Aww... Itã¢â‚¬â„¢s a Cute Baby Dragon. As Soon as It Hatched It Headed to the Sea.

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

THE Trouble WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they recall conservation has something to practice with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the about important biologists in the last half century—she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but v or even 6 (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria).

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

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

Bacteria and protists tin do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like usa: grade giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as information technology is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen nosotros breathe. Compared to this power and diverseness, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, only not actually pregnant.

Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling similar someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn't move the earth a little closer to the heart of the universe. Aren't we special at all?

This was simply chitchat on the street, so I didn't write annihilation downward. Only equally I recall information technology, she answered that Human sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one 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" hateful, if self-destruction is role of the definition? Does that self-destruction include the rest of the biosphere? What are human being beings in the thousand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is human nature, if at that place is such a matter, and how did we acquire 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.

Ane mode to brainstorm answering them came to Mark Stoneking in 1999, when he received a observe from his son's school warning of a potential lice outbreak in the classroom. Stoneking is a researcher at the Max Planck Found for Evolutionary Biological science in Leipzig, Germany. He didn't know much about lice. Equally a biologist, it was natural for him to noodle around for information most them. The nigh mutual louse found on homo 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—body lice, which feed on skin but live in clothing. In fact, Stoneking learned, body lice are so dependent on the protection of article of clothing that they cannot survive more than than a few hours away from information technology.

It occurred to him that the two louse subspecies could be used equally an evolutionary probe. P. humanus capitis, the caput louse, could be an ancient badgerer, because homo beings have always had hair for it to infest. Just P. humanus corporis, the trunk louse, must not be especially one-time, because its demand for clothing meant that information technology could not take existed while humans went naked. Humankind's great coverup had created a new ecological niche, and some head lice had rushed to make full it. Evolution then worked its magic; a new subspecies, P. humanus corporis, arose. Stoneking couldn't be sure that this scenario had taken place, though information technology seemed probable. But if his idea were correct, discovering when the body louse diverged from the head louse would provide a rough date for when people starting time invented and wore clothing.

The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated deed. Habiliment has practical uses—warming the torso in cold places, shielding information technology from the sun in hot places—just it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something that has proven to be of inescapable interest to Homo sapiens. Wear is ornament and emblem; it separates human being beings from their earlier, united nations-self-conscious state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without clothing, merely only people tin be naked.) The invention of vesture was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human globe had go a realm of circuitous, symbolic artifacts.

With ii colleagues, Stoneking measured the difference between snippets of Dna in the two louse subspecies. Because Deoxyribonucleic acid is thought to selection up small, 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 mutual ancestor—the greater the number of differences, the longer the separation. In this case, the trunk louse had separated from the head louse about 70,000 years agone. Which meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that clothing also dated from about seventy,000 years ago.

And not only clothing. 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 fabricated united states of america who we are, and pointed united states of america, for better and worse, toward the world we now take created for ourselves.

Human being sapiens emerged on the planet nigh 200,000 years ago, researchers believe. From the starting time, our species looked much as it does today. If some of those long-agone people walked past united states on the street at present, we would remember they looked and acted somewhat oddly, just not that they weren't people. Just those anatomically modern humans were not, as anthropologists say, behaviorally modern. Those first people had no language, no wearable, no art, no religion, null but the simplest, unspecialized tools. They were little more advanced, technologically speaking, than their predecessors—or, for that affair, modernistic chimpanzees. (The big exception was fire, but that was first controlled by Human erectus, ane of our ancestors, a million years agone or more.) Our species had so lilliputian capacity for innovation that archaeologists have found almost no testify of cultural or social modify during our first 100,000 years of existence. Equally important, for virtually all that time these early humans were confined to a unmarried, small-scale surface area in the hot, dry out savanna of East Africa (and maybe a second, still smaller surface area in southern Africa).

