A Darwinian Survival Guide: Hope for the Twenty-First Century

🎀 Highlights

They think that if they approach nature with an attitude of open curiosity, nature will show them aspects of the living world that cannot be experienced, much less comprehended, without spending considerable time in close contact with it.

field biologists, the professional descendants of Alexander von Humboldt, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Aldo Leopold,

Field biologists are not better scientists than others, but they have special knowledge stemming from cultivating a personal relationship with nature.

Without knowing nature, it is impossible to understand enough of the insights offered at nature’s whim and discretion that are essential for survival.

When most scientists meet in group social settings, the predominant word is the first-personal singular, followed by the first-person possessive. “I did this study,” “I got that award,” “my grant,”

When most scientists meet in group social settings, the predominant word is the first-personal singular, followed by the first-person possessive. “I did this study,” “I got that award,” “my grant,” “my lab,” “my group,” or “my new idea.”

Field biology is anticipating that unexpected things will always happen; we have never had a perfect field season, but we have always had a successful one.

Evolutionary history provides evidence of past environmental changes leading to many extinctions of particular species.

More than anything else, field biologists know that nature does not function like a well-oiled machine but instead is rather sloppy, inefficient, flexible, and opportunistic.

we have not written it for fun. We think the accelerating pace and scope of global climate change means that the danger is great, the time is short, and humanity is largely

we have not written it for fun. We think the accelerating pace and scope of global climate change means that the danger is great, the time is short, and humanity is largely unprepared.

It is nonetheless not too early to begin planning for how humanity might recover if timely action does not occur.

We know that humans have a strong need for drama, strong attraction to magic, and strong aversion to bad news, especially if the bad news involves taking personal responsibility.

A common theme in 1950s’ science fiction was wondering if humankind’s technological cleverness had raced ahead of its wisdom.

Darwinian evolution shows that avoiding apocalypse does not require utopia.

challenges posed by global climate change threaten humanity’s immediate survival, at least as a technological species.

humans are creatures of habit who do not like to change their behavior even in response to changes in their surroundings.

Attempting to resolve this paradox, humans invented sustainability. Sustainability is founded on a belief that what humans are doing is fundamentally justified, and if they just do less of

Attempting to resolve this paradox, humans invented sustainability. Sustainability is founded on a belief that what humans are doing is fundamentally justified, and if they just do less of it, or do it more efficiently and equitably,

business as usual is not working.

Business as usual leads to crisis management, and in an increasingly complex world bounded by accelerating global climate change, new challenges keep outrunning efforts to sustain the status quo. As

Business as usual leads to crisis management, and in an increasingly complex world bounded by accelerating global climate change, new challenges keep outrunning efforts to sustain the status quo.

We believe, therefore, that trying to solve the problems of human existence through sustainability in the usual sense has contributed to the existential crisis it was supposed to counteract.

This book attempts to change the narrative from sustainability to survivability.

ecology of fear. Anyone who has seen primates in the field will understand.

primates freeze and assess, and then flee if the potential threat moves one millimeter inside their comfort zone.

if they underestimated dangers, they were lunch, and if they overestimated them, they would starve.

Neiman’s answer was that simplifying their surroundings gave humans a sense of security.

Humans can control only limited amounts of the world, and that worries them.

Humans want the unknown to be only a little unknown and never dangerous, ultimately approachable and controllable, so they can feed their curiosity safely.

Humans are so afraid of the unknown that they keep (over)simplifying the world, even if that does not make life more secure.

The more people learn, the more complicated the world becomes, and yet they are still able to function;

We believe humans will be less afraid to do something in their own behalf if they become more comfortable with the notion that survival in nature is a matter of coping with change by changing rather than resisting change.

Darwin published On the Origin of Species, affirming that all life on this planet is evolvable life and mapping out the evolutionary process. Life is not a clockwork mechanism; it is not an engineering problem and cannot be controlled; it is strong, robust, and resilient by its very nature.

Darwin saw that in order to survive indefinitely, members of species needed only to be good enough to cope with the conditions at hand and have enough potential to deal with unexpected changes.

Darwin showed that life can survive and even thrive without certainty. Despite Darwin’s insights, humans are undecided about what they ought to do in the face of an imminent threat to their existence: global climate change.

Uncertainty makes people afraid, fear catalyzes denial, and denial leads people to cling to business as usual, even when it is not working.

How does nature work (chapters 2–3) and

How does nature work (chapters 2–3) and what part of human history does that explain (chapters 4–6)?

