John Campbell
The body of work achieved by the evolution of the
rational and empirical worldview we call science can
assist us with answers to the big questions such as
‘what are we?’ and ‘where did we come from?’ It is also
the only effective source of answers on how to meet the
big challenges that the near term historical future may
present to us. Our major challenges have little
resemblance to those encountered by biological life
through evolutionary history. We will not be out
competed or driven to extinction by any other life form.
We have a good deal of control over our biological
competition.
Our major challenges, the ones that pose a risk to our
survival are mostly of our own making. With a bit of
luck and judicious use of our scientific knowledge many
of them are avoidable and have at least potential
solutions. A list of these challenges, in no particular
order, might include:
1)
Impact
of the earth with an extraterrestrial body such as a
comet or meteorite. These impacts are the probable cause
for at least two of the six mass extinctions that have
visited the earth during the past 450 million years.
Although these events are rare they are truly
devastating. Efforts are currently underway to bring the
powers of science to bear on this threat. Telescopic
surveys of space are being organized to identify
potential impacting bodies well in advance and
scientific work is being conducted to determine the best
methods of diverting these bodies from their impact
trajectories.
2)
Rapid
global climate change. Rapid global climate change is
the probable cause for at least another two of the
earth’s mass extinctions. All indications are that human
activity, specifically the substantial increase in the
proportion of green house gases in the earth’s
atmosphere, has kicked off a major global warming event.
Moderating it is well within the bounds of scientific
knowledge but it will require focus and will.
3)
Biological Pandemic. Biological Pandemics were
responsible for the largest human dying event in the
history of the earth when European infectious diseases
were introduced to Native American populations. More
recently the flu epidemic in 1918 killed over 20 million
people world wide. Presently with high world wide
population densities, large numbers of potential carries
conducting daily international travel and deadly strains
routinely arising in Asia professional health workers
are in a state of grave concern. The H5N1
virus is of current concern. After over a year it is
still on the scene. It hasn’t infected many yet but of
those who it has, it has been fatal 75% of the time. It
may only be a matter of time before it becomes
infectious; it usually takes time. It is estimated that
today an infectious H5N1 virus
could infect 1/3 of the world’s population within
months. If the death rate holds that could be 1.5
billion dead.[i]
Science is our only reliable foil for this challenge.
Many previously deadly infectious diseases have been
defeated by science and there is no reason to believe
that science coupled with good public health practices
could not shield us from the latest threats. Again what
is required is focus and will.
4)
Global
Nuclear War. The historical forces that seemed intent on
driving the world toward mutually assured destruction
during the latter half of the previous century have
succumbed to rationality and the threat of global
nuclear war has receded. That so much energy was
expended and such extensive preparations made to prepare
for nuclear war is a graphic example of science
providing us with destructive powers we are ill equipped
to handle.
5)
Global
Conventional War. Limited conventional war, largely
driven by religious or ethnic motivation, continues to
be common. This risk is mitigated from becoming global
as a global conventional war could easily escalate into
nuclear war having no winners.
6)
Over
population, ecological destruction and collapse. The
human species has not had to face the Malthusian limits
experienced by others. Our culture and technologies have
allowed us to expand into new territories and exploit
new environments as populations increased. They have
also given us the means to consistently increase
population densities in the areas we have occupied. Now
that there is a hugely dense human population inhabiting
earth this situation endangers the survival of the
natural processes on which we depend. We face severe
risks with no ready means of mitigation in sight. This
is a near and inevitable occurrence; in fact it is
already well underway. We can respond to its challenge
or we can ignore it. My guess is we’ll ignore it until
we are provided with some clear, nasty evidence of its
existence. (There is a scientific bent in us after all.)
The Chicago 1995 heat wave is said to have killed over
700 Americans and in 2003 one in France killed over
14,000. Not sufficient to get our attention yet.
Something may come along that will engage us.
These potential pitfalls are real challenges for us.
Rationality is our greatest ally in facing them all.