But now jump frontwards 50,000 years. East Africa looks much the aforementioned. So exercise the humans in it—but suddenly they are drawing and carving images, weaving ropes and baskets, shaping and wielding specialized tools, burial the dead in formal ceremonies, and perhaps worshipping supernatural beings. They are wearing clothes—lice-filled clothes, to be sure, just clothes nonetheless. Momentously, they are using linguistic communication. And they are dramatically increasing their range. Homo sapiens is exploding across the planet.

What caused this remarkable change? By geologists' standards, 50,000 years is an instant, a finger snap, a rounding error. Nonetheless, most 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 non absurd: in the final 400 years, canis familiaris breeders converted village dogs into creatures that act as differently as foxhounds, border collies, and Labrador retrievers. 50 millennia, researchers say, is more than enough to make over a species.

Man 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 three-pound universe of hyperconnected neural tissue, constantly aswirl with schemes and notions. Hence every hypothesized cause for the transformation of humankind from anatomically mod to behaviorally modern involves a physical alteration of the moisture gray matter within our skulls. 1 candidate explanation is that in this period people developed hybrid mental abilities by interbreeding with Neanderthals. (Some Neanderthal genes indeed appear to be in our genome, though nobody is yet sure of their office.) Another putative crusade is symbolic language—an invention that may accept tapped latent creativity and aggressiveness in our species. A third is that a mutation might have enabled our brains to alternate between spacing out on imaginative chains of clan and focusing our attention narrowly on the physical world around usa. The former, in this view, allows usa to come up with artistic new strategies to reach a goal, whereas the latter enables us to execute the concrete tactics required past those strategies.

Each of these ideas is fervently advocated by some researchers and fervently attacked past others. What is articulate is that something made over our species betwixt 100,000 and 50,000 years agone—and right in the centre of that menstruum was Toba.

CHILDREN OF TOBA

About 75,000 years ago, a huge volcano exploded on the isle of Sumatra. The biggest blast for several meg years, the eruption created Lake Toba, the world's biggest crater lake, and ejected the equivalent of as much equally 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 feather spread west, enveloping southern asia in tephra (rock, ash, and dust). Drifts in Islamic republic of pakistan and India reached every bit high as six meters. Smaller tephra beds blanketed the Middle East and E Africa. Nifty rafts of pumice filled the sea and drifted nearly to Antarctica.

In the long run, the eruption raised Asian soil fertility. In the curt term, it was catastrophic. Dust hid the lord's day for as much as a decade, plunging the earth into a years-long wintertime accompanied by widespread drought. A vegetation plummet was followed by a plummet in the species that depended on vegetation, followed past a plummet 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, Homo sapiens' numbers shrank dramatically, perchance to a few thousand people—the size of a large urban high school. The clearest evidence of this bottleneck is also its main legacy: humankind'southward remarkable genetic uniformity. Countless people have viewed the differences between races equally worth killing for, but compared to other primates—even compared to nearly other mammals—human beings are about indistinguishable, genetically speaking. Deoxyribonucleic acid is fabricated from exceedingly long chains of "bases." Typically, most i out of every 2,000 of these "bases" differs between one person and the side by side. The equivalent figure from two E. coli (human gut leaner) might be about one out of xx. 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 minor group of founders.

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

Did Toba, as theorists like Richard Dawkins take argued, cause an evolutionary clogging that set off the creation of behaviorally modern people, maybe past helping previously rare genes—Neanderthal Deoxyribonucleic acid or an opportune mutation—spread through our species? Or did the volcanic blast simply clear away other man species that had previously blocked H. sapiens' expansion? Or was the volcano irrelevant to the deeper story of human modify?

For now, the answers are the bailiwick of careful dorsum-and-along in refereed journals and heated argument in kinesthesia lounges. All that is clear is that about the time of Toba, new, behaviorally modern people charged so fast into the tephra that human footprints appeared in Australia inside as few equally x,000 years, peradventure within 4,000 or v,000. Stay-at-dwelling Human being sapiens one.0, a wallflower that would never have interested Lynn Margulis, had been replaced by aggressively expansive Human being sapiens 2.0. Something happened, for better and worse, and we were built-in.

