think what you do when you run in debt, you give to another power over your liberty.” lds

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

THE PROBLEM WITH environmentalists, Lynn Margulis used to say, is that they think conservation has something to exercise with biological reality. A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was ane 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 not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and ii types of bacteria).

Until Margulis's death final twelvemonth, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are y'all still all worked upward virtually protecting endangered species?

Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Withal, she couldn't assistance regarding conservationists' preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants equally testify of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percentage 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 10 times more the number of human cells!

Leaner and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form behemothic supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or past swapping genes with others, routinely comprise DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms accept changed the face up of the globe, crumbling stone and even giving ascension to the oxygen nosotros breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, possibly, just non actually significant.

Does that utilise to human being beings, besides? I once asked her, feeling similar someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn't move the earth a footling closer to the center of the universe. Aren't we special at all?

This was merely chitchat on the street, then I didn't write anything down. But equally I call up it, she answered that Human being 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" mean, if self-devastation is part of the definition? Does that cocky-destruction include the remainder of the biosphere? What are homo beings in the grand scheme of things anyway, and where are we headed? What is man nature, if there is such a matter, and how did nosotros acquire information technology? What does that nature portend for our interactions with the environment? With vii billion of us crowding the planet, it's hard to imagine more than vital questions.

One manner to begin answering them came to Mark Stoneking in 1999, when he received a notice from his son'due south school alert 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 about lice. As a biologist, information technology was natural for him to noodle effectually for data well-nigh them. The most common louse institute on human 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—trunk lice, which feed on skin but live in wear. In fact, Stoneking learned, body lice are then dependent on the protection of clothing that they cannot survive more a few hours abroad from it.

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 aboriginal badgerer, because human being beings have ever had pilus for it to infest. Just P. humanus corporis, the body louse, must not be especially old, because its need 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 fill it. Evolution and so worked its magic; a new subspecies, P. humanus corporis, arose. Stoneking couldn't be sure that this scenario had taken place, though it seemed likely. Only if his idea were correct, discovering when the body louse diverged from the head louse would provide a rough appointment for when people get-go invented and wore clothing.

The subject was anything but frivolous: donning a garment is a complicated act. Wearable has practical uses—warming the body in common cold places, shielding it from the lord's day in hot places—but it also transforms the appearance of the wearer, something that has proven to be of inescapable interest to Man sapiens. Article of clothing is ornament and emblem; it separates human beings from their before, un-cocky-witting state. (Animals run, swim, and fly without wearable, merely but people can be naked.) The invention of vesture was a sign that a mental shift had occurred. The human earth had get a realm of complex, symbolic artifacts.

With two colleagues, Stoneking measured the difference between snippets of DNA in the two louse subspecies. Because DNA is thought to option upward pocket-sized, random mutations at a roughly constant rate, scientists utilize the number of differences between two populations to tell how long agone they diverged from a common ancestor—the greater the number of differences, the longer the separation. In this case, the body louse had separated from the head louse about 70,000 years ago. Which meant, Stoneking hypothesized, that vesture also dated from most lxx,000 years ago.

And not merely clothing. Equally scientists have established, a host of remarkable things occurred to our species at about that time. It marked a dividing line in our history, 1 that made us who we are, and pointed u.s.a., for meliorate and worse, toward the world we now have created for ourselves.

Human being sapiens emerged on the planet nearly 200,000 years agone, researchers believe. From the beginning, our species looked much as information technology does today. If some of those long-agone people walked by the states on the street at present, we would think they looked and acted somewhat oddly, but not that they weren't people. But those anatomically modern humans were non, every bit anthropologists say, behaviorally modern. Those first people had no language, no clothing, no art, no religion, nix but the simplest, unspecialized tools. They were little more avant-garde, technologically speaking, than their predecessors—or, for that affair, modern chimpanzees. (The big exception was fire, simply that was first controlled by Homo erectus, one of our ancestors, a 1000000 years ago or more.) Our species had so little capacity for innovation that archaeologists accept plant almost no evidence of cultural or social change during our start 100,000 years of existence. Equally important, for nigh all that time these early humans were bars to a single, pocket-size area in the hot, dry out savanna of East Africa (and maybe a second, still smaller expanse in southern Africa).