With a little luck and attention we can mitigate all of
these risks from having a major impact on the planet or
the human population, except for the last one. We are
already well into the impact zone of over population and
ecological collapse. There is no ready means to mitigate
this risk. The only way that this risk can fail to take
a toll is if we fall victim to one of the other major
catastrophes. For instance a global nuclear war or a
deadly flu pandemic could drastically reduce human
population numbers to a point where over population
would not be a problem. Dealing with the overpopulation
challenge is our best case scenario.
We tend to be
conservative regarding our answers to the big questions
and do not change them unless we have a compelling
reason to do so. They do however change over historical
time and the process of their change is best seen in an
evolutionary context. Probably the great religions first
evolved because they conferred organizational advantages
to the dense human populations produced by agriculture.
Religiously organized societies have similar
characteristics to biological entities such as bee hives
or ant hills and were able to out-compete less well
organized societies.[ii]
The history of the spread and consolidation of the great
religions involved a bloody and brutal contest of
survival of the fittest amongst societies as may be
surmised by a reading of the Old Testament.
The rational and scientific worldview that has been
evolving for the past 400 years has now largely
supplanted the answers to the big questions provided by
the great religions in the arena of power. No society
can vie for power or even feed its own people without
embracing some aspects of technology and the most
powerful nations rely heavily on technology and
rationality for their wealth and power. However the
scientific worldview has failed to become the source of
personal answers for most people. This is partly due to
its democratic nature. Other than public education,
there is little state or institutional support for
popularizing it or promoting it as a worldview. No one
has ever been subjected to the rack or burned at the
stake for refusing to believe in scientific answers.
Things change over historical times and the challenges
faced by new agricultural societies with unprecedented
population densities in the third millennium BC are not
the same challenges facing modern societies in the
twenty first century. While the Great Religions
provided successful answers to earlier societies
assisting them to organize and populate their lands we
are now entering a new historical era that may well
provide evolutionary motivation for us to leave these
answers behind and more fully embrace those of science.
It is only relatively recently that mankind has come to
dominate the earth. The first of our branch ventured
forth from Africa about 65,000 years ago and multiplied
to become the dominant species throughout Asia. 30,000
years ago we entered Europe, 17,000 years ago the New
World, the last Pacific Island less than a thousand
years ago. The Earth has only recently been peopled, but
the exponential growth of its numbers has not stopped.
With all the free land gone our density is now rising
exponentially. We are in an entirely new situation and
the stakes are high.
During our previous expansion phase when we populated
the world a major motivation for moving on and
colonizing new lands may have been the devastation we
visited upon the ecosystems we occupied. As humans
spread over the earth they drove many prey species
extinct as well as other species dependent upon them.
American Museum of Natural History’s biologist Niles
Eldredge summarizes the evidence:
The fossil record attests to human destruction of
ecosystems:
·
Humans arrived in large numbers in North America roughly
12,500 years ago-and sites revealing the butchering of
mammoths, mastodons and extinct buffalo are well
documented throughout the continent. The demise of the
bulk of the La Brea tar pit Pleistocene fauna coincided
with our arrival.
·
The
Caribbean lost several of its larger species when humans
arrived some 8000 years ago.
·
Extinction struck elements of the Australian megafauna
much earlier-when humans arrived some 40,000 years ago.
Madagascar-something of an anomaly, as humans only
arrived there two thousand years ago-also fits the
pattern well: the larger species (elephant birds, a
species of hippo, plus larger lemurs) rapidly
disappeared soon after humans arrived.
Indeed only in
places where earlier hominid species had lived (Africa,
of course, but also most of Europe and Asia) did the
fauna, already adapted to hominid presence, survive the
first wave of the Sixth Extinction pretty much intact.
