A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 17 – Evolution
Evolution is the master theory of biology.
In the 1990s, I saw humanity described as energy-windfall opportunists. At the time, it seemed like an intriguing idea, but it took long years of study for that to become clear to me. As I began to understand that statement, I slowly realized that humans were really little different from any other life on Earth. Studying the Peak Oilers, and specifically Richard Heinberg’s work, began making that clearer to me. Life is great at exploiting nutrient windfalls and breeding to their limits. Algal blooms are an example, as they will grow explosively until the nutrients are exhausted, and then the bloom will collapse. There is an evolutionary logic to that, as life will reproduce as much as it can, which increases its odds of survival, but the history of life on Earth is filled with booms and busts. The booms are golden ages for the fortunate species that proliferate, and the busts often lead to extinctions. When there are seeming equilibriums, it is because the competitions are at standstills, whether it is in the vying of microorganisms, plants, or animals. This is the “red in tooth and claw” dynamic that Tennyson wrote about and Darwin used.
The practice of conservation – of purposely not consuming something so that it lasts longer and might be harvested sustainably – has rarely been performed anywhere at any time. In the human journey, the tortoise extermination may be the first example of what the rise of humans entailed. Giant tortoises had no natural predators and had achieved a global distribution until the rise of rock-wielding apes in East Africa over three million years ago. From that time onward, wherever the human line appeared, giant tortoises were among the first to go, as they were driven to extinction. The only survivors live on the Galapagos and Seychelles islands, as humans did not invade there until recently and did not drive them to extinction before a conservation ethic saved the remnant.
Giant tortoises were representative of the fate of all of Earth’s easily hunted meat, as humans expanded across the planet. It is estimated that humans killed one billion large animals during that expansion. Many species were driven to extinction by human hunters. More than one million years ago, where the human line made its rise in Africa, many species were hunted to extinction, including several species of the elephant family, and the extinctions spread to Asia with the human migration. But it really accelerated when behaviorally modern humans conquered Earth. Australia lost nearly 90% of its megafauna species and the Americas more than 70%, soon after humans arrived. There have been badly misguided efforts to attribute those extinctions to anything but humans, including climate change and bolide impacts. Until recently, driving species to extinction was a matter of pride. The men who killed the last great auks and ate their egg, in 1844, became celebrities. The man who shot the last known Merriam’s elk cow in 1890, Spense Hill, was proud of his feat. I recently read of a new species of animal that was discovered on an island off of Southeast Asia, and “collectors” vie today for specimens of that species, which may well drive them to extinction, soon after they were “discovered.”
The extinctions of megafauna species had the virtue of fueling the human expansion across Earth, to every continent but Antarctica. When Earth warmed in this interglacial interval, and carbon dioxide levels rose with the receding ice sheets, humans began domesticating plants and animals, probably for survival reasons. Earth has lost half of its trees since humans began farming. The world is full of the ruins of vanished civilizations, which likely collapsed either because they wrecked their local environments or climate changes, which deforestation often contributed to, wiped out their crops. No civilizations have ever been sustainable, as they always wiped out their energy supplies.
Today, humans are burning up fossil fuels a million times as fast as they were created, which is a little less than sustainable. We are even quickly reaching “Peak Phosphorus,” “Peak Uranium,” and other “peaks.” Plow agriculture on the Great Plains of North America wiped out a third of its topsoil in less than two centuries, on the heels of history’s most spectacular deforestation, of the Eastern Woodlands. In that regard, nothing has fundamentally changed in the human line in millions of years. We are energy-windfall opportunists above all else. Each Epoch of the human journey began with a golden age of exploiting the new energy sources, but those sources were soon depleted and humans battled over the remnants, which is the root of all warfare, in a dynamic that goes back to chimps.
This is the human way, no different in kind from an algal bloom, and most humans deny, ignore, or justify almost all of above. It takes a comprehensive perspective to understand. As far as I know, the energy source that people such as Sparky Sweet tapped is practically inexhaustible. Only with abundant and harmlessly produced energy will humanity finally learn sustainability and what abundance really is, and then we may become a truly sentient species.