One way to illustrate what this upgrade looked like is to consider Solenopsis invicta, the red imported fire ant. Geneticists believe that S. invicta originated in northern Argentine republic, an area with many rivers and frequent floods. The floods wipe out ant nests. Over the millennia, these small-scale, furiously active creatures have caused the ability to reply to rising water by coalescing into huge, floating, pullulating balls—workers on the outside, queen in the centre—that drift to the edge of the flood. In one case the waters recede, colonies swarm dorsum into previously flooded state so apace that Southward. invicta actually tin can use the destruction to increase its range.

In the 1930s, Solenopsis invicta was transported to the U.s.a., probably in ship anchor, which oftentimes consists of haphazardly loaded soil and gravel. Every bit a teenaged problems enthusiast, Edward O. Wilson, the famed biologist, spotted the commencement colonies in the port of Mobile, Alabama. He saw some very happy burn ants. From the ant'south point of view, it had been dumped into an empty, recently flooded expanse. South. invicta took off, never looking back.

The initial incursion watched by Wilson was likely just a few k individuals—a number pocket-size enough to advise that random, bottleneck-style genetic alter played a role in the species' subsequent history in this country. In their Argentine birthplace, fire-ant colonies constantly fight each other, reducing their numbers and creating infinite for other types of ant. In the The 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 resource, wiping out other emmet species along the way—models of zeal and rapacity. Transformed by gamble and opportunity, new-model S. invictus needed only a few decades to conquer nigh of the southern The states.

Homo 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 Homo sapiens were racing across the continents like then many imported fire ants. The difference between humans and fire ants is that burn ants specialize in disturbed habitats. Humans, too, specialize in disturbed habitats—but nosotros practice the agonizing.

THE WORLD IS A PETRI DISH

As a student at the University of Moscow in the 1920s, Georgii Gause spent years trying—and failing—to drum up support from the Rockefeller Foundation, then the most prominent funding source for non-American scientists who wished to work in the U.s.a.. Hoping to dazzle the foundation, Gause decided to perform some smashing experiments and depict the results in his grant application.

By today's 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 goop, strained the liquid portion of the broth into a container, diluted the mixture by adding water, and then decanted the contents into small, flat-bottomed test tubes. Into each he dripped five Paramecium caudatum or Stylonychia mytilus, both unmarried-celled protozoans, one species per tube. Each of Gause'south test tubes was a pocket ecosystem, a food spider web with a unmarried node. He stored the tubes in warm places for a week and observed the results. He set up downwards his conclusions in a 163-page book, The Struggle for Being, published in 1934.

Today The Struggle for Being is recognized every bit a scientific landmark, ane of the starting time successful marriages of theory and experiment in ecology. Simply the book was not enough to go Gause a fellowship; the Rockefeller Foundation turned down the twenty-iv-year-old Soviet student as insufficiently eminent. Gause could not visit the United states of america for another twenty years, by which time he had indeed become eminent, but every bit an antibiotics researcher.

What Gause saw in his test 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 start the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection indicate, and of a sudden rockets up—a frenzy of exponential growth. The mad rise continues until the organism begins to run out of nutrient, at which point there is a second inflection point, and the growth curve levels off once more as bacteria begin to die. Somewhen the line descends, and the population falls toward nothing.

Years ago I watched Lynn Margulis, ane of Gause's successors, demonstrate these conclusions to a class at the Academy of Massachusetts with a fourth dimension-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 about every fifteen minutes. Margulis switched on the projector. Onscreen was a small, wobbly chimera—P. vulgaris—in a shallow, circular glass container: a petri dish. The class gasped. The cells in the time-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 xxx-half dozen hours, she said, this single bacterium could encompass the entire planet in a pes-deep layer of single-celled ooze. Twelve hours later that, information technology would create a living brawl of bacteria the size of the earth.