But now jump frontwards 50,000 years. Eastward Africa looks much the same. So do 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 wearing apparel—lice-filled clothes, to exist sure, but dress all the same. Momentously, they are using language. 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. Notwithstanding, most researchers believe that in that flicker of time, favorable mutations swept through our species, transforming anatomically modernistic humans into behaviorally mod humans. The thought is non absurd: in the last 400 years, canis familiaris breeders converted village dogs into creatures that human activity as differently as foxhounds, edge collies, and Labrador retrievers. 50 millennia, researchers say, is more than plenty to make 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' singular 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 modern to behaviorally modern involves a physical alteration of the wet gray thing within our skulls. One candidate caption 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 all the same certain of their part.) Another putative cause is symbolic language—an invention that may have tapped latent creativity and aggressiveness in our species. A tertiary is that a mutation might have enabled our brains to alternate betwixt spacing out on imaginative chains of association and focusing our attention narrowly on the physical world effectually us. The old, in this view, allows united states to come up with creative new strategies to reach a goal, whereas the latter enables united states of america to execute the physical tactics required by those strategies.

Each of these ideas is fervently advocated by 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 island of Sumatra. The biggest boom for several million years, the eruption created Lake Toba, the world's biggest crater lake, and ejected the equivalent of as much every bit 3,000 cubic kilometers of stone, plenty to cover the District of Columbia in a layer of magma and ash that would reach to the stratosphere. A gigantic plumage spread west, enveloping southern Asia in tephra (rock, ash, and grit). Drifts in Pakistan and Bharat reached as high as six meters. Smaller tephra beds blanketed the Center E and East Africa. Swell rafts of pumice filled the sea 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 lord's day for as much equally a decade, plunging the earth into a years-long winter accompanied by widespread drought. A vegetation collapse was followed by a collapse 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 take 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, perhaps to a few thousand people—the size of a big urban loftier school. The clearest bear witness of this clogging is also its main legacy: humankind's remarkable genetic uniformity. Countless people have viewed the differences between races equally worth killing for, only compared to other primates—even compared to most other mammals—human beings are almost duplicate, genetically speaking. DNA is made from exceedingly long chains of "bases." Typically, nigh one out of every 2,000 of these "bases" differs between one person and the next. The equivalent effigy from two E. coli (human gut leaner) might be near i out of xx. The bacteria in our intestines, that is, accept a hundredfold more than innate variability than their hosts—evidence, researchers say, that our species is descended from a small group of founders.

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

Did Toba, as theorists like Richard Dawkins have argued, cause an evolutionary bottleneck that set 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 nail simply clear away other human being species that had previously blocked H. sapiens' expansion? Or was the volcano irrelevant to the deeper story of human alter?

For now, the answers are the subject of careful back-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 and so fast into the tephra that human footprints appeared in Australia inside equally few as 10,000 years, maybe inside 4,000 or v,000. Stay-calm Human being sapiens i.0, a wallflower that would never have interested Lynn Margulis, had been replaced by aggressively expansive Man sapiens two.0. Something happened, for better and worse, and we were born.

I 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 Argentina, an area with many rivers and frequent floods. The floods wipe out pismire nests. Over the millennia, these pocket-size, furiously active creatures have acquired the power to respond to ascension water past coalescing into huge, floating, pullulating balls—workers on the outside, queen in the center—that drift to the edge of the flood. Once the waters recede, colonies swarm back into previously flooded country so speedily that S. invicta actually tin use the devastation to increase its range.

In the 1930s, Solenopsis invicta was transported to the U.s., probably in transport ballast, which often consists of haphazardly loaded soil and gravel. As a teenaged problems 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'due south bespeak of view, it had been dumped into an empty, recently flooded expanse. S. invicta took off, never looking dorsum.

