for the farm or village. It quickly led to investment in growing the capacity of a community to support more people and have more stuff and that led us, eventually, to what we have today — unbridled avarice and waste. Our brains are not sufficiently strong enough to have resisted the temptation (though history records several attempts to do so).

In today's version of economics there are so many fallacious beliefs that stem from this early subversion of normal autopoeisis. For example, consider the accepted “fact” that everyone should get a raise to compensate for the cost of living inflation. But also consider the fact that when everyone gets a raise the cost of living is pressured to rise since labor had been a major component of most products and services up until recently. An endless cycle of inflation, compensation, more inflation. The only thing that may have masked the obvious was the increases in technology that helped drive some other costs down allowing the upward pressure to build slowly, but inevitably resulting in increases in prices. Why do you think so many corporations have sought cheaper labor costs through off-shoring? Ironically now the Chinese and Indian factory laborers are starting to want the same creature comforts as had by the Westerners who buy their goods; you know what that means vis-a-vis prices!

OTOH: All of our advanced technologies would not be here either. Inhabitants of the planet in this time (the NOT-YOU) would not be reading a blog by a speculating crackpot. Without capitalism's peculiar motivation much innovation would probably never have happened in the time frame it did. Sure, humans might have eventually figured some stuff out. But wisdom often entails careful consideration of new things and the consequences of their uses before blundering in. While a lot of modern technology is really not very useful in the sense of producing happiness, it is really hard to make judgments about such things. I conjecture that to get the good stuff as rapidly as we did, you have to accept the worthless and even bad stuff as well. I guess you could call it collateral damage.

Humans and culture are locked into a coevolutionary, mutually causal spin. It is the way it is and that's just the way it is. My hope is that once humans evolve greater sapience they will be able to sort the wheat from the chaff and get on with developing and using more sane technology. I'm betting iPhones will be left far behind.

I Say Rejoice in Evolution

Even when you don't understand it of feel like you are the one being selected against!

We can't really know what is going to happen. We only dimly understand (and more often guess) about how things got to be the way they are. But we can assume that evolution will persist and as long as the Sun continues to pour energy into our biosphere something more complex, but also more controlled will emerge. My money is on eusapience and real eusociality down the road a ways.

Comments

[John]

I'm sure there is more wrong with civilization today than just our economic frameworks, but responding only to the "capitalism is evil" meme I have to somewhat disagree. The success of capitalism is due to the - very necessary, IMHO - attribute of rewarding the creativity and initiative of the individual. Where capitalism fails is when that reward mechanism is subverted by the sociopaths for personal gain at the expense of the rightful recipients of the individuals' efforts.

I have absolutely no problem with people getting wealthy off their own hard work and creativity. I do take exception to people (to abuse the definition) like Jamie Dimon or companies like Goldman Sachs or AIG amassing indecent amounts of money at the expense of everyone and everything else. To say this is simply a result of "capitalism" is to disregard the failure of various other regulatory mechanisms that are (were?) available to society to limit such extremism.

[Oliver]

I am greatly impressed that you identify capitalism as the central culprit in the current dis-ease of mankind. Even without a belief in any good versus evil narrative, I can't think of any word more evocative of "the evil that men do". Especially in the name of 'progress'.

And what a conundrum you have set out: Could eusapience evolve without that "collateral damage"..? I expect the jury will be out for a very, very long time.

In the meantime, I am somewhat saddened by the idea that there is/was an inevitability to the mess we are in right now. Somehow, I sleep better believing it didn't have to be like this in the long road from single cells to complex sociality.

[Oliver]

@John - I feel it is wishful thinking to propose that capitalism is good/successful if only it could be properly regulated. It is part and parcel of capitalism to fete the erroneously named 'free market' and resist and actively subvert regulatory control. What you are lauding appears to be some form of benevolent capitalism - i.e. a meritocracy of reward-for-effort. But this has never applied to more than a minuscule fraction of human history, and in the USA has existed only in the fantasy of the American Dream.

I would commend and respect your description of capitalism - if only it matched reality.

[Brian]

I was once involved in a cancer project. I would process eighty or so cancerous samples with normal nearby control tissue in a single day. I can tell you that when looked at dispassionately without the context of the human they were from, the cancerous tissue was always more beautiful. I can remember this dark blue one with red coral shaped streaks through it. And one of the findings of the study was that cancerous cells have more DNA and hence carry and made more information. It is amazing what can be created when you over utilize energy from your environment. Use the elephant's tusk so Mozart can make music. On ivory keys. Capitalism is just the form humans took to use available energy. When it is gone we will switch modes. We saw how fast humans can switch modes in the 70s. And I would wager that cancers try to switch modes when energy in the tissues they are stuck get low, just like we see Ebola get less virulent through time. There is even some evidence that a majority of cancers resolve themselves. We have just begun to see the full power of our sapience, but we want to see it all right now and it to be a completely happy story.