The rest of the world's species, which had never before
encountered hominids in their local ecosystems, were as
naively unwary as all but the most recently arrived
species (such as Vermilion Flycatchers) of the Galapagos
Islands remain to this day.[iii]
In some cases it was
not possible for excess populations to easily move on
once the ecology collapsed under the weight of human
numbers. In his aptly named book Collapse, Jared
Diamond documents a number of isolated societies such as
those on Easter Island and Greenland where an ecological
collapse resulted in social collapse.[iv]
We have lessons to learn from the history recounted in
this book now that we all have nowhere new to go. There
are no more unspoiled lands to colonize. We must reach a
state of homeostasis with our environment or face dire
consequences.
One very current,
especially sad chapter in this painful saga is that a
recent search by field researcher to find Bonobo
Chimpanzees, our closets relatives, in the wild was
unsuccessful. These vulnerable primates only exist in
Democratic Republic of the Congo
and with the on-going
civil war there has been an increase in their use as
bush meat. It is unlikely that they are presently
extinct but their numbers may have decreased by 80% in
recent years and extinction appears imminent given
current trends.
Having filled the earth with population levels grown
beyond those sustainable through hunting and gathering
we have recently learned to use the vast powers of
science to harness the earth’s natural processes for our
use. Like bacteria on a Petri dish this richness of
resources has served to exponentially grow our numbers
and our never ending hunger for more. We desire ever
more and the plundering of the planet is ever more
intense. There are no easy technical solutions to this
crisis. The solutions are personal and spiritual. We
must decide, we must become motivated to turn away from
exponential biological growth. This is a daunting
challenge as built deeply into the nature of living
things from bacteria on up is the blind imperative to
expand our numbers and appetites.
We are challenged with reversing this aspect of our
nature. Don’t despair; we have broken our amoeba ways
before. Many cultures have drastically reduced their
rates of growth and a few have begun contracting. Still
overall we keep growing and the most optimistic
prediction is that we will increase by another 50%
before the numbers peak in about 2050. Those 50% more
will expect to have more as well. We plan to have
increased per capita GDP every year; anything else would
be an economic catastrophe. If the 50% more are going to
expect and receive an ever increasing footprint on the
planet some things will have to give. Inexorable human
population growth until all green things are gone is a
scary scenario but what are the alternatives? Are we fit
to tangle with our amoeba instincts and resist growth?
In this contest rationality and spirituality are our
strengths. The spiritual strength we require is not
offered by organized religions, often they champion the
very opposite, the right of human life to expand without
bounds. They cannot and will not provide a signal
guiding us away from this siren song of our biological
past. Can the spiritual might of science fill the void?
A
world crisis of unparalleled significance is playing
itself out and will be the main theme of 21st
century history. It is a crisis around overpopulation
and the attendant strain on natural systems. Other
potential crises such as nuclear war, extreme climate
change or biological plague, may be avoidable. They are
not inevitable in the same sense as is over population.
Over population is an existing condition and will only
get worse during the next 50 years, even in the best
case scenario. It can only be alleviated, in the short
term, if some other catastrophe occurs that drastically
reduces human population levels. The other potential
crisis threatening near term reduction in human numbers
increase in likelihood as the population crisis becomes
more intense.
Evolution of life on
earth has not been a linear process; its production of
increased complexity has always taken the road of two
steps forward and one back. Although the evolutionary
algorithm relentlessly produces every greater complexity
many times in earth’s history physical processes have
abruptly caused a major reduction in complexity. These
events are known as mass extinctions and researchers
have good evidence for at least six of these events
having occurred since the evolution of multi-cellular
life. These events are outside the evolutionary process
and were usually caused by cataclysmic processes such as
meteorite strikes, rapid climate change or extreme
volcanic events.[v]
Some researchers have speculated that these mass
extinctions actually result in a more rapid accumulation
of complexity in the long run, that the many
environmental niches emptied by mass extinctions allow
more experimental and less immediately competitive
biological designs to flourish for a time. Even if from
some perspectives mass extinctions are not totally
negative they do entail massive die offs, particularly
of the more advanced life forms, and do set back
evolution’s quest for more advanced designs by some
time.