The initial incursion watched by Wilson was likely merely a few thousand individuals—a number pocket-size plenty to advise that random, bottleneck-style genetic change played a role in the species' subsequent history in this country. In their Argentine birthplace, burn down-emmet colonies constantly fight each other, reducing their numbers and creating infinite for other types of pismire. In the Usa, 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 ant species forth the fashion—models of zeal and rapacity. Transformed past adventure and opportunity, new-model S. invictus needed just a few decades to conquer most of the southern United States.

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

THE WORLD IS A PETRI DISH

Equally a educatee at the University of Moscow in the 1920s, Georgii Gause spent years trying—and declining—to drum up support from the Rockefeller Foundation, so the most prominent funding source for not-American scientists who wished to work in the United states. Hoping to dazzle the foundation, Gause decided to perform some bang-up experiments and describe the results in his grant application.

By today's standards, his methodology was simplicity itself. Gause placed one-half a gram of oatmeal in ane hundred cubic centimeters of water, boiled the results for x minutes to create a broth, strained the liquid portion of the goop into a container, diluted the mixture past calculation water, then decanted the contents into pocket-size, apartment-bottomed exam tubes. Into each he dripped five Paramecium caudatum or Stylonychia mytilus, both unmarried-celled protozoans, one species per tube. Each of Gause's test tubes was a pocket ecosystem, a food web with a unmarried node. He stored the tubes in warm places for a week and observed the results. He ready downwards his conclusions in a 163-page book, The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934.

Today The Struggle for Existence is recognized every bit a scientific landmark, ane of the first successful marriages of theory and experiment in ecology. But the book was non enough to get Gause a fellowship; the Rockefeller Foundation turned down the twenty-four-year-old Soviet educatee as insufficiently eminent. Gause could not visit the Usa for another twenty years, by which fourth dimension he had indeed get eminent, only as an antibiotics researcher.

What Gause saw in his test tubes is often depicted in a graph, fourth dimension on the horizontal axis, the number of protozoa on the vertical. The line on the graph is a distorted bong curve, with its left side twisted and stretched into a kind of flattened S. At first the number of protozoans grows slowly, and the graph line slowly ascends to the right. But then the line hits an inflection point, and suddenly rockets upward—a frenzy of exponential growth. The mad rise continues until the organism begins to run out of food, at which point there is a 2d inflection indicate, and the growth curve levels off over again as bacteria brainstorm to die. Eventually the line descends, and the population falls toward zero.

Years agone I watched Lynn Margulis, one of Gause's 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 well-nigh 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 course gasped. The cells in the time-lapse video seemed to shiver and eddy, doubling in number every few seconds, colonies exploding out until the mass of leaner filled the screen. In just xxx-six hours, she said, this single bacterium could encompass the entire planet in a foot-deep layer of single-celled ooze. Twelve hours subsequently that, it would create a living ball of bacteria the size of the globe.

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 not bad insight. All living creatures take the same purpose: to brand more than of themselves, ensuring their biological hereafter by the just means bachelor. Natural selection stands in the way of this goal. It prunes back near all species, restricting their numbers and confining their range. In the homo 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, by contrast, competition is absent-minded; nutrients and habitat seem limitless, at least at showtime. The bacterium hits the first inflection betoken and rockets upwards the left side of the bend, swamping the petri dish in a reproductive frenzy. But then its colonies slam into the second inflection point: the edge of the dish. When the dish'southward nutrient 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 earth is their petri dish. Their populations grow exponentially; they have over big areas, overwhelming their environment every bit if no force opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their own wastes or starving from lack of food.

To someone like Margulis, Human being sapiens looks like ane of these briefly fortunate species.