Stellenbosch, South Africa. The whole city is a botanical garden of indigenous and introduced plants and animals, with gray squirrels happily behaving like they do in their native North American

Stellenbosch, South Africa. The whole city is a botanical garden of indigenous and introduced plants and animals, with gray squirrels happily behaving like they do in their native North American forests,

If humanity is to survive indefinitely into the future, people must use that potential to adopt public policies that better mimic the biological systems that produced it.

Climate change is thus either collateral damage offset by that astonishing progress, which will inevitably be overcome, or a manifestation of humanity’s self-induced downfall, which it has no right to overcome.

William Ruddiman in 2003. Ruddiman suggested that the Anthropocene originated about 12,500 years ago, at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

evidence of increased carbonization of the atmosphere with human activities connected to the earliest permanent settlements and the start of agriculture.

Distinctive early urbanized cultures emerged, such as the Halafian in Turkey, Syria, and northern Mesopotamia, the Ubaid in southern Mesopotamia, and the Natufians in the Levant.

Undoubtedly there would have been early climate change deniers, who felt that the changed conditions in their settlement was less severe than in others, or that the changes would be temporary, in which case the short-term costs of staying in place would be worth the long-term benefits.

substantial number of people who lacked the knowledge to survive on their own.

interpersonal violence between humans and even some intergroup conflicts, but of a restricted nature and duration.

That solution to coping with problems associated with climate change and increasing human population density ensured that the Anthropocene would be unsustainable. But that would not be apparent for some time.

That solution to coping with problems associated with climate change and increasing human population density ensured that the Anthropocene would be unsustainable.

The arbitrary start of the Industrial Revolution is 1753, the year the first industrial grade steam engine was used.

The promise of new and better-paying jobs in the city lured increasing numbers of young people away from rural areas, reducing agricultural production even more.

Inevitably, local food supplies were exhausted. A significant amount of industrial production focused on technological advances to amplify food production as well as those designed to help extort needed supplies from people with abundant resources but inferior weapons.

beginning of the belief that technology will save us.

Beginning about 1950, human civilization became increasingly fast-paced and interconnected.

The Anthropocene was never sustainable, and now it is not survivable for much longer.

We have reached the autumn of the Anthropocene and need to think seriously about what comes next.

We are not suggesting abandoning the positive products of the Anthropocene.

Self-awareness alone, however, cannot guarantee survival in a world full of unpredictable and often fatal dangers.

We think if humans understand their place in nature from an evolutionary perspective, it will be easier to understand why they ought to engage in more effective and cooperative behaviors for coping with global climate change.

life seems to have a lot going for it during this period of global climate change. It is everywhere—in the water where there is no wind, in the desert where there is no water, and at the bottom of the sea where there is no light.

Some of it uses oxygen and produces carbon dioxide, and some uses carbon dioxide and produces oxygen.

Much of it runs on solar power and much of the rest benefits from that. And all of it is 100 percent biodegradable.

And yet there is concern for the survival of the collection of life called the biosphere and one particular member of it—us.

At the same time, some things seemed not to be cyclic. When a woman gives birth, she remains the same woman, while part of her—the child—becomes a separate person, unique to themself, and will be so until they die.

That today’s life is part of a global evolutionary system that is at least four billion years old is still something novel to most humans,

natural selection, a property of the interaction between organisms, with their own properties and sense of time, and the environments in which they

Metabolism slows things down, stores things, reuses things, and gets the most out of the available.

Metabolism is how organisms exploit their surroundings, “buying time” to be alive.

Metabolism also fuels the growth, development, and other activities required for reproduction and the vital functions that make up the “cost of maintenance.”

nature of the organism to produce as many offspring as possible without regard for the nature of the environmental conditions in which those offspring emerge.

inheritance is highly conservative, which explains why organisms resemble each other so much regardless of the conditions.

squirrels have hair because they are mammals, and mammals are at least 65 million years old.

1,000 bits (binary units, with binary referring to the 0,1 options). If the 1,000 units were DNA bases, the information content would be 2,000 bits (there are 4 DNA bases, so the calculation is 1,000 times log2 of 4 [which is 2]).

The need to survive implies that the capacity for using necessary resources must complement the opportunity to use them.

although inheritance produces variation, it is so conservative that the emergence of new variation must lag behind changes in the conditions.

the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions. The former seems to be much more the important;

Darwin’s necessary misfit. So long as there is a mismatch between organisms and their surroundings, there is a possibility for surviving environmental perturbations.

This sounds paradoxical, but it is key to survival.

The concept of fitness summarizes how living systems cope with their surroundings. Organisms are fit for any conditions under which they have the capacity to survive and reproduce.

Darwinian evolution is not about “survival of the fittest” or being the best but rather about “survival of the fit” or being good enough to cope with the conditions at hand.