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 selection, Darwin's great insight. All living creatures have the aforementioned purpose: to make more than of themselves, ensuring their biological future by the only means bachelor. Natural option stands in the way of this goal. It prunes back almost all species, restricting their numbers and confining their range. In the human body, P. vulgaris is checked by the size of its habitat (portions of the human 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, past contrast, competition is absent-minded; nutrients and habitat seem limitless, at least at showtime. The bacterium hits the start inflection indicate and rockets up the left side of the bend, swamping the petri dish in a reproductive frenzy. Just then its colonies slam into the second inflection bespeak: the edge of the dish. When the dish'south food supply is exhausted, P. vulgaris experiences a miniapocalypse.

By luck or superior adaptation, 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 grow exponentially; they take over large areas, overwhelming their environment every bit if no force opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their ain wastes or starving from lack of food.

To someone like 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. But they emerged into landscapes that past today'south standards were as rich every bit Eden. Cool mountains, tropical wetlands, lush forests—all were teeming with food. Fish in the sea, birds in the air, fruit on the trees: breakfast was everywhere. People moved in.

Despite our territorial expansion, though, humans were nevertheless only in the initial stages of Gause's oddly shaped bend. 10 chiliad years agone, virtually demographers believe, we numbered barely 5 million, nearly one human existence for every hundred square kilometers of the globe's land surface. Homo sapiens was a scarcely noticeable dusting on the surface of a planet dominated by microbes. Withal, at virtually this time—10,000 years ago, requite or take a millennium—humankind finally began to approach the offset inflection point. Our species was inventing agriculture.

The wild ancestors of cereal crops similar wheat, barley, rice, and sorghum have been part of the man diet for almost every bit long as there have been humans to swallow them. (The earliest evidence comes from Mozambique, where researchers establish tiny bits of 105,000-year-old sorghum on aboriginal scrapers and grinders.) In some cases people may take watched over patches of wild grain, returning to them yr after yr. Yet despite the endeavour and care the plants were not domesticated. As botanists say, wild cereals "shatter"—individual grain kernels fall off as they ripen, scattering grain haphazardly, making it impossible to harvest the plants systematically. Merely when unknown geniuses discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did true agriculture brainstorm. Planting dandy expanses of those mutated crops, start in southern Turkey, later on in one-half a dozen other places, early on farmers created landscapes that, so to speak, waited for hands to harvest them.

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

Before agronomics, the Ukraine, American Midwest, and lower Yangzi were barely hospitable nutrient deserts, sparsely inhabited landscapes of insects and grass; they became breadbaskets equally people scythed away suites of species that used soil and water nosotros wanted to dominate and replaced them with wheat, rice, and maize (corn). To one of Margulis'south love bacteria, a petri dish is a uniform area of nutrients, all of which information technology can seize and eat. For Homo sapiens, agronomics transformed the planet into something similar.

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

As any biologist would predict, success led to an increase in human numbers. Homo sapiens rocketed around the elbow of the first inflection point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when American crops like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and maize were introduced to the rest of the globe. Traditional Eurasian and African cereals—wheat, rice, millet, and sorghum, for example—produce their grain atop thin stalks. Basic physics suggests that plants with this blueprint will fatally topple if the grain gets besides heavy, which means that farmers can really be punished if they have an extra-bounteous harvest. By dissimilarity, potatoes and sweet potatoes grow underground, which ways that yields are non limited past the plant'due south architecture. Wheat farmers in Edinburgh and rice farmers in Edo akin discovered they could harvest four times equally much dry food matter from an acre of tubers than they could from an acre of cereals. Maize, too, was a winner. Compared to other cereals, it has an extra-thick stalk and a different, more productive type of photosynthesis. Taken together, these immigrant crops vastly increased the nutrient 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 rising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, discovered that institute growth was limited past the supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen, neither plants nor the mammals that eat plants can create proteins, or for that thing the Dna and RNA that direct their production. Pure nitrogen gas (N2) is plentiful in the air just plants are unable to absorb it, because the two nitrogen atoms in N2 are welded so tightly together that plants cannot carve up them apart for employ. Instead, plants take 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 "green manures" replenished the land. Today nosotros know that their roots comprise special leaner that catechumen useless N2 into "bio-available" nitrogen compounds.) After Liebig, European and American growers replaced those crops with high-intensity fertilizer—nitrogen-rich guano from Republic of peru at outset, and then nitrates from mines in Republic of chile. Yields soared. But supplies were much more than limited than farmers liked. Then intense was the competition for fertilizer that a guano war erupted in 1879, engulfing much of western South America. Well-nigh 3,000 people died.