THE WHIP HAND

No more than a few hundred people initially migrated from Africa, if geneticists are right. But they emerged into landscapes that by today's standards were as rich as 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 still simply in the initial stages of Gause's oddly shaped bend. Ten thousand years agone, most demographers believe, we numbered barely 5 million, well-nigh one human existence for every hundred square kilometers of the world's land surface. Human sapiens was a scarcely noticeable dusting on the surface of a planet dominated by microbes. Withal, at about this time—10,000 years ago, give or take a millennium—humankind finally began to approach the first inflection point. Our species was inventing agronomics.

The wild ancestors of cereal crops like wheat, barley, rice, and sorghum have been role of the human diet for almost as long as there have been humans to eat them. (The primeval evidence comes from Mozambique, where researchers found tiny $.25 of 105,000-yr-old sorghum on ancient scrapers and grinders.) In some cases people may have watched over patches of wild grain, returning to them year subsequently year. Yet despite the effort and care the plants were non domesticated. As botanists say, wild cereals "shatter"—individual grain kernels autumn off as they ripen, handful grain haphazardly, making it impossible to harvest the plants systematically. Only when unknown geniuses discovered naturally mutated grain plants that did not shatter—and purposefully selected, protected, and cultivated them—did truthful agronomics brainstorm. Planting great expanses of those mutated crops, start in southern Turkey, after in half a dozen other places, early on farmers created landscapes that, and then to speak, waited for hands to harvest them.

Farming converted well-nigh of the habitable world into a petri dish. Foragers manipulated their surroundings with fire, burning areas to kill insects and encourage the growth of useful species—plants we liked to consume, 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 fourth dimension and season. Agriculture gave humanity the whip hand. Instead of natural ecosystems with their haphazard mix of species (so many useless organisms guzzling upwards resource!), farms are taut, disciplined communities conceived and defended to the maintenance of a single species: u.s..

Earlier 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 i of Margulis's dear bacteria, a petri dish is a uniform expanse of nutrients, all of which it can seize and consume. For Homo sapiens, agriculture transformed the planet into something similar.

Equally in a fourth dimension-lapse movie, nosotros divided and multiplied across the newly opened land. It had taken Homo sapiens ii.0, behaviorally modern humans, non 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.

Every bit whatever biologist would predict, success led to an increase in human numbers. Homo sapiens rocketed around the elbow of the first inflection betoken in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when American crops like potatoes, sugariness potatoes, and maize were introduced to the residuum of the world. Traditional Eurasian and African cereals—wheat, rice, millet, and sorghum, for example—produce their grain atop sparse stalks. Bones physics suggests that plants with this design will fatally topple if the grain gets likewise heavy, which means that farmers can actually be punished if they have an actress-bounteous harvest. By contrast, potatoes and sweet potatoes grow underground, which ways that yields are not limited by the plant'south architecture. Wheat farmers in Edinburgh and rice farmers in Edo akin discovered they could harvest four times as much dry out food thing 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 increment the supply of Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The population smash had begun.

Numbers kept rising in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, afterward a German chemist, Justus von Liebig, discovered that found growth was express by 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 merely plants are unable to absorb it, because the 2 nitrogen atoms in N2 are welded so tightly together that plants cannot split them apart for utilize. Instead, plants take in nitrogen only when it is combined with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements. To restore wearied soil, traditional farmers grew peas, beans, lentils, and other pulses. (They never knew why these "green manures" replenished the land. Today we know that their roots contain special bacteria that convert useless N2 into "bio-available" nitrogen compounds.) After Liebig, European and American growers replaced those crops with loftier-intensity fertilizer—nitrogen-rich guano from Peru at offset, and then nitrates from mines in Chile. Yields soared. Just supplies were much more than express than farmers liked. So intense was the competition for fertilizer that a guano war erupted in 1879, engulfing much of western S America. Almost 3,000 people died.

Ii more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, came to the rescue, discovering the cardinal steps to making constructed 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 as well known as they should exist; their discovery, the Haber-Bosch procedure, has literally changed the chemical composition of the earth, a feat previously reserved for microorganisms. Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into the soil that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels take risen worldwide. Today, roughly a third of all the protein (animate being and vegetable) consumed by humankind is derived from constructed nitrogen fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled Homo sapiens to excerpt most 2 billion people's worth of food from the same amount of bachelor land.