Because organisms impose themselves on the environment according to their inherited legacy, capacity will always exceed opportunity.

The fundamental criterion for evolutionary success is sufficiency, not efficiency.

Selection for the most efficient variant would routinely destroy diversity, leaving little potential to respond when conditions change,

for life to evolve, there must be a persistent mechanism for conflict resolution.

We call this becoming a victim of your own success.

natural selection does not create anything; it can eliminate, amplify, perturb, and even reinforce the output of inheritance systems, but what meets the surroundings is produced solely by the inheritance systems.

Inheritance is conservative, and changes in the conditions are unpredictable, so capacity always lags behind opportunity.

being perfectly fit to the current conditions leaves little room to respond when conditions change.

Darwin’s notion of adaptation was that of coping with change by employing workable solutions that were already present, reinforced by natural selection.

In each case, evolution is accomplished not by creating new structures but instead by modifying existing ones.

Having the potential to move from unsuitable to suitable conditions is more important than being the fittest in any particular conditions.

A study by Pamela Yeh and Trevor Price showed that the mild conditions allowed birds to breed twice, increasing their reproductive output.

Compared to the costs of staying alive, producing new offspring is cheap. This is not sustainable because unlimited growth is pathological. But this is offset by the fact that all organisms die, and when they do, they are 100 percent recyclable.

The fundamental problem for animals

emergence of a new microbe living solely inside the animal’s gut and

The fundamental problem for animals is cellulose, a complex molecule found in plant cell walls that provides structural rigidity and makes plants difficult to digest.

diversity of animals that feed on plants, it may be surprising to learn that no animal has ever evolved the ability to digest cellulose.

evolution of herbivory is a story of the conjunction of several

These phenomena included cellulose-digesting microbes that were accessible in an animal’s environment, the ability of the animal to encounter and ingest yet not digest the microbe, the ability of the microbe to make a suitable living inside the animal’s gut, the emergence of a new microbe living solely inside the animal’s gut and not connected to its free-living ancestor, and finally, a mechanism for the animal to transmit the symbiotic microbes to subsequent generations of herbivores.

herbivory has evolved in only a few animal lineages, but also why those few lineages became highly diverse.

Nothing ever stands still, nothing is ever the best, and there is always potential to deal with change by changing.

Evolution is a process of never-ending conflict and conflict resolution, with diversity accumulating because each episode of conflict resolution sets the stage for new conflict.

Life exists within what prominent theoretical ecologist Robert Ulanowicz calls a window of vitality:

Accumulating variation is like saving potential to cope with an unpredictable world. When conditions change, organisms will inevitably come into conflict.

Through ingestion, excretion, growth and differentiation, reproduction, and death and decay, every organism participates in renewing the rest of the biosphere.

Most offspring die without reproducing, but they are not wasted because each one is 100 percent biodegradable and recyclable.

Dead or alive, all species in any ecosystem interact with each other, sharing matter and energy directly or indirectly.

Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction;

(renewal, for example, was an expression of persistent ancestral capacities).

supply of the resources necessary for survival. If this is true, then every species should

Each organism in an ecosystem uses up the supply of the resources necessary for survival.

every species should ultimately deplete its surroundings and leave or go extinct. And

Tansley coined the term ecosystem in 1935 as an alternative to Clements’s superorganism concept.

Plants convert solar energy into plant biomass, other organisms eat the plants and convert them into plant-eating organism biomass, and other organisms eat the plant-eating organisms, and so on.

Species risk becoming victims of their own success within ecosystems in three ways.

reproduction proceeds without regard to environmental conditions, each species will tend to overrun its resources.

competitive interactions are always disruptive to ecosystem stability to some degree, but stability can be restored through ecological fitting reinforced by natural selection mitigating competition by enhancing coaccommodation.

were unsuccessful. Its range now extends more than 900,000 square kilometers (350,000 square miles) with the current invasion front happening as far north as southern Canada,

It causes large-scale defoliation and extensive economic damage, with larvae capable of eating a wide range of trees and shrubs

Succession happens when the system is approaching its maximal capacity for exploitation and has maximum evolutionary potential to cope with change.

Climax occurs when the system is maximally exploitative, with high production but no net growth, maintaining maximum evolutionary potential.

to pandemics, including the recent one caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2 producing the disease COVID-19. The virus originated in bats, among the most solitary of all animals; when different bat species share the same cave for roosting, it is common for each species to occupy a different part of the cave.

Like all species, pathogens alternate between generalizing in the functional dimensions of fitness space during periods of change and specializing during periods of isolation. Pathogens colonize new hosts based on preexisting capacities. Once a new host has been colonized, new variants arise within the new host, some of which can infect new hosts as new opportunities for survival become available.