Two more than German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, came to the rescue, discovering the fundamental steps to making synthetic fertilizer from fossil fuels. (The process 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 not nearly besides known as they should exist; their discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, has literally inverse the chemic composition of the earth, a feat previously reserved for microorganisms. Farmers have injected and then much synthetic fertilizer into the soil that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, roughly a tertiary of all the protein (brute and vegetable) consumed past humankind is derived from constructed nitrogen fertilizer. Some other way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled Human being sapiens to extract most 2 billion people's worth of food from the aforementioned corporeality of available land.

The improved wheat, rice, and (to a bottom extent) maize varieties adult past plant breeders in the 1950s and 1960s are oftentimes said to take prevented some other billion deaths. Antibiotics, vaccines, and water-treatment plants besides saved lives past pushing dorsum humankind'due south bacterial, viral, and fungal enemies. With well-nigh no surviving biological contest, humankind had ever more unhindered access to the planetary petri dish: in the by two hundred years, the number of humans walking the planet ballooned from 1 to vii billion, with a few billion more expected in coming decades.

Rocketing up the growth bend, homo beings "now appropriate about twoscore% . . . of potential terrestrial productivity." This figure dates from 1986—a famous estimate by a team of Stanford biologists. Ten years after, a 2nd Stanford team calculated that the "fraction of the land's biological product that is used or dominated" by our species had risen to as much as 50 percent. In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen gave a proper name to our time: the "Anthropocene," the era in which Homo sapiens became a strength operating on a planetary scale. That twelvemonth, half of the world's accessible fresh water was consumed by homo beings.

Lynn Margulis, it seems safe to say, would take scoffed at these assessments of human being domination over the natural world, which, in every case I know of, practise not take into account the enormous bear on of the microworld. But she would non have disputed the central idea: Human sapiens has become a successful species, and is growing accordingly.

If we follow Gause's pattern, growth will continue at a delirious speed until we hit the 2nd inflection point. At that time we will take exhausted the resource of the global petri dish, or effectively made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste, or both. Later that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead. When the king falls, so practice his minions; information technology is possible that our autumn might too take down well-nigh mammals and many plants. Mayhap sooner, quite probable afterward, in this scenario, the earth volition again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects, equally it has been through almost of its history.

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

As PLASTIC Equally CANBY

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

"Aye, indeed," the man replied happily. "I'g every bit tall as can be"—and he grew directly upward until all that could exist seen of him were his shoes and stockings—"and I'1000 equally curt as tin can be"—and he shrank down to the size of a pebble. "I'g as generous equally can be," he said, handing each of them a large cherry apple tree, "and I'm as selfish every bit tin be," he snarled, grabbing them dorsum again.

In brusque social club, the companions learn that the human being is as potent as tin can be, weak as tin can exist, smart as tin can be, stupid equally can be, graceful as can be, clumsy as—you get the picture. "Is that any help to you lot?" he asks. Once again, Milo and his friends confer, and realize that the respond is actually quite elementary:

"Without a doubt," Milo concluded brightly, "yous must exist Canby."

"Of course, yep, of course," the man shouted. "Why didn't I think of that? I'chiliad as happy as can exist."

