Aww... Itã¢â‚¬â„¢s a Cute Baby Dragon. It Seems to Stick Closely With the Other Dragons.

(This essay was a finalist for a 2013 National Magazine Award in the Essay category.)

THE Problem WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they call back conservation has something to do with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did non consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but v or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and 2 types of leaner).

Until Margulis'due south decease concluding year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from fourth dimension to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are y'all however all worked up about protecting endangered species?

Margulis was no apologist for unthinking devastation. Still, she couldn't help regarding conservationists' preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants equally evidence of their ignorance nearly the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than than 90 percent of the living thing on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is x times more the number of human cells!

Bacteria and protists tin exercise things undreamed of by clumsy mammals similar usa: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or past swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the listing is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving ascension to the oxygen nosotros exhale. Compared to this ability and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perchance, merely non really meaning.

Does that utilise to human beings, likewise? I once asked her, feeling similar someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn't move the globe a little closer to the eye of the universe. Aren't nosotros special at all?

This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn't write anything downwardly. But equally I recall it, she answered that Human sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For i thing, she said, we're unusually successful.

Seeing my face brighten, she added: Of course, the fate of every successful species is to wipe itself out.

OF LICE AND MEN

Why and how did humankind become "unusually successful"? And what, to an evolutionary biologist, does "success" mean, if self-destruction is part of the definition? Does that self-devastation include the rest of the biosphere? What are homo beings in the thou scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if there is such a affair, and how did we learn it? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With 7 billion of us crowding the planet, it's hard to imagine more vital questions.

One style to begin answering them came to Mark Stoneking in 1999, when he received a observe from his son'due south school warning of a potential lice outbreak in the classroom. Stoneking is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. He didn't know much nearly lice. As a biologist, information technology was natural for him to noodle around for information about them. The most common louse institute on man bodies, he discovered, is Pediculus humanus. P. humanus has two subspecies: P. humanus capitis—head lice, which feed and live on the scalp—and P. humanus corporis—torso lice, which feed on pare just live in wearable. In fact, Stoneking learned, body lice are so dependent on the protection of wear that they cannot survive more than than a few hours away from it.

Information technology occurred to him that the two louse subspecies could exist used as an evolutionary probe. P. humanus capitis, the head louse, could be an ancient annoyance, because human beings have always had hair for it to infest. Just P. humanus corporis, the body louse, must not be especially quondam, considering its need for wearable meant that it could not accept existed while humans went naked. Humankind'south slap-up coverup had created a new ecological niche, and some head lice had rushed to fill it. Evolution then worked its magic; a new subspecies, P. humanus corporis, arose. Stoneking couldn't be certain that this scenario had taken place, though it seemed likely. Simply if his idea were correct, discovering when the body louse diverged from the head louse would provide a rough date for when people first invented and wore article of clothing.

The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Clothing has practical uses—warming the body in cold places, shielding it from the lord's day in hot places—just it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something that has proven to be of inescapable interest to Homo sapiens. Vesture is ornament and emblem; it separates man beings from their earlier, un-self-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, but only people can be naked.) The invention of vesture was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human globe had become a realm of complex, symbolic artifacts.

With two colleagues, Stoneking measured the difference between snippets of Dna in the two louse subspecies. Because Deoxyribonucleic acid is thought to pick upwards small-scale, random mutations at a roughly constant rate, scientists use the number of differences betwixt two populations to tell how long ago they diverged from a common ancestor—the greater the number of differences, the longer the separation. In this instance, the body louse had separated from the caput louse about seventy,000 years ago. Which meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that article of clothing also dated from about 70,000 years agone.

And non just wear. As scientists accept established, a host of remarkable things occurred to our species at about that time. It marked a dividing line in our history, one that made us who nosotros are, and pointed united states, for ameliorate and worse, toward the world nosotros now have created for ourselves.

Homo sapiens emerged on the planet about 200,000 years ago, researchers believe. From the beginning, our species looked much as information technology does today. If some of those long-ago people walked by the states on the street now, nosotros would recall they looked and acted somewhat oddly, but not that they weren't people. But those anatomically modern humans were not, as anthropologists say, behaviorally modern. Those starting time people had no language, no vesture, no fine art, no religion, nothing but the simplest, unspecialized tools. They were trivial more advanced, technologically speaking, than their predecessors—or, for that matter, mod chimpanzees. (The big exception was burn down, merely that was outset controlled by Homo erectus, 1 of our ancestors, a one thousand thousand years agone or more.) Our species had so niggling capacity for innovation that archaeologists have found almost no prove of cultural or social change during our showtime 100,000 years of existence. As important, for nearly all that time these early on humans were confined to a single, small-scale area in the hot, dry savanna of Due east Africa (and perchance a second, still smaller area in southern Africa).