Already, though it receives remarkably little media
attention and then usually only to dispute its
existence, our present crisis is the most severe crisis
experienced by living things on earth during the last 60
million years. Already it meets the official definition
of a ‘mass extinction’ something not seen since the
dinosaurs disappeared. How its severity will rank
amongst the half dozen mass extinctions previously
experienced over geological time remains to be played
out.
There are some, usually those supported by ‘faith based’
or ‘personal wealth’ constituencies, who claim
overpopulation is not a problem, who claim technological
solutions can continue to provide plenty for all no
matter how many people crowd the planet. E.O. Wilson,
biologist and Nobel laureate has some pertinent comments
for those holding this view:
The constraints of the biosphere are fixed. The
bottleneck through which we are passing is real. It
should be obvious to anyone not in a euphoric delirium
that whatever humanity does or does not do, Earth's
capacity to support our species is approaching the
limit. We already appropriate by some means or other 40
percent of the planet's organic matter produced by green
plants. If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving
little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion
hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would
support about 10 billion people. If humans utilized as
food all of the energy captured by plant photosynthesis
on land and sea, some 40 trillion watts, the planet
could support about 16 billion people. But long before
that ultimate limit was approached, the planet would
surely have become a hellish place to exist. There may,
of course, be escape hatches. Petroleum reserves might
be converted into food, until they are exhausted. Fusion
energy could conceivably be used to create light, whose
energy would power photosynthesis, ramp up plant growth
beyond that dependent on solar energy, and hence create
more food. Humanity might even consider becoming someday
what the astrobiologists call a type II civilization and
harness all the power of the sun to support human life
on Earth and on colonies on and around the other solar
planets. Surely these are not frontiers we will wish to
explore in order simply to continue our reproductive
folly.[vi]
The bottleneck we are facing and the historical
challenge it issues has two components:
1)
Numbers of humans occupying the earth.
2)
Average per capita resources consumed.
Current demographic trends indicate that human numbers
may peak sometime in the next fifty years at somewhere
around 9 billion and then start a slow decline. This
challenge, though huge, at least represents a reprieve
from the seemingly inevitable exponential growth in
human numbers experienced until a few decades ago, a
growth that could only result in calamity. While this
challenge has become less acute, there is, at present,
no reprieve in sight from the exponential growth in per
capita resource usage.
The reduction in rates of population growth has taken
place despite the best efforts of the ‘faith based’
community. Some of their most strident injunctions
center on the sanctity of the life of the organism and
unfettered reproduction. Such concerns have served us
well in the past but now as we exceed 6 billion humans,
on our way to at least a 50% increase, these injunctions
are a threat to our survival. It is a triumph for
humanity that these injunctions have lost their power.
In almost all countries where family planning methods
are available and where women have some control of their
destinies the birth rate has dropped dramatically. It
seems nearly universal that when women can decide how
many children to bear and how to apportion resources
between them, they decide to limit the number of their
children and maximize the resources available to each.
Edward Wilson’s gives us his perspective on this
phenomenon:
First, by what appears to be the
providential instinct, women consciously reduce their
fertility wherever they gain education, opportunity, and
some degree of freedom of choice in reproduction. This
is not just a liberal Harvard professor addressing you.
This is, fortunately, thoroughly now documented in world
demographic studies. Among nearly all of the European
countries, Japan, Thailand, the Asian tigers, and
native-born Americans (and immigrants will almost
certainly soon follow as their security in this country
improves), the population growth has now fallen below
the zero-population-growth breakpoint of 2.1 children
per woman, and is headed toward population decline. That
would be characteristic of all of the industrialized
countries in a very short period of time.
The rest of the world is following. The average number
of children per woman has dropped worldwide in the last
40 years from 6 to 3 children. That is an astonishing
decline for global demography. The latest United Nations
estimates project that the total human population may
very well peak out at about 8.9 billion around
mid-century, and then very likely start to decline. We
may thank whatever gods may be that women, when given
the choice, prefer a small number of quality children,
instead of entering the lottery of life by scattering
out many children who, by force of necessity, cannot be
raised in a quality manner.[vii]
Ironically this trend is most pronounced in Italy, a
predominately Roman Catholic country. It is encouraging
to see that women are able to defy religious injunctions
and instead choose what is best for themselves and their
families.