With Canby, Juster presumably meant to mock a certain kind of babyish, uncommitted man-child. But I tin't help thinking of poor old Canby as exemplifying one of humankind'south 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, but strong plenty not to yield all at one time." Behavioral plasticity, a defining feature of Homo sapiens' big encephalon, means that humans tin modify their habits; about every bit a thing of course, people change careers, quit smoking or take up vegetarianism, convert to new religions, and migrate to afar lands where they must learn foreign languages. This plasticity, this Canby-hood, is the authentication of our transformation from anatomically mod Homo sapiens to behaviorally mod Homo sapiens—and the reason, possibly, we were able to survive when Toba reconfigured the mural.

Other creatures are much less flexible. Like flat-domicile cats that compulsively hide in the cupboard when visitors get in, they accept express chapters to welcome new phenomena and alter in response. Human beings, by dissimilarity, are so exceptionally plastic that vast swaths of neuroscience are devoted to trying to explain how this could come well-nigh. (Nobody knows for certain, but some researchers now think that particular genes give their possessors a heightened, inborn sensation of their environs, which can lead both to useless, neurotic sensitivity and greater ability to detect and adapt to new situations.)

Plasticity in individuals is mirrored past plasticity on a societal level. The caste system in social species like honeybees is elaborate and finely tuned but fixed, as if in bister, in the loops of their DNA. Some leafcutter ants are said to have, side by side to human beings, the biggest and nearly complex societies on earth, with elaborately coded behavior that reaches from disposal of the dead to circuitous agricultural systems. Housing millions of individuals in inconceivably ramose subterranean networks, leafcutter colonies are "Earth'south ultimate superorganisms," Edward O. Wilson has written. Just they are incapable of key change. The centrality and authority of the queen cannot be challenged; the tiny minority of males, used simply to inseminate queens, will never acquire new responsibilities.

Human societies are far more varied than their insect cousins, of course. But the true departure is their plasticity. Information technology is why humankind, a species of Canbys, has been able to move into every corner of the earth, and to control what we find there. Our ability to alter ourselves to extract resources from our surround with ever-increasing efficiency is what has fabricated Homo sapiens a successful species. It is our greatest approving.

Or was our greatest blessing, anyway.

Discount RATES

Past 2050, demographers predict, as many equally 10 billion human beings volition walk the earth, three billion more today. Not only will more people exist than ever before, they volition be richer than ever before. In the last three decades hundreds of millions in China, India, and other formerly poor places accept lifted themselves from destitution—arguably the most important, and certainly the about heartening, accomplishment of our fourth dimension. Yet, like all human enterprises, this great success will pose bang-up difficulties.

In the past, rising incomes have invariably prompted rise demand for goods and services. Billions more jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics—these are things the newly prosperous will desire. (Why shouldn't they?) Only the greatest challenge may be the most bones of all: feeding these extra mouths. To agronomists, the prospect is sobering. The newly affluent volition not want their ancestors' gruel. Instead they will ask for pork and beefiness and lamb. Salmon will sizzle on their outdoor grills. In winter, they will want 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 than resources to produce than simple peasant agriculture. Already 35 per centum of the world'southward grain harvest is used to feed livestock. The process is terribly inefficient: between 7 and ten kilograms of grain are required to produce one kilogram of beef. Not merely volition the earth's farmers have to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 3 billion more people, they will have to produce enough to give them all hamburgers and steaks. Given present patterns of nutrient consumption, economists believe, nosotros will need to produce well-nigh 40 percent more grain in 2050 than we practise today.

How tin we provide these things for all these new people? That is only part of the question. The full question is: How can nosotros 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 nosotros must drastically throttle industrial civilization. (End energy-intensive, chemic-based farming today! Eliminate fossil fuels to halt climatic change!) Others merits that but intense exploitation of scientific knowledge can save the states. (Plant super-productive, genetically modified crops now! Switch to nuclear ability to halt climate modify!) No matter which course is chosen, though, information technology will require radical, big-calibration transformations in the homo enterprise—a daunting, hideously expensive task.