Simply at present jump forrad 50,000 years. East Africa looks much the aforementioned. Then practise the humans in it—simply all of a sudden they are drawing and carving images, weaving ropes and baskets, shaping and wielding specialized tools, burying the dead in formal ceremonies, and maybe worshipping supernatural beings. They are wearing apparel—lice-filled clothes, to be sure, only clothes yet. Momentously, they are using linguistic communication. And they are dramatically increasing their range. Human sapiens is exploding across the planet.

What caused this remarkable change? Past geologists' standards, 50,000 years is an instant, a finger snap, a rounding error. Nonetheless, nigh researchers believe that in that flicker of time, favorable mutations swept through our species, transforming anatomically mod humans into behaviorally modern humans. The idea is not absurd: in the last 400 years, dog breeders converted hamlet dogs into creatures that act every bit differently as foxhounds, border collies, and Labrador retrievers. Fifty millennia, researchers say, is more enough to brand over a species.

Human being sapiens lacks claws, fangs, or exoskeletal plates. Rather, our unique survival skill is our ability to innovate, which originates with our species' atypical encephalon—a 3-pound universe of hyperconnected neural tissue, constantly aswirl with schemes and notions. Hence every hypothesized crusade for the transformation of humankind from anatomically mod to behaviorally mod involves a physical amending of the wet greyness matter inside our skulls. I candidate caption is that in this period people developed hybrid mental abilities past interbreeding with Neanderthals. (Some Neanderthal genes indeed appear to be in our genome, though nobody is yet sure of their office.) Another putative cause is symbolic linguistic communication—an invention that may take tapped latent creativity and aggressiveness in our species. A 3rd is that a mutation might have enabled our brains to alternate between spacing out on imaginative chains of association and focusing our attention narrowly on the physical earth around us. The old, in this view, allows u.s.a. to come upwards with creative new strategies to achieve a goal, whereas the latter enables us to execute the concrete tactics required past those strategies.

Each of these ideas is fervently advocated past some researchers and fervently attacked by others. What is clear is that something made over our species between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago—and right in the middle of that period was Toba.

CHILDREN OF TOBA

Nigh 75,000 years ago, a huge volcano exploded on the isle of Sumatra. The biggest smash for several million years, the eruption created Lake Toba, the world's biggest crater lake, and ejected the equivalent of every bit much as 3,000 cubic kilometers of rock, enough to embrace the District of Columbia in a layer of magma and ash that would reach to the stratosphere. A gigantic plume spread westward, enveloping southern asia in tephra (rock, ash, and dust). Drifts in Pakistan and India reached equally loftier equally vi meters. Smaller tephra beds blanketed the Middle Eastward and East Africa. Keen rafts of pumice filled the bounding main and drifted almost to Antarctica.

In the long run, the eruption raised Asian soil fertility. In the short term, it was catastrophic. Dust hid the sun for equally much equally a decade, plunging the globe into a years-long wintertime accompanied by widespread drought. A vegetation collapse was followed by a plummet in the species that depended on vegetation, followed past a collapse in the species that depended on the species that depended on vegetation. Temperatures may have remained colder than normal for a thousand years. Orangutans, tigers, chimpanzees, cheetahs—all were pushed to the verge of extinction.

At about this time, many geneticists believe, Human sapiens' numbers shrank dramatically, perhaps to a few one thousand people—the size of a big urban high school. The clearest testify of this bottleneck is as well its main legacy: humankind's remarkable genetic uniformity. Countless people have viewed the differences between races every bit worth killing for, merely compared to other primates—even compared to most other mammals—human beings are almost indistinguishable, genetically speaking. DNA is made from exceedingly long bondage of "bases." Typically, most one out of every two,000 of these "bases" differs between one person and the next. The equivalent figure from two Due east. coli (human gut leaner) might be about one out of twenty. The bacteria in our intestines, that is, have a hundredfold more innate variability than their hosts—evidence, researchers say, that our species is descended from a small group of founders.

Uniformity is hardly the only effect of a bottleneck. When a species shrinks in number, mutations can spread through the unabridged population with astonishing rapidity. Or genetic variants that may have already been in existence—arrays of genes that confer better planning skills, for example—can suddenly become more than common, effectively reshaping the species inside a few generations equally once-unusual traits become widespread.

Did Toba, as theorists like Richard Dawkins take argued, cause an evolutionary clogging that prepare off the creation of behaviorally modern people, perhaps by helping previously rare genes—Neanderthal DNA or an opportune mutation—spread through our species? Or did the volcanic boom simply articulate abroad other human species that had previously blocked H. sapiens' expansion? Or was the volcano irrelevant to the deeper story of human change?

For now, the answers are the subject of conscientious dorsum-and-forth in refereed journals and heated argument in faculty lounges. All that is articulate is that near the time of Toba, new, behaviorally modern people charged so fast into the tephra that human footprints appeared in Commonwealth of australia within as few as x,000 years, maybe within iv,000 or 5,000. Stay-at-home Homo sapiens 1.0, a wallflower that would never take interested Lynn Margulis, had been replaced past aggressively expansive Man sapiens two.0. Something happened, for better and worse, and we were built-in.