The key component enabling this earthly miracle is
effective and widely available methods of birth control.
Birth control decouples sex from reproduction.
Reproduction is biology’s primary concern and we
incorporate many biological mechanisms that keep it
always on our minds. Most of these mechanisms drive us
towards having sex but not directly to reproduce. We
have a sex drive not a reproductive drive. It is why our
fantasies are about sexual activity and not about child
birth. Ever since sex first evolved as a biological
process it has been tightly coupled to reproduction and
was obviously an adaptation to allow a new and more
powerful form of reproduction. With birth control this
coupling is broken and the causal link between sexual
activity and reproductive activity is broken. This break
allows a rational decision about reproduction without
the necessity of reining in our libido and attendant
biological imperatives.
Of the two critical components composing our challenge;
population numbers and per capita resource usage, there
is some hope on the first front. No such slick solution
to the second is on the horizon. In fact it appears that
in developing countries such as China there is
irresistible pressure to maximize resource usage and
even in the developed world with already huge per capita
consumption rates the primary political and economic
focus seems to be for more.
From the perspective developed here the two components
have a basic similarity; we are driven to consume and
reproduce by biological adaptations central to our
evolutionary history. These drives are almost impossible
to rein in via rationality. Other mechanisms must be
found. Birth control, by decoupling sex from
reproduction, allows the sex drive to be satisfied
without resulting in reproduction. Can this be used as a
clue for a solution to the consumption problem?
Consumption is central to our being. From a biological
point of view we are designed to survive until the age
of reproduction and then reproduce. Our biological
design cares for little else. Central to both survival
and reproduction is resource usage. Biologically we
survive longer and successfully raise more offspring the
more resources we can commandeer.
Unfortunately the psychological mechanisms around
resource usage such as status, a sense of security,
satiation etc. are bound to the act of consumption
rather than to the act of survival. This makes the
consumption nut very hard to crack. With population
numbers, the key to a solution is that reproduction, the
act requiring limits, is not the psychologically
compelling act. Rather the psychologically compelled
act, sex, is the act that can be permitted with birth
control producing an antidote to the population problem.
With consumption, it is the consuming act itself, the
act that must be limited, that we are psychologically
compelled to perform.
Technology may provide some assistance with this
problem. There seems to be a well established trend of
reduction in the mass of many man made items including
railway locomotives, cars and computers. Even while this
reduction in mass has taken place many of the items have
become more powerful; the power to mass ratio for items
from locomotives to computers has increased
dramatically. The amount of fuel required to propel an
automobile a given distance has been greatly reduced as
technology has improved. These trends seem to have been
accomplished mostly for marginal economic reasons and
not specifically for lessening our impact on the
resources of the earth. Undoubtedly we could vastly
reduce consumption of resources through a sustained
effort to focus technology on the problem of producing
consumable goods with reduced impact on natural systems.
Computer technology may provide another means of
lessening the impact of consumption. Information
intensive items such as movies, music and books do not
need to be stored on physical mediums such as DVDs, CDs
and books. They can all be stored in a central
repository and downloaded for use with little resource
usage other than a bit of electricity. The dream of a
paperless office may eventually be realized where
information is viewed electronically on reusable media
resembling paper rather than printed to paper.
Resource usage is definitely a challenge but there is
hope. The psychological mechanisms compelling our
behaviour may be labelled the ‘tyranny of the self’.
This tyranny compels us to follow priorities mapped out
by biology over billons of years, priorities that are
definitely counter productive in meeting the challenges
facing us today. Susan Blackmore suggests two aids in
our struggle to overthrow this domination:
1)
Buddhism. On the surface it would seem that religious
values with their downplaying of material benefits and
suspicion of sex should be of aid in our struggle.