The improved wheat, rice, and (to a lesser extent) maize varieties developed by plant breeders in the 1950s and 1960s are oftentimes said to take prevented another billion deaths. Antibiotics, vaccines, and water-handling plants too saved lives by pushing dorsum humankind'southward bacterial, viral, and fungal enemies. With nearly no surviving biological competition, humankind had ever more than unhindered access to the planetary petri dish: in the past two 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 curve, human beings "now appropriate nearly 40% . . . of potential terrestrial productivity." This figure dates from 1986—a famous estimate by a team of Stanford biologists. Ten years later, a second Stanford team calculated that the "fraction of the land's biological product that is used or dominated" by our species had risen to equally much as 50 percent. In 2000, the pharmacist Paul Crutzen gave a name to our time: the "Anthropocene," the era in which Homo sapiens became a forcefulness operating on a planetary scale. That twelvemonth, half of the globe's accessible fresh h2o was consumed by human beings.

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

If we follow Gause'due south pattern, growth will continue at a delirious speed until we hit the 2d inflection point. At that time we will have wearied the resource of the global petri dish, or effectively made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste, or both. Afterward that, human being life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed past the dead. When the king falls, so do his minions; it is possible that our fall might also take down near mammals and many plants. Maybe sooner, quite probable afterwards, in this scenario, the world will again be a choir of bacteria, fungi, and insects, as information technology has been through most of its history.

It would be foolish to wait anything else, Margulis thought. More than than that, information technology would be unnatural.

AS PLASTIC Every bit CANBY

In The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster's classic, pun-filled adventure tale, the young Milo and his faithful companions unexpectedly find themselves transported to a bleak, mysterious island. Encountering a human being 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, evidently, confused on the field of study. Milo and his friends confer, and then ask if he can describe himself.

"Yes, indeed," the homo replied happily. "I'grand as tall as tin exist"—and he grew straight up until all that could be seen of him were his shoes and stockings—"and I'm as short every bit can exist"—and he shrank downwards to the size of a pebble. "I'1000 equally generous as can be," he said, handing each of them a large red apple tree, "and I'm equally selfish equally tin can exist," he snarled, grabbing them dorsum again.

In short guild, the companions acquire that the man is every bit strong as can be, weak as can exist, smart as tin exist, stupid as tin can be, graceful as can be, clumsy as—you get the motion picture. "Is that any help to you?" he asks. Again, Milo and his friends confer, and realize that the answer is actually quite simple:

"Without a doubt," Milo concluded brightly, "you must be Canby."

"Of grade, yes, of course," the homo shouted. "Why didn't I think of that? I'g equally happy as can exist."

With Canby, Juster presumably meant to mock a certain kind of babyish, uncommitted human being-child. Merely I tin't help thinking of poor quondam Canby as exemplifying one 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 structure weak enough to yield to an influence, just strong plenty not to yield all at once." Behavioral plasticity, a defining characteristic of Human being sapiens' big brain, means that humans tin can change their habits; almost equally a matter of course, people alter careers, quit smoking or have up vegetarianism, convert to new religions, and migrate to distant lands where they must learn foreign languages. This plasticity, this Canby-hood, is the authentication of our transformation from anatomically modern Human being sapiens to behaviorally modern Homo sapiens—and the reason, possibly, we were able to survive when Toba reconfigured the landscape.

Other creatures are much less flexible. Like flat-dwelling cats that compulsively hide in the closet when visitors arrive, they have express chapters 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 about. (Nobody knows for certain, but some researchers at present call back that particular genes give their possessors a heightened, inborn sensation of their environment, which can pb both to useless, neurotic sensitivity and greater ability to observe and adapt to new situations.)