One fashion to illustrate what this upgrade looked similar is to consider Solenopsis invicta, the cherry-red imported fire ant. Geneticists believe that Southward. invicta originated in northern Argentine republic, an area with many rivers and frequent floods. The floods wipe out pismire nests. Over the millennia, these small-scale, furiously active creatures have acquired the ability to respond to rising water by coalescing into huge, floating, pullulating balls—workers on the outside, queen in the eye—that migrate to the border of the overflowing. Once the waters recede, colonies swarm back into previously flooded land so apace that Due south. invicta actually can use the destruction to increment its range.

In the 1930s, Solenopsis invicta was transported to the United States, probably in transport ballast, which oft consists of haphazardly loaded soil and gravel. As a teenaged bug enthusiast, Edward O. Wilson, the famed biologist, spotted the first colonies in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He saw some very happy fire ants. From the ant'southward betoken of view, it had been dumped into an empty, recently flooded expanse. S. invicta took off, never looking back.

The initial incursion watched past Wilson was likely merely a few thousand individuals—a number small enough to suggest that random, bottleneck-mode genetic change played a role in the species' subsequent history in this state. In their Argentine birthplace, fire-emmet colonies constantly fight each other, reducing their numbers and creating infinite for other types of pismire. In the United States, by contrast, the species forms cooperative supercolonies, linked clusters of nests that can spread for hundreds of miles. Systematically exploiting the landscape, these supercolonies monopolize every useful resources, wiping out other emmet species along the way—models of zeal and rapacity. Transformed by hazard and opportunity, new-model S. invictus needed just a few decades to conquer most of the southern United States.

Man sapiens did something similar in the wake of Toba. For hundreds of thousands of years, our species had been restricted to East Africa (and, possibly, a similar area in the south). Now, abruptly, new-model Man sapiens were racing across the continents similar so many imported fire ants. The difference between humans and fire ants is that fire ants specialize in disturbed habitats. Humans, too, specialize in disturbed habitats—but we exercise the agonizing.

THE WORLD IS A PETRI DISH

Every bit a student at the University of Moscow in the 1920s, Georgii Gause spent years trying—and failing—to pulsate up back up from the Rockefeller Foundation, so the about prominent funding source for not-American scientists who wished to work in the Usa. Hoping to dazzle the foundation, Gause decided to perform some nifty experiments and describe the results in his grant application.

By today'southward standards, his methodology was simplicity itself. Gause placed one-half a gram of oatmeal in one hundred cubic centimeters of water, boiled the results for ten minutes to create a broth, strained the liquid portion of the broth into a container, diluted the mixture past calculation water, and and so decanted the contents into small-scale, flat-bottomed exam tubes. Into each he dripped five Paramecium caudatum or Stylonychia mytilus, both single-celled protozoans, one species per tube. Each of Gause'southward test tubes was a pocket ecosystem, a nutrient spider web with a single node. He stored the tubes in warm places for a week and observed the results. He set down his conclusions in a 163-folio volume, The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934.

Today The Struggle for Existence is recognized as a scientific landmark, one of the first successful marriages of theory and experiment in ecology. Merely the book was non plenty to go Gause a fellowship; the Rockefeller Foundation turned down the twenty-four-year-former Soviet student equally insufficiently eminent. Gause could not visit the United States for another twenty years, by which time he had indeed become eminent, but as an antibiotics researcher.

What Gause saw in his examination tubes is often depicted in a graph, time on the horizontal axis, the number of protozoa on the vertical. The line on the graph is a distorted bell bend, with its left side twisted and stretched into a kind of flattened S. At offset the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection indicate, and all of a sudden rockets upward—a frenzy of exponential growth. The mad ascension continues until the organism begins to run out of food, at which point there is a second inflection signal, and the growth curve levels off once more equally bacteria brainstorm to die. Eventually the line descends, and the population falls toward zero.

Years ago I watched Lynn Margulis, i of Gause'due south successors, demonstrate these conclusions to a course at the University of Massachusetts with a time-lapse video of Proteus vulgaris, a bacterium that lives in the gastrointestinal tract. To humans, she said, P. vulgaris is mainly notable as a cause of urinary-tract infections. Left alone, it divides nearly every 15 minutes. Margulis switched on the projector. Onscreen was a small, wobbly bubble—P. vulgaris—in a shallow, circular glass container: a petri dish. The class gasped. The cells in the fourth dimension-lapse video seemed to shiver and boil, doubling in number every few seconds, colonies exploding out until the mass of bacteria filled the screen. In just thirty-six hours, she said, this single bacterium could cover the entire planet in a foot-deep layer of unmarried-celled ooze. Twelve hours after that, it would create a living ball of bacteria the size of the world.