Darwin and Wallace, cofounders of the theory of natural selection, the geographic location in which a species resided was the dominant component of its fitness space.

measure of how successful the species was at coping with the conditions at hand.

Species might limit each other’s abundance and activities, but so long as they did not limit each other’s survival, there was no reason to think there was a limit on how many species could coexist. Natural selection might even facilitate the packing of species in ecosystems.

In 1921, plant ecologist Olof Arrhenius suggested there was a limit on the number of species that could live in one place and proposed a mathematical formula to capture that idea.

In the 1950s, the now-late, great biologist Edward O. Wilson proposed the concept of taxon cycles in which multiple species from one area colonized new areas when a change in conditions expanded their suitable habitat and then contracted their ranges when another change in conditions reduced their suitable habitat.

Perturbations in the nature of the conditions, like global climate change, trigger taxon pulses, leading to oscillating episodes of conflict and conflict resolution.

Extinction is a failure to have the capacity to cope already in place when a crisis hits.

Survival means moving away from trouble using what is already available to survive long enough to find new suitable conditions, where new traits can arise that might help deal with the next crisis.

Our economic systems as well as the ways we interact with each other and the rest of the biosphere are driven by such mantras as “bigger is better” and “growth is good.” Darwin understood that growth is a fundamental aspect of biology, but growth alone only produces conflict.

massive loss of species indicated by the dotted lines but rather the rapid accumulation of new diversity following each extinction event.

The important element is not the massive loss of species indicated by the dotted lines but rather the rapid accumulation of new diversity following each extinction event.

What is happening to the biosphere today is not an isolated incident. Climate change events have been pervasive drivers of episodic evolutionary change throughout the history of life on this planet.

evolutionary system that has absorbed and survived many previous perturbations, including those leading to the five great mass extinctions.

We in no way minimize the role of human activities in the current episode of global climate change, nor are we ignoring the existential threat to humanity.

We should not be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking we can continue our current behavior and the biosphere will continue to be supportive of human life.

Extinction occurs in the course of life because biological systems cannot predict the future.

story of extinction and renewal.

not more separate from, the rest of the biosphere. The biosphere itself

Like all living systems, humans do not occupy nature, they are part of it. Whatever the future may bring, there can be no doubt that if humanity wants to “save itself,” it must become better integrated with, not more separate from, the rest of the biosphere.

shared history of repeated episodes of geographic expansion, isolation, and innovation, and then new expansion

The Miocene epoch was succeeded by the Pliocene epoch, beginning about 5.3 million years ago. During that time, Earth’s climate became cooler, drier, and more seasonal.

Those distant ancestors did not look like modern humans, but they thought like them. They spoke and shared information. And by the end of the Pliocene 2.6 million years ago, they were eating meat and defending themselves from other scavengers on a regular basis.

During a glacial, the glacier experiences minor advances and retreats. Minor excursions are stadials, and times between them are interstadials. Each glacial advance tied up huge volumes of water in continental ice sheets 1,500–3,000 meters (4,900–9,800 feet) thick, resulting in temporary sea level drops of as much as 100 meters (330 feet).

Glacials are separated by interglacials. During interglacials, drowned coastlines were common. Antarctica was icebound from the Pliocene onward. The southern Andes were covered by the Patagonian ice cap. New Zealand and Tasmania were glaciated.

The glaciers of Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Ruwenzori range in East and Central Africa were far more extensive than today.

While our ancestors were gathering burned bodies, they would also have recognized that predators and other scavengers were afraid of fire. This might have been the first clue that fire could be used for protection.

Humans are known to have controlled fire, likely for cooking and protection, at least 1.5 million years ago.

First, when did we get smart? The answer is “much longer ago than traditionally assumed”; the basic human cognitive platform likely existed by the end of the Pliocene. Second, someone had to figure out complex innovations and technology, coordinate activities, and transmit the knowledge from generation to generation. “How was that accomplished?”

early humans Homo habilis and H. erectus and their relatives indicate that they had evolved the capacity for speech. They may not have been able to produce the full range of sounds that we can, but they could produce enough diversity of sounds to form complex speech.

earliest humans thus needed three things to live indefinitely in the grasslands: a way to defend themselves while getting meat, a source of plant-based food outside the forest, and a way to protect the group day and night on the savanna.

Tools for warding off other scavengers and predators, finding a source of plant-based food outside the forest, and using fire as a means of protecting all members of the group from predators were each improbable until they happened.

The odds that all three inventions occurred at the same time and place are low. Fortunately, it was not necessary for that to happen.

inheritance systems accumulate innovations and carry them into the future, where eventually they become connected with yet more innovations,