Worse, the ship is too large to turn quickly. The world'south food supply cannot exist decoupled rapidly from industrial agriculture, if that is seen every bit the answer. Aquifers cannot be recharged with a snap of the fingers. If the high-tech route is chosen, genetically modified crops cannot be bred and tested overnight. Similarly, carbon-sequestration techniques and nuclear ability plants cannot be deployed instantly. Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that's similar asking healthy, happy 16-year-olds to write living wills.

Not merely is the task daunting, information technology's strange. In the proper noun of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has always done or could ever do: constrain its ain growth (at to the lowest degree in some ways). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brown tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.Due south., rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause'due south protozoans, they are racing to find the edges of their petri dish. Not one has voluntarily turned back. Now we are asking Homo sapiens to fence itself in.

What a peculiar matter to enquire! Economists similar to talk about the "discount rate," which is their term for preferring a bird in paw today over ii in the bush-league tomorrow. The term sums up part of our human nature as well. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, nosotros are equally hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term and faraway every bit we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep nighttime forests. Thus, we care more than about the broken stoplight up the street today than conditions next year in Croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists point out: Americans are far more than likely to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo next year. Yet here we are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades. Given the disbelieve rate, nothing could be more than understandable than the U.S. Congress'due south failure to grapple with, say, climate change. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Human sapiens, unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, tin can exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species?

To biologists like Margulis, who spend their careers arguing that humans are just part of the natural order, the reply should exist articulate. All life is like at base. All species seek without pause to make more of themselves—that is their goal. Past multiplying till we reach our maximum possible numbers, even every bit we accept out much of the planet, nosotros are fulfilling our destiny.

From this vantage, the reply to the question whether nosotros are doomed to destroy ourselves is yes. It should exist obvious.

Should exist—simply perhaps is non.

HARA HACHI BU

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

To get Crusoe on his unlucky voyage, Defoe made him an officer on a slave ship, transporting captured Africans to S America. Today, no writer would make a slave seller the beauteous hero of a novel. But in 1720, when Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, no readers said boo about Crusoe'southward occupation, because slavery was the norm from one end of the globe to another. Rules and names differed from place to identify, merely 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 common in continental Europe, but Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands happily exploited slaves by the 1000000 in their American colonies. Few protests were heard; slavery had been function of the material of life since the code of Hammurabi.

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

The sheer implausibility of this modify is staggering. In 1860, slaves were, collectively, the single most valuable economical asset in the U.s.a., worth an estimated $3 billion, a vast sum in those days (and near $10 trillion in today's money). Rather than investing in factories like northern entrepreneurs, southern businessmen had sunk their capital into slaves. And from their perspective, correctly so—masses of enchained men and women had made the region politically powerful, and gave social status to an entire class of poor whites. Slavery was the foundation of the social order. It was, thundered John C. Calhoun, a one-time senator, secretary of country, and vice president, "instead of an evil, a good—a positive good." Yet just a few years after Calhoun spoke, part of the Usa set out to destroy this institution, wrecking much of the national economy and killing half a million citizens forth the way.

Incredibly, the turn against slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Dandy Britain, the world's biggest human trafficker, closed downward its slave operations in 1808, though they were among the nation'southward nearly assisting industries. Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal soon followed. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the earth removed themselves from the previously universal substitution of homo cargo. Slavery still exists hither and in that location, merely in no society anywhere is it formally accepted as part of the social fabric.

Historians have provided many reasons for this boggling transition. Just one of the about important is that abolitionists had convinced huge numbers of ordinary people effectually the world that slavery was a moral disaster. An establishment fundamental to human lodge for millennia was swiftly dismantled past ideas and a call to action, loudly repeated.