Such a calamity never happens, because competing organisms and lack of resources prevent the overwhelming majority of P. vulgaris from reproducing. This, Margulis said, is natural pick, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the same purpose: to make more of themselves, ensuring their biological futurity by the only means bachelor. Natural selection stands in the way of this goal. Information technology prunes back well-nigh all species, restricting their numbers and confining their range. In the man torso, P. vulgaris is checked by the size of its habitat (portions of the man gut), the limits to its supply of nourishment (food proteins), and other, competing organisms. Thus constrained, its population remains roughly steady.

In the petri dish, by contrast, competition is absent; nutrients and habitat seem limitless, at least at commencement. The bacterium hits the outset inflection point and rockets up the left side of the curve, swamping the petri dish in a reproductive frenzy. But so its colonies slam into the second inflection bespeak: the edge of the dish. When the dish'southward nutrient supply is exhausted, P. vulgaris experiences a miniapocalypse.

By luck or superior accommodation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while. Nature's success stories, they are like Gause's protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations abound exponentially; they accept over large areas, overwhelming their surroundings as if no forcefulness opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their ain wastes or starving from lack of food.

To someone similar Margulis, Homo sapiens looks like i of these briefly fortunate species.

THE WHIP Hand

No more than than a few hundred people initially migrated from Africa, if geneticists are correct. Just they emerged into landscapes that by today'south standards were every bit rich equally Eden. Cool mountains, tropical wetlands, lush forests—all were teeming with food. Fish in the sea, birds in the air, fruit on the copse: breakfast was everywhere. People moved in.

Despite our territorial expansion, though, humans were still simply in the initial stages of Gause's oddly shaped curve. 10 thousand years ago, most demographers believe, nosotros numbered barely 5 one thousand thousand, about ane human being being for every hundred square kilometers of the earth's country surface. Homo sapiens was a scarcely noticeable dusting on the surface of a planet dominated by microbes. Nevertheless, at about this time—x,000 years ago, give or take a millennium—humankind finally began to arroyo the first inflection indicate. Our species was inventing agronomics.

The wild ancestors of cereal crops like wheat, barley, rice, and sorghum have been part of the man nutrition for almost as long every bit at that place have been humans to swallow them. (The primeval evidence comes from Mozambique, where researchers plant tiny $.25 of 105,000-year-old sorghum on aboriginal scrapers and grinders.) In some cases people may have watched over patches of wild grain, returning to them year after yr. All the same despite the endeavour and care the plants were not domesticated. Equally botanists say, wild cereals "shatter"—individual grain kernels autumn off as they ripen, scattering grain haphazardly, making it impossible to harvest the plants systematically. Only when unknown geniuses discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did non shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did truthful agriculture brainstorm. Planting cracking expanses of those mutated crops, first in southern Turkey, later in half a dozen other places, early farmers created landscapes that, and so to speak, waited for hands to harvest them.

Farming converted virtually of the habitable world into a petri dish. Foragers manipulated their environs with fire, burning areas to kill insects and encourage the growth of useful species—plants nosotros liked to eat, plants that attracted the other creatures we liked to eat. Nonetheless, their diets were largely restricted to what nature happened to provide in any given time and season. Agriculture gave humanity the whip hand. Instead of natural ecosystems with their haphazard mix of species (and so many useless organisms guzzling upwards resources!), farms are taut, disciplined communities conceived and defended to the maintenance of a single species: u.s..

Before agriculture, the Ukraine, American Midwest, and lower Yangzi were barely hospitable nutrient deserts, sparsely inhabited landscapes of insects and grass; they became breadbaskets as people scythed abroad suites of species that used soil and water we wanted to boss and replaced them with wheat, rice, and maize (corn). To i of Margulis'south beloved leaner, a petri dish is a uniform expanse of nutrients, all of which it tin seize and eat. For Homo sapiens, agriculture transformed the planet into something similar.

As in a time-lapse film, we divided and multiplied across the newly opened land. It had taken Homo sapiens two.0, behaviorally mod humans, not even 50,000 years to reach the farthest corners of the globe. Homo sapiens two.0.A—A for agriculture—took a tenth of that time to conquer the planet.

As whatever biologist would predict, success led to an increment in human numbers. Man sapiens rocketed around the elbow of the showtime inflection point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when American crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize were introduced to the rest of the world. Traditional Eurasian and African cereals—wheat, rice, millet, and sorghum, for instance—produce their grain atop sparse stalks. Basic physics suggests that plants with this design will fatally topple if the grain gets too heavy, which ways that farmers tin can actually be punished if they have an extra-bounteous harvest. By contrast, potatoes and sweet potatoes grow underground, which means that yields are not limited by the constitute'south architecture. Wheat farmers in Edinburgh and rice farmers in Edo akin discovered they could harvest four times every bit much dry nutrient matter from an acre of tubers than they could from an acre of cereals. Maize, as well, was a winner. Compared to other cereals, it has an extra-thick stem and a dissimilar, more productive blazon of photosynthesis. Taken together, these immigrant crops vastly increased the food supply in Europe, Asia, and Africa, which in turn helped increase the supply of Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The population nail had begun.