[Robin Datta]

Speculations about "what might have happened" are exercises that serve a variety of purposes from constructing theories to punishing wrongdoers. But in the end they are all speculations.

[Makati1]

The sun will come up over the horizon for many more years, but will any remnants of homo sapiens live to see it? I give the species about 20-40 years max.

[Ron Patterson]

George, I agree that cancer is not the right word. The more correct term would be: Plague Species.
Paul MacCready pointed out in a Ted Talk that 10,000 years ago humans and their animals represented less than one tenth of one percent of the land and air vertebrate biomass of the earth. Now they are 97 percent.
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_maccready_on_nature_vs_humans.html

[George Mobus]

@Oliver,

I can't say it had to be this way. There may be many paths to the point of the emergence of eusapience and resulting eusociality in humans. My point is more that given how sapience and cleverness did evolve on this globe, the ensuing over expansion and overshoot were probably inevitable. But, like you, my thinking often goes to contra-positives that ask what we might have been like if only. That train of thought is what led me to consider sapience in the first place.

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@John,

My approach is biophysical. Capitalism is based on a false premise about the nature of profits, namely that they can grow infinitely as the capitalized engine so-grows. But this is not possible in a finite world. No matter how good it sounds or feels, you cannot change the laws of nature, especially not on a wish.

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@Brian,

Thanks for the observation.

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@Robin,

Don't forget, though, hypotheses are also a form of speculation.

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@@Makati1,

Regardless of the time scale, Homo sapiens is guaranteed to go extinct. For me the real question is: What about the genus?

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@ Ron,

I will have to watch that one. I would have thought that the biomass of bacteria (even just land-based) would have exceeded that of humans let alone the biomass of all land-based plants and animals. But his point is certainly taken. Thanks for the link.

George

[Cantab]

Malthus put the question as to how to make two distinct classes of people contribute to the capitalist system: the rich man, who had more than enough of everything and would prefer to sit back and enjoy it all; and the poor man, who sensibly wanted only to labour until he'd fed and clothed himself and his family.

The answer: tax the rich man heavily, and pay the poor working man just too little to live comfortably - and so both would, respectively, invest and labour to grow wealth.

He also recommended inspiring both classes with a conditioned and irrational desire for more unnecessary goods.

It's obvious that the basic assumption to be inculcated in order to prime this system must be that of infinite growth and expansion, in order to be able envisage these artificial wants being satisfied.

An evil system? Hardly. But profoundly out of line with earthly reality, and a distortion of certain aspects of human nature.

[Oliver]

Hello again George

I thought you would be mildly amused by this 'news' article that features an Oxford University luminary who applauds psychopathic behavior in politics and commerce.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22488328

Have we got to such a low point in public discourse that this non-sapient behavior is considered a good trait?

[Oliver]

Hello again George

I thought you would be mildly amused by this 'news' article that features an Oxford University luminary who applauds psychopathic behavior in politics and commerce.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22488328

Have we got to such a low point in public discourse that this non-sapient conduct is considered a laudable trait in the 21st century?

[St. Roy]

Hi George:

What you are saying in this post reminds me of Ernst Mayr's contention that superior intelligence is a lethal mutation. Have you read Paul Chefurka's two May posts on the same? (http://www.paulchefurka.ca)

[George Mobus]

@Oliver,

Thanks for the link. Just with a broad brush, quick reaction, it seems to me he might be right, if the world you want is the one we have! Also I think he may be playing a bit fast and loose with the definition of psychopathy. Other than that, I think yes, these are the depths.

George

[Brooks Bridges]

A thought provoking article that I must re-read.

But, as I'm right now reading EOW's "The Social Conquest of Earth" I find there is a caveat to your statement:

"Variation in the gene pool is a function of size of the population......."

This is basically true for most of planet but NOT for "native" South Africans.

Wilson says a study in 2010 found more genetic variation between 4 bushmen (San) than between an average European and an average Asian. "They (the South Africans) possess our species' greatest reservoir of genetic diversity" page 80.

[George Mobus]

@Brooks,

TSCOE is a great book. E.O. is one of my all time heroes and a personal model of high sapience in my view.

I have not read the study first hand but have read a synopsis of it in Science (or Nature possibly). As I understand it the variance they measured was not global for all of the genes, just a few. The higher variation of alleles as specific sites might be due to two factors. First the populations in Africa are the oldest ones on the planet so they have had more time to acquire variants. Second, this could be evidence of a relaxation of selective forces that had been the result of the glacial retreats and a return of more "nominal" conditions in the African climate. Strong selection forces tend to promote conservation of working genes, whereas relaxation allows gene variation to accumulate.

So the African populations may indeed possess our greatest reservoir of diversity it has to stand the test of selection. Diversity, by itself, is a neutral thing. It comes in handy when selection goes to work; presumably some individuals with the right combination will be more fit.

Enjoy the book.

George