Plasticity in individuals is mirrored by plasticity on a societal level. The caste arrangement in social species like honeybees is elaborate and finely tuned but fixed, equally if in amber, in the loops of their Dna. Some leafcutter ants are said to have, next to human beings, the biggest and about complex societies on earth, with elaborately coded behavior that reaches from disposal of the expressionless 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 fundamental change. The axis and potency of the queen cannot exist challenged; the tiny minority of males, used only to inseminate queens, will never acquire new responsibilities.

Man societies are far more than varied than their insect cousins, of course. Just the truthful difference is their plasticity. It is why humankind, a species of Canbys, has been able to movement into every corner of the world, and to control what we find there. Our power to change ourselves to extract resources from our surroundings with ever-increasing efficiency is what has made Homo sapiens a successful species. Information technology is our greatest blessing.

Or was our greatest blessing, anyway.

DISCOUNT RATES

By 2050, demographers predict, equally many as ten billion homo beings volition walk the world, 3 billion more than today. Not only volition more people exist than e'er before, they will be richer than ever before. In the terminal three decades hundreds of millions in Prc, Republic of india, and other formerly poor places have lifted themselves from destitution—arguably the most of import, and certainly the most heartening, accomplishment of our time. Yet, like all human enterprises, this great success will pose great difficulties.

In the by, rising incomes have invariably prompted rising demand for goods and services. Billions more jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics—these are things the newly prosperous will desire. (Why shouldn't they?) But the greatest challenge may be the most basic of all: feeding these extra mouths. To agronomists, the prospect is sobering. The newly affluent will not want their ancestors' gruel. Instead they volition inquire for pork and beef and lamb. Salmon volition 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 resource to produce than simple peasant agriculture. Already 35 percent of the world's grain harvest is used to feed livestock. The process is terribly inefficient: between seven and ten kilograms of grain are required to produce one kilogram of beef. Not merely volition the world's farmers take to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 3 billion more people, they will have to produce plenty to give them all hamburgers and steaks. Given present patterns of food consumption, economists believe, nosotros volition need to produce virtually 40 percent more grain in 2050 than nosotros do today.

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

Scientists, activists, and politicians have proposed many solutions, each from a different ideological and moral perspective. Some argue that we must drastically throttle industrial civilization. (Stop energy-intensive, chemical-based farming today! Eliminate fossil fuels to halt climate modify!) Others claim that simply intense exploitation of scientific knowledge tin can salve u.s.a.. (Plant super-productive, genetically modified crops at present! Switch to nuclear power to halt climate change!) No matter which course is called, though, it will crave radical, large-scale transformations in the human enterprise—a daunting, hideously expensive task.

Worse, the send is too large to turn quickly. The world'due south nutrient supply cannot exist decoupled rapidly from industrial agronomics, if that is seen as the respond. Aquifers cannot exist 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 power plants cannot be deployed instantly. Changes must be planned and executed decades in accelerate of the usual signals of crisis, but that'due south like asking good for you, happy sixteen-yr-olds to write living wills.

Non only is the task daunting, it's strange. In the proper name of nature, we are asking human beings to exercise something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever exercise: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brownish tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.S., rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause'southward protozoans, they are racing to discover the edges of their petri dish. Non i has voluntarily turned back. Now we are asking Homo sapiens to fence itself in.

What a peculiar affair to inquire! Economists like to talk about the "discount rate," which is their term for preferring a bird in hand today over 2 in the bush tomorrow. The term sums upwardly part of our man nature likewise. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, we are as hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term and faraway as we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep dark forests. Thus, nosotros care more about the broken stoplight up the street today than conditions next year in Croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly and so, evolutionists point out: Americans are far more likely to exist killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo adjacent yr. Still here nosotros are request governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may non be reached for decades. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than the U.S. Congress'southward failure to grapple with, say, climate alter. From this perspective, is there whatever reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, different 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 simply part of the natural club, the answer should exist clear. All life is like at base. All species seek without pause to make more of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying till we accomplish our maximum possible numbers, even equally we take out much of the planet, nosotros are fulfilling our destiny.