Numbers kept rise in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, afterward a High german pharmacist, Justus von Liebig, discovered that found growth was limited past the supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen, neither plants nor the mammals that eat plants tin create proteins, or for that matter the DNA and RNA that direct their production. Pure nitrogen gas (N2) is plentiful in the air but plants are unable to absorb information technology, because the ii nitrogen atoms in N2 are welded so tightly together that plants cannot dissever them apart for utilize. Instead, plants have in nitrogen only when it is combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements. To restore exhausted soil, traditional farmers grew peas, beans, lentils, and other pulses. (They never knew why these "light-green manures" replenished the land. Today we know that their roots contain special leaner that convert useless N2 into "bio-bachelor" nitrogen compounds.) After Liebig, European and American growers replaced those crops with high-intensity fertilizer—nitrogen-rich guano from Peru at first, and so nitrates from mines in Chile. Yields soared. Merely supplies were much more limited than farmers liked. And then intense was the competition for fertilizer that a guano war erupted in 1879, engulfing much of western South America. Almost 3,000 people died.

Ii more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, came to the rescue, discovering the central steps to making constructed fertilizer from fossil fuels. (The procedure involves combining nitrogen gas and hydrogen from natural gas into ammonia, which is then used to create nitrogenous compounds usable by plants.) Haber and Bosch are non about as well known as they should be; their discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, has literally changed the chemical composition of the globe, a feat previously reserved for microorganisms. Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into the soil that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels accept risen worldwide. Today, roughly a 3rd of all the poly peptide (brute and vegetable) consumed by humankind is derived from synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled Homo sapiens to extract about two billion people'due south worth of food from the aforementioned amount of available land.

The improved wheat, rice, and (to a bottom extent) maize varieties developed past plant breeders in the 1950s and 1960s are often said to have prevented another billion deaths. Antibiotics, vaccines, and water-treatment plants also saved lives by pushing back humankind's bacterial, viral, and fungal enemies. With virtually no surviving biological competition, humankind had always more unhindered access to the planetary petri dish: in the by ii hundred years, the number of humans walking the planet ballooned from 1 to 7 billion, with a few billion more expected in coming decades.

Rocketing up the growth bend, human beings "now appropriate nearly forty% . . . of potential terrestrial productivity." This figure dates from 1986—a famous estimate by a squad of Stanford biologists. Ten years later, a second Stanford squad calculated that the "fraction of the land's biological product that is used or dominated" past our species had risen to as much as 50 percent. In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen gave a name to our time: the "Anthropocene," the era in which Human sapiens became a forcefulness operating on a planetary scale. That year, one-half of the world'south attainable fresh water was consumed past human beings.

Lynn Margulis, it seems safe to say, would have scoffed at these assessments of human domination over the natural globe, which, in every case I know of, do non accept into account the enormous touch of the microworld. Merely she would not have disputed the cardinal idea: Man sapiens has become a successful species, and is growing accordingly.

If we follow Gause's pattern, growth will keep at a delirious speed until we hit the 2d inflection point. At that time we will have exhausted the resources of the global petri dish, or finer made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste material, or both. After that, human life volition be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead. When the male monarch falls, so do his minions; it is possible that our autumn might also take downwards most mammals and many plants. Possibly sooner, quite likely afterwards, in this scenario, the globe volition over again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects, every bit it has been through most of its history.

It would exist foolish to expect anything else, Margulis thought. More than that, it would be unnatural.

As PLASTIC AS CANBY

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's classic, pun-filled run a risk tale, the young Milo and his faithful companions unexpectedly find themselves transported to a bleak, mysterious isle. Encountering a man in a tweed jacket and beanie, Milo asks him where they are. The homo replies by asking if they know who he is—the homo is, evidently, confused on the subject. Milo and his friends confer, then enquire if he can describe himself.

"Yes, indeed," the human replied happily. "I'g as tall every bit can be"—and he grew straight upwards until all that could be seen of him were his shoes and stockings—"and I'one thousand as brusque as can be"—and he shrank down to the size of a pebble. "I'k equally generous as can be," he said, handing each of them a large red apple tree, "and I'm every bit selfish as can exist," he snarled, grabbing them dorsum again.

In curt club, the companions learn that the man is equally potent as can be, weak as tin can be, smart as tin can exist, stupid equally tin be, graceful equally tin can be, clumsy as—yous get the picture. "Is that whatever help to you lot?" he asks. Again, Milo and his friends confer, and realize that the answer is actually quite elementary:

"Without a dubiousness," Milo ended brightly, "you must be Canby."

