Humanity, The Species

We do not often think of humanity as the species it is. With the increasing globalization of our species and its impact upon the planet it calls home, it is high time that our individual and collective consciousness made this human species the center of our attention and the background for all other considerations. We are, after all, the only ones who can assure our continued existence, at least until the next major asteroid hits Earth. We are, and must regard ourselves as, an endangered species.

As a child of evolutionary accidents we must deal with the deep conflicts in our nature that flow from that random complexity. Salient among these is the apposition between our ability to reason and our more ancient inheritance of emotion.  We appeal to both of these when confronted with threats to our well-being and when faced with the unknown.

At the current conjunction of species-threatening impacts such as global warming, overpopulation, dwindling food supplies, weapons capable of destroying civilization if not our species, growing water shortages, etc. we see the conflict between our reason, as exemplified by science, and emotion exemplified by the refusal of many to accept the overwhelming evidence of science and substituting religion and tradition. This cannot go on.

A number of proposals have been made to suggest a way out of this increasingly dangerous dilemma. David Korten argues for a world of small productive enterprises to replace the mammoth corporations that now control our world. As evidence for the validity of this approach he points out that the American people, trying to throw off the control of a massively more powerful England, undertook a plethora of small productive actions, including women manufacturing their own and others’ clothing, in order to survive the British embargo. Gar Alperovitz argues for an economy of cooperation in which employees own their business, thereby eliminating the master-servant model of capitalism.

Both of these proposals, as is so often the case, rests upon historical evidence of the way humans have behaved in certain specific cultural and economic occasions. They are both very worthy proposals and merit our respect and understanding. However, they are both derived from human cultural artifacts such as labor relations and the size of economic units of production.

I think the problems we face require that we go far deeper in our understanding than how some societies have functioned. We must go to nature itself for guidance in trying to cope with our many and massive threats.

Let me take as an example the single threat of overpopulation and all the horrors and species decimation it could be expected to unleash.

In nature we find species that limit their birth rate according to the availability of the resources they need. Indeed, in a report titled Top Predators Limit Their Own Numbers issued in May of this year, evidence is presented that top level predators such as lions and wolves are able to control reproduction without such external controls. If these animals have developed the capacity to control their numbers we, as a top level predator with the greatest ability to reason, should also be able to do this.

So far, except for China, the best that we humans have been able to do is hope that the increasing education of women combined with the technologies for preventing reproduction, will be sufficient to prevent the mass starvation and violence that large scale shortages of food and water would engender. We have already seen what much less dramatic shortages of oil can do. Even China, now that it is more affluent, is relaxing the one child per couple law. Lamentably, this is one more demonstration of our inability to learn as nations and cultures.

Perhaps the most profound book on using our biological and evolutionary knowledge to create a zeitgeist inclusive of all humans regardless of other divisions among them is to be found in Edward. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth in which this great evolutionary biologist shows that the most enduring species have been social species. What does that say of a society whose economy is based on competition?

This book is packed with succinct thinking and the prose to go with it. I highly recommend it to those who are struggling to find a way to avoid the obvious catastrophe that faces our species. Let me close with two among countless pregnant observations in Wilson’s book.

History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology. Humanity is a biological species in a biological world.

The more we learn about our physical existence, the more apparent it becomes that even the most complex forms of human behavior are ultimately biological.

So why not start there in our search for a viable human future?

Bob Newhard