Unfortunately most variants of the great religions argue
for unfettered human reproduction and for the material
strength of their adherents. Amongst the great
religions, the meditative tradition of Buddhism seems
the only religious challenge to the supremacy of the
self and its preoccupation with sexuality and
consumption. Buddhism teaches that material desire is
suffering and provides meditative techniques to loosen
the hold of the self in order to allow other, less often
heard, components of our psyche to raise themselves to
consciousness. It promotes the understanding that the
‘one time only’ concerns of the self are an illusion
standing between us and real understanding or awakening.
2)
Science. To some science seems an enemy in this
struggle. Without science the world would not be capable
of supporting so many people with such high levels of
consumption. Without science the world’s population
would be regulated at much reduced levels by famine,
disease and war. There is no going back. Science is
knowledge and knowledge, as a rule, is conserved by
evolution. Science has given us power and we have used
this power to propel our biological imperatives to
extremes.
This is not written in stone. Science also gives us
understanding of our true situation and we can use this
understanding to adapt and solve problems. With little
in the way of mainstream recognition this process is
well under way. Understanding of our situation has led
many in the developed world to adopt practices such as
simplicity and vegetarianism. The understanding provided
by the science of ecology has been adopted and
championed by the environmental movement. In many cases
this involves a spiritual shift. In my area of the world
environmentalists are often referred to as ‘Tree
Huggers’ in recognition of their deep affection for
nature. A common bumper sticker says ‘Hug a logger and
you will never go back’. I believe this line nicely
reflects our challenge opposing the sexual connotations
of ‘Hug a logger’ with the spiritual connotation of ‘Hug
a tree’. As Wilson remarks the embryonic environmental
movement is focused on our true challenges.
Humanity did not descend as angelic
beings into this world. Nor are we aliens who colonized
Earth. We evolved here, one among many species, across
millions of years, and exist as one organic miracle
linked to others. The natural environment we treat with
such unnecessary ignorance and recklessness was our
cradle and nursery, our school, and remains our one and
only home. To its special conditions we are intimately
adapted in every one of the bodily fibers and
biochemical transactions that gives us life. That is the
essence of environmentalism. It is the guiding principle
of those devoted to the health of the planet. But it is
not yet a general worldview, evidently not yet
compelling enough to distract many people away from the
primal diversions of sport, politics, religion, and
private wealth.
[viii]
Scientists are in the forefront of the environmental
movement and organizations such as the Union of
Concerned Scientist are amongst the most effective lobby
groups attempting to gain legislation on environmental
issues. Recently over 1,000 American scientists signed
an open letter to congress on the State of Climate
Science.[ix]
Science provides a spiritual framework from which we can
see our true situation and the inappropriateness of our
self’s ‘one time only’ concerns. Science is not often
considered as a spiritual framework but it serves this
function for a growing body of humanity. In the next
section we will trace the evolution of this framework
and a number of extraordinary people who serve as its
prophets.
[i]
New Scientist, February 5th – 11th
2005, Vol 185 No2485, pg 5.
[ii] Wilson David Sloan.
(2002).
Darwin's Cathedral : Evolution, Religion, and
the Nature of Society.
University of Chicago press.
[iii]
Eldredge Niles. The Sixth Extinction website.
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
. Last viewed January 27, 2005.
[iv]
Diamond Jared. (2005).
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or
Succeed. Penguin
Publishing
[v]
Eldredge Niles. The Sixth Extinction website.
http://www.actionbioscience.org/newfrontiers/eldredge2.html
. Last viewed January 27, 2005.
[vi]
Wilson Edward O. (2002). The Future of Life.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
[vii]
Address by Edward O. Wilson at the
Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Science Takes
Flight Celebration, September 4, 2003, at the
Imogene Powers Johnson Center for Birds and
Biodiversity, Ithaca, New York.
[viii]
Wilson Edward O. (2002). The Future of
Life.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York
[ix]
Global Environment page on the Union of
Concerned Scientist website. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/page.cfm?pageID=1264
, Last viewed February 5, 2005