"Of course, yes, of class," the human shouted. "Why didn't I think of that? I'grand as happy every bit can be."

With Canby, Juster presumably meant to mock a certain kind of babyish, uncommitted man-kid. Only I tin't aid thinking of poor old Canby as exemplifying ane of humankind's greatest attributes: behavioral plasticity. The term was coined in 1890 by the pioneering psychologist William James, who defined it as "the possession of a construction weak enough to yield to an influence, merely strong enough non to yield all at once." Behavioral plasticity, a defining feature of Homo sapiens' big brain, means that humans can change their habits; about every bit a matter of course, people change careers, quit smoking or accept up vegetarianism, catechumen to new religions, and drift to distant lands where they must learn strange languages. This plasticity, this Canby-hood, is the hallmark of our transformation from anatomically modernistic Human being sapiens to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens—and the reason, perhaps, we were able to survive when Toba reconfigured the landscape.

Other creatures are much less flexible. Like apartment-home cats that compulsively hide in the cupboard when visitors get in, they have limited capacity to welcome new phenomena and change in response. Human beings, by contrast, are so exceptionally plastic that vast swaths of neuroscience are devoted to trying to explain how this could come up most. (Nobody knows for certain, but some researchers now retrieve that item genes give their possessors a heightened, inborn sensation of their surround, which tin atomic number 82 both to useless, neurotic sensitivity and greater power to detect and adapt to new situations.)

Plasticity in individuals is mirrored past plasticity on a societal level. The degree system in social species like honeybees is elaborate and finely tuned simply fixed, every bit if in amber, in the loops of their Dna. Some leafcutter ants are said to accept, next to human beings, the biggest and most complex societies on globe, with elaborately coded beliefs that reaches from disposal of the dead to complex agricultural systems. Housing millions of individuals in inconceivably ramose subterranean networks, leafcutter colonies are "Globe's ultimate superorganisms," Edward O. Wilson has written. But they are incapable of primal change. The centrality and potency of the queen cannot exist challenged; the tiny minority of males, used just to inseminate queens, will never learn new responsibilities.

Human societies are far more varied than their insect cousins, of form. But the true divergence is their plasticity. It is why humankind, a species of Canbys, has been able to move into every corner of the earth, and to command what we notice in that location. Our ability to alter ourselves to extract resource from our surroundings with ever-increasing efficiency is what has fabricated Homo sapiens a successful species. It is our greatest blessing.

Or was our greatest approving, anyway.

DISCOUNT RATES

Past 2050, demographers predict, as many as 10 billion human beings will walk the earth, 3 billion more than today. Not only will more than people be than ever before, they will exist richer than ever earlier. In the last iii decades hundreds of millions in China, Bharat, and other formerly poor places have lifted themselves from destitution—arguably the most of import, and certainly the nearly heartening, achievement of our fourth dimension. Yet, similar all human being enterprises, this corking success will pose great difficulties.

In the past, rising incomes have invariably prompted rise demand for goods and services. Billions more than jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics—these are things the newly prosperous will want. (Why shouldn't they?) Just the greatest challenge may exist the most basic of all: feeding these extra mouths. To agronomists, the prospect is sobering. The newly flush will non want their ancestors' gruel. Instead they will inquire for pork and beef and lamb. Salmon will sizzle on their outdoor grills. In wintertime, they will desire strawberries, like people in New York and London, and clean bibb lettuce from hydroponic gardens.

All of these, each and every one, require vastly more resources to produce than simple peasant agriculture. Already 35 percentage of the earth's grain harvest is used to feed livestock. The process is terribly inefficient: between seven and ten kilograms of grain are required to produce i kilogram of beefiness. Not only will the globe's farmers accept to produce enough wheat and maize to feed iii billion more people, they volition take to produce enough to give them all hamburgers and steaks. Given present patterns of nutrient consumption, economists believe, we volition need to produce about 40 per centum more grain in 2050 than nosotros do today.

How can nosotros provide these things for all these new people? That is only role of the question. The full question is: How tin we provide them without wrecking the natural systems on which all depend?

Scientists, activists, and politicians accept proposed many solutions, each from a different ideological and moral perspective. Some argue that we must drastically throttle industrial culture. (Stop energy-intensive, chemical-based farming today! Eliminate fossil fuels to halt climate change!) Others claim that only intense exploitation of scientific knowledge tin can save us. (Plant super-productive, genetically modified crops now! Switch to nuclear ability to halt climatic change!) No matter which course is chosen, though, information technology will crave radical, large-calibration transformations in the human enterprise—a daunting, hideously expensive task.

Worse, the ship is too large to plough quickly. The world's food supply cannot be decoupled rapidly from industrial agriculture, if that is seen as the answer. Aquifers cannot exist recharged with a snap of the fingers. If the high-tech route is chosen, genetically modified crops cannot exist bred and tested overnight. Similarly, carbon-sequestration techniques and nuclear power plants cannot exist deployed instantly. Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that'south like asking good for you, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills.