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

Should be—but perhaps is not.

HARA HACHI BU

When I imagine the profound social transformation necessary to avoid calamity, I think near Robinson Crusoe, hero of Daniel Defoe'southward famous novel. Defoe conspicuously intended his hero to be an exemplary man. Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island off Venezuela in 1659, Crusoe is an impressive example of behavioral plasticity. During his twenty-seven-yr exile he learns to grab fish, hunt rabbits and turtles, tame and pasture isle goats, clip and support local citrus trees, and create "plantations" of barley and rice from seeds that he salvaged from the wreck. (Defoe plain didn't know that citrus and goats were not native to the Americas and thus Crusoe probably wouldn't accept found them in that location.) Rescue comes at last in the course of a shipful of ragged mutineers, who plan to maroon their captain on the supposedly empty island. Crusoe helps the captain recapture his ship and offers the defeated mutineers a selection: trial in England or permanent banishment to the island. All cull the latter. Crusoe has harnessed so much of the isle'southward productive power to human use that fifty-fifty a gaggle of inept seamen can survive at that place in condolement.

To get Crusoe on his unlucky voyage, Defoe made him an officer on a slave ship, transporting captured Africans to South America. Today, no writer would brand a slave seller the admirable hero of a novel. But in 1720, when Defoe published Robinson Crusoe, no readers said boo about Crusoe's occupation, because slavery was the norm from one end of the earth to some other. Rules and names differed from place to identify, only 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, merely Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Netherlands happily exploited slaves past the one thousand thousand in their American colonies. Few protests were heard; slavery had been office of the fabric of life since the code of Hammurabi.

Then, in the infinite of a few decades in the nineteenth century, slavery, ane of humankind's virtually enduring institutions, almost vanished.

The sheer implausibility of this change is staggering. In 1860, slaves were, collectively, the single most valuable economic asset in the United states, worth an estimated $three billion, a vast sum in those days (and about $x 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 and then—masses of enchained men and women had made the region politically powerful, and gave social status to an entire form of poor whites. Slavery was the foundation of the social guild. It was, thundered John C. Calhoun, a former senator, secretary of state, and vice president, "instead of an evil, a expert—a positive good." Still just a few years afterward Calhoun spoke, part of the Us set out to destroy this institution, wrecking much of the national economy and killing half a one thousand thousand citizens along the manner.

Incredibly, the turn confronting slavery was as universal as slavery itself. Uk, the globe's biggest human trafficker, airtight downwards its slave operations in 1808, though they were amidst the nation'southward well-nigh assisting industries. The Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal soon followed. Like stars winking out at the approach of dawn, cultures across the globe removed themselves from the previously universal commutation of human cargo. Slavery still exists here and in that location, but in no society anywhere is it formally accepted equally office of the social textile.

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

In the last few centuries, such profound changes have occurred repeatedly. Since the beginning of our species, for instance, every known lodge has been based on the domination of women by men. (Rumors of past matriarchal societies abound, only few archaeologists believe them.) In the long view, women's lack of liberty has been equally cardinal to the human enterprise as gravitation is to the angelic order. The degree of suppression varied from time to time and identify to identify, but women never had an equal vocalization; indeed, some evidence exists that the penalisation for possession of two Ten chromosomes increased with technological progress. Even as the industrial Northward and agricultural Due south warred over the treatment of Africans, they regarded women identically: in neither half of the nation could they attend college, take a banking company account, or own property. Equally circumscribed were women'due south lives in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Nowadays women are the majority of U.South. college students, the bulk of the workforce, and the bulk of voters. Once more, historians assign multiple causes to this shift in the human condition, rapid in fourth dimension, staggering in scope. Merely i of the most important was the power of ideas—the voices, actions, and examples of suffragists, who through decades of ridicule and harassment pressed their case. In contempo years something similar seems to have occurred with gay rights: beginning a few solitary advocates, censured and mocked; and so victories in the social and legal sphere; finally, peradventure, a wearisome movement to equality.