In the last 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 past men. (Rumors of past matriarchal societies abound, but few archaeologists believe them.) In the long view, women's lack of liberty has been as central to the human enterprise equally gravitation is to the celestial society. The degree of suppression varied from time to time and place to identify, but women never had an equal voice; indeed, some show exists that the penalization for possession of two X chromosomes increased with technological progress. Even as the industrial North and agricultural S warred over the treatment of Africans, they regarded women identically: in neither one-half of the nation could they attend college, take a bank account, or ain property. Equally circumscribed were women's lives in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Present women are the bulk of U.S. college students, the majority of the workforce, and the majority of voters. Over again, historians assign multiple causes to this shift in the human condition, rapid in fourth dimension, staggering in telescopic. But ane of the nigh important was the power of ideas—the voices, actions, and examples of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their instance. In recent years something similar seems to have occurred with gay rights: start a few lonely advocates, censured and mocked; and then victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, peradventure, a slow motion to equality.

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

In this respect, classical Greece was nix special—expect at the ghastly histories of Communist china, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Similarly, early mod Europe's wars were so fast and furious that historians simply gather them into catchall titles like the Hundred Years' War, followed by the shorter just even more destructive Thirty Years' War. And even as Europeans and their descendants paved the way toward today's concept of universal man rights by creating documents like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Denizen, Europe remained so mired in combat that it fought two conflicts of such massive scale and reach they became known as "world" wars.

Since the Second World War, however, rates of fierce death take fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain past another fellow member of the species than always before—an boggling transformation that has occurred, about unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article. Equally the political scientist Joshua Goldstein has written, "we are winning the war on war." Once more, there are multiple causes. Merely Goldstein, probably the leading scholar in this field, argues that the almost important is the emergence of the United Nations and other transnational bodies, an expression of the ideas of peace activists earlier in the final century.

As a relatively immature species, we have an adolescent propensity to make a mess: we pollute the air we exhale and the h2o we drinkable, and appear stalled in an age of carbon dumping and nuclear experimentation that is putting countless species at take chances including our own. Just 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 exist able to marry. No ane could have guessed a continent that had been vehement itself apart for centuries would be free of armed disharmonize, even amid terrible economic times. Given this record, even Lynn Margulis might pause (maybe).

Preventing Man sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would crave a withal greater transformation—behavioral plasticity of the highest guild—because we would be pushing confronting biological nature itself. The Japanese have an expression, hara hachi bu, which ways, roughly speaking, "abdomen 80 percent full." Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an ancient injunction to cease eating before feeling full. Nutritionally, the command makes a great deal of sense. When people consume, their stomachs produce peptides that point fullness to the nervous system. Unfortunately, the mechanism is so slow that eaters often perceive satiety just later they have consumed too much—hence the all-besides-mutual condition of feeling bloated or sick from overeating. Japan—really, the Japanese island of Okinawa—is the only place on earth where big numbers of people are known to restrict their own calorie intake systematically and routinely. Some researchers claim that hara hachi bu is responsible for Okinawans' notoriously long life spans. But I call up of information technology equally a metaphor for stopping before the second inflection betoken, voluntarily forswearing short-term consumption to obtain a long-term benefit.

Evolutionarily speaking, a species-wide adoption of hara hachi bu would be unprecedented. Thinking about it, I tin moving-picture show Lynn Margulis rolling her optics. Merely is it so unlikely that our species, Canbys one and all, would be able to do exactly that before we round that fateful curve of the 2nd inflection bespeak and nature does it for united states?

I tin can imagine Margulis'southward response: You're imagining our species as some sort of big-brained, hyperrational, benefit-cost-calculating reckoner! A better analogy is the bacteria at our feet! Even so, Margulis would be the first to concord that removing the shackles from women and slaves has begun to unleash the suppressed talents of ii-thirds of the human race. Drastically reducing violence has prevented the waste of countless lives and staggering amounts of resources. Is it really impossible to believe that we wouldn't use those talents and those resource to draw back earlier the abyss?

Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. But it is terrible to suppose that we could become then many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential end, merely not have the imagination to avert it. To send humankind to the moon but neglect to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential merely to be unable to use it—to be, in the stop, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. Information technology would exist evidence that Lynn Margulis's most dismissive beliefs had been right afterwards all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would be, at final count, not an peculiarly interesting species. O

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

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