Not only is the task daunting, it's strange. In the name of nature, nosotros are asking homo beings to exercise something securely unnatural, something no other species has ever washed or could ever practise: constrain its own growth (at least in some means). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brownish tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.South., rabbits in Commonwealth of australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause's protozoans, they are racing to find the edges of their petri dish. Not one has voluntarily turned back. Now we are request Homo sapiens to fence itself in.

What a peculiar affair to ask! Economists like to talk about the "discount rate," which is their term for preferring a bird in hand today over two in the bush tomorrow. The term sums upward part of our homo nature too. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, we are as hard-wired to focus on the firsthand and local over the long-term and faraway as we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep night forests. Thus, we intendance more about the broken stoplight up the street today than atmospheric condition next year in Republic of croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists signal out: Americans are far more than probable to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo side by side year. Yet here nosotros are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more than understandable than the U.S. Congress's failure to grapple with, say, climate alter. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, tin exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species?

To biologists like Margulis, who spend their careers arguing that humans are but part of the natural order, the respond should be articulate. All life is similar at base. All species seek without pause to make more than of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying till nosotros reach our maximum possible numbers, even equally we take out much of the planet, we are fulfilling our destiny.

From this vantage, the answer to the question whether we are doomed to destroy ourselves is yes. Information technology should be obvious.

Should be—but perhaps is not.

HARA HACHI BU

When I imagine the profound social transformation necessary to avoid calamity, I think about Robinson Crusoe, hero of Daniel Defoe'south famous novel. Defoe clearly intended his hero to be an exemplary human being. Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off Venezuela in 1659, Crusoe is an impressive example of behavioral plasticity. During his 20-seven-twelvemonth exile he learns to take hold of fish, hunt rabbits and turtles, tame and pasture island goats, prune and support local citrus trees, and create "plantations" of barley and rice from seeds that he salvaged from the wreck. (Defoe apparently didn't know that citrus and goats were not native to the Americas and thus Crusoe probably wouldn't have found them in that location.) Rescue comes at terminal in the form of a shipful of ragged mutineers, who plan to maroon their captain on the supposedly empty isle. Crusoe helps the captain recapture his ship and offers the defeated mutineers a choice: trial in England or permanent banishment to the isle. All choose the latter. Crusoe has harnessed so much of the island's productive power to human use that fifty-fifty a gaggle of inept seamen can survive there in comfort.

To get Crusoe on his unlucky voyage, Defoe made him an officer on a slave ship, transporting captured Africans to South America. Today, no author would make a slave seller the admirable hero of a novel. Only in 1720, when Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, no readers said boo about Crusoe's occupation, because slavery was the norm from i end of the world to another. Rules and names differed from place to place, simply coerced labor was everywhere, building roads, serving aristocrats, and fighting wars. Slaves teemed in the Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, and Ming China. Unfree hands were less mutual in continental Europe, merely Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands happily exploited slaves by the million in their American colonies. Few protests were heard; slavery had been part of the cloth of life since the lawmaking of Hammurabi.

And so, in the space of a few decades in the nineteenth century, slavery, one of humankind'south most indelible institutions, almost vanished.

The sheer implausibility of this change is staggering. In 1860, slaves were, collectively, the single well-nigh valuable economical asset in the The states, worth an estimated $3 billion, a vast sum in those days (and nigh $x trillion in today'southward money). Rather than investing in factories similar northern entrepreneurs, southern businessmen had sunk their uppercase into slaves. And from their perspective, correctly so—masses of enchained men and women had fabricated the region politically powerful, and gave social status to an entire class of poor whites. Slavery was the foundation of the social lodge. It was, thundered John C. Calhoun, a former senator, secretary of state, and vice president, "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good." Yet just a few years subsequently Calhoun spoke, part of the United States set out to destroy this institution, wrecking much of the national economy and killing one-half a meg citizens along the way.

Incredibly, the plow against slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Great Britain, the globe's biggest man trafficker, closed down its slave operations in 1808, though they were amid the nation's nearly profitable industries. The Netherlands, France, Espana, and Portugal soon followed. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal exchange of human cargo. Slavery still exists hither and there, merely in no society anywhere is it formally accustomed as office of the social fabric.

Historians have provided many reasons for this extraordinary transition. But one of the most important is that abolitionists had convinced huge numbers of ordinary people around the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An institution fundamental to human order for millennia was swiftly dismantled by ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

In the concluding few centuries, such profound changes have occurred repeatedly. Since the beginning of our species, for instance, every known social club has been based on the domination of women by men. (Rumors of past matriarchal societies grow, but few archaeologists believe them.) In the long view, women'southward lack of liberty has been as central to the human enterprise every bit gravitation is to the angelic order. The degree of suppression varied from time to time and place to place, merely women never had an equal voice; indeed, some prove exists that the penalization for possession of two Ten chromosomes increased with technological progress. Even as the industrial Due north and agricultural S warred over the handling of Africans, they regarded women identically: in neither half of the nation could they attend college, take a bank account, or own holding. Equally confining were women'south lives in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Nowadays women are the bulk of U.South. college students, the bulk of the workforce, and the majority of voters. Again, historians assign multiple causes to this shift in the human condition, rapid in time, staggering in scope. But i of the most important was the power of ideas—the voices, deportment, and examples of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In recent years something similar seems to have occurred with gay rights: first a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, mayhap, a slow movement to equality.