Less well known, merely as profound: the decline in violence. Foraging societies waged war less brutally than industrial societies, but 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 yet a constant presence. When Athens was at its height in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, it was e'er at war: against Sparta (Start and Second Peloponnesian Wars, Corinthian War); against Persia (Greco-Farsi Wars, Wars of the Delian League); against Aegina (Aeginetan State of war); confronting Macedon (Olynthian War); against Samos (Samian War); confronting Chios, Rhodes, and Cos (Social War).

In this respect, classical Greece was nothing special—look at the ghastly histories of China, sub-Saharan Africa, or Mesoamerica. Similarly, early modern Europe'due south wars were so fast and furious that historians but gather them into catchall titles like the Hundred Years' War, followed by the shorter but fifty-fifty more than destructive Thirty Years' War. And even as Europeans and their descendants paved the mode 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 Citizen, Europe remained so mired in combat that information technology fought two conflicts of such massive calibration and accomplish they became known equally "earth" wars.

Since the Second Globe State of war, however, rates of violent death take fallen to the everyman levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to exist slain by another fellow member of the species than ever earlier—an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost 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 state of war." Again, there are multiple causes. Merely Goldstein, probably the leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of the Un and other transnational bodies, an expression of the ideas of peace activists before in the terminal century.

As a relatively young species, we accept an boyish propensity to make a mess: we pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink, and announced stalled in an historic period of carbon dumping and nuclear experimentation that is putting countless species at hazard including our ain. But nosotros are making undeniable progress nonetheless. No European in 1800 could have imagined that in 2000 Europe would have no legal slavery, women would be able to vote, and gay people would be able to ally. No one could accept guessed a continent that had been fierce itself apart for centuries would be gratuitous of armed disharmonize, even amid terrible economical times. Given this record, fifty-fifty Lynn Margulis might pause (perchance).

Preventing Homo sapiens from destroying itself à la Gause would require a nevertheless greater transformation—behavioral plasticity of the highest order—because we would be pushing against biological nature itself. The Japanese have an expression, hara hachi bu, which means, roughly speaking, "belly 80 per centum full." Hara hachi bu is shorthand for an aboriginal injunction to end eating before feeling total. Nutritionally, the command makes a great deal of sense. When people swallow, their stomachs produce peptides that signal fullness to the nervous arrangement. Unfortunately, the machinery is so slow that eaters frequently perceive satiety only after they have consumed besides much—hence the all-also-mutual condition of feeling bloated or sick from overeating. Japan—actually, 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. Only I call back of it as a metaphor for stopping before the second inflection point, voluntarily forswearing short-term consumption to obtain a long-term benefit.

Evolutionarily speaking, a species-broad adoption of hara hachi bu would be unprecedented. Thinking about information technology, I can film Lynn Margulis rolling her optics. But is information technology so unlikely that our species, Canbys one and all, would be able to practise exactly that before nosotros round that fateful curve of the second inflection bespeak and nature does it for usa?

I can imagine Margulis'southward response: You're imagining our species as some sort of big-brained, hyperrational, benefit-cost-calculating estimator! A improve analogy is the leaner at our feet! Withal, Margulis would be the first to agree 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 it really incommunicable to believe that we wouldn't utilise those talents and those resources to draw back before the completeness?

Our record of success is not that long. In any case, past successes are no guarantee of the future. Simply it is terrible to suppose that we could go so many other things right and get this one wrong. To have the imagination to see our potential stop, but not take the imagination to avoid information technology. To transport humankind to the moon but fail to pay attention to the earth. To have the potential just to be unable to use it—to be, in the end, no different from the protozoa in the petri dish. It would be evidence that Lynn Margulis's most dismissive beliefs had been right afterward all. For all our speed and voraciousness, our changeable sparkle and flash, we would exist, at terminal count, not an especially interesting species. O

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

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