Less well known, simply equally profound: the decline in violence. Foraging societies waged state of war less brutally than industrial societies, but more ofttimes. Typically, archaeologists believe, about a quarter of all hunters and gatherers were killed by their fellows. Violence declined somewhat as humans gathered themselves into states and empires, just was still a constant presence. When Athens was at its superlative in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, it was ever at war: against Sparta (First and Second Peloponnesian Wars, Corinthian State of war); confronting Persia (Greco-Farsi Wars, Wars of the Delian League); against Aegina (Aeginetan War); against Macedon (Olynthian State of war); against Samos (Samian War); against Chios, Rhodes, and Cos (Social War).

In this respect, classical Greece was zip special—look at the ghastly histories of Red china, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Similarly, early modern Europe's wars were and then fast and furious that historians simply gather them into catchall titles similar the Hundred Years' State of war, followed by the shorter just even more than destructive Thirty Years' War. And even equally Europeans and their descendants paved the way toward today's concept of universal man rights past creating documents like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Europe remained so mired in combat that it fought two conflicts of such massive scale and reach they became known every bit "earth" wars.

Since the 2d World War, however, rates of fierce decease have fallen to the everyman levels in known history. Today, the boilerplate person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than e'er before—an boggling transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. As the political scientist Joshua Goldstein has written, "we are winning the war on state of war." Again, there are multiple causes. But Goldstein, probably the leading scholar in this field, argues that the well-nigh of import is the emergence of the United Nations and other transnational bodies, an expression of the ideas of peace activists earlier in the last century.

As a relatively young species, we have an adolescent propensity to make a mess: we pollute the air we exhale and the h2o we drink, and appear stalled in an historic period of carbon dumping and nuclear experimentation that is putting endless species at risk including our own. But we are making undeniable progress nonetheless. No European in 1800 could have imagined that in 2000 Europe would take no legal slavery, women would be able to vote, and gay people would be able to marry. No one could have guessed a continent that had been tearing itself apart for centuries would be gratuitous of armed conflict, even amid terrible economic times. Given this record, even Lynn Margulis might pause (mayhap).

Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a withal greater transformation—behavioral plasticity of the highest order—considering we would be pushing against biological nature itself. The Japanese take an expression, hara hachi bu, which means, roughly speaking, "belly lxxx percent full." Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an ancient injunction to stop eating earlier feeling full. Nutritionally, the command makes a smashing bargain of sense. When people consume, their stomachs produce peptides that bespeak fullness to the nervous arrangement. Unfortunately, the mechanism is so tedious that eaters frequently perceive satiety simply after they accept consumed as well much—hence the all-besides-common condition of feeling bloated or sick from overeating. Nihon—actually, the Japanese island of Okinawa—is the only place on earth where large numbers of people are known to restrict their own calorie intake systematically and routinely. Some researchers merits that hara hachi bu is responsible for Okinawans' notoriously long life spans. Merely I call up of information technology as a metaphor for stopping before the 2nd inflection point, voluntarily forswearing brusk-term consumption to obtain a long-term do good.

Evolutionarily speaking, a species-wide adoption of hara hachi bu would be unprecedented. Thinking about it, I can picture Lynn Margulis rolling her eyes. Simply is it and so unlikely that our species, Canbys i and all, would exist able to do exactly that earlier nosotros circular that fateful curve of the second inflection signal and nature does it for us?

I tin imagine Margulis'due south response: Yous're imagining our species equally some sort of large-brained, hyperrational, do good-toll-calculating computer! A meliorate analogy is the bacteria at our anxiety! Notwithstanding, Margulis would be the first to hold that removing the shackles from women and slaves has begun to unleash the suppressed talents of two-thirds of the human race. Drastically reducing violence has prevented the waste of endless lives and staggering amounts of resources. Is information technology really impossible to believe that nosotros wouldn't use those talents and those resources to draw back before the abyss?

Our record of success is not that long. In any example, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could get so many other things right and become this i incorrect. To have the imagination to see our potential cease, but not have the imagination to avoid it. To send humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential but to be unable to utilise it—to be, in the stop, no unlike from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would exist testify that Lynn Margulis's most dismissive beliefs had been correct afterward all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at terminal count, not an peculiarly interesting species. O

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Source: https://orionmagazine.org/article/state-of-the-species/

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