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Looking at the readership numbers, it appears that the blog is doing exactly what I'd hoped. People are going back and reading stories that I published from the start---over five years ago. That means to me that people are using it to get the detailed, background information that you simply cannot get off social media or even traditional news sources. If you think that this is worthwhile project---and you can afford it---why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.
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Excerpt from Big Sky Ruminations: Waxing Philosophical About the Climate Trials, by Sequoia Lobo, British Journal of Practical Philosophy vol 44, pp. 59-83.
Towards the end of the YouTube phenomenon known as The Climate Trials the moderator, Mikhail Bookchin, brought in an obscure wildlife biologist, Stonie Birdhouse, to talk about the meaning of the Climate Emergency. This was an attempt to clarify what people should make of the series of events and social tendencies all human beings were currently experiencing and how to better understand what they were seeing on their televisions and computer monitors.
Birdhouse began by explaining the concept of adaptive radiation resulting from extinction events. As he outlined, most people believe that evolution occurs gradually over long periods of time as species of animals change to become more and more fit. The latest understanding of evolutionary biology suggests that this is not true. Instead, evolution goes through long periods of stability, interspersed with periods of relatively fast change.
Mature, intact ecosystems don’t allow a lot of room for experimentation in the design of animals because they generally already have an well-adapted organism filling every niche. The offspring of these species do compete and natural selection continues, but the successful strategies are already closely-defined and there isn’t enough “slack” in the competition to allow some organism to come along and deal with problems in a totally new way.
This all changes during an extinction event. For example, when climate changes so dramatically that “keystone” species become extinct this causes “ecosystem collapse” where a great many different organisms also become extinct. He cited as an example the well-know Cretaceous extinction event that occurred when the Chicxulub asteroid hit the earth where the Gulf of Mexico is now and killed off all the non-avian dinosaurs.
He pointed out that the immediate ancestors of mammals actually evolved before dinosaurs. At one time they dominated the earth. But an earlier extinction event---the Permian-Triassic---wiped out most of the proto-mammalian (or synapsid) vertebrates. This allowed new creatures to evolve into the now-vacant niches. At this point reptiles became dominant, especially the crocodylians. These included apex predators from the genus saurosuchus and large, armoured, herbivorous lizards called aetosaurs. But eventually another extinction event occurred, the Triassic-Jurassic. This again knocked down ecosystems and opened-up new niches for animals to evolve into. This time the non-avian dinosaurs, and, both flying and aquatic lizards filled in the sea and air niches (although avian dinosaurs---what we call birds---also evolved at this time, they filled different sub-niches than the flying reptiles did). This period of dominance ended when the asteroid strike led to the current “age of mammals”.
Biologists generally dislike discussions that would suggest that evolution has a bias towards any particular quality besides survival, but there does seem to be a general tendency towards greater complexity as new species evolve to fill vacant niches. Single cells without a nucleus, or prokaryotes were once dominant, but eventually led to the evolution of single-celled eukaryotes, or cells with a nucleous. And these single celled eukaryotes led to the rise of multi-celled organisms: plants, animals, and, fungi.
As these changes processed, increased complexity arose as plants developed photosynthesis, animals and fungi learned how to digest cellulose, predators developed jaws and teeth, amphibians learned how to move out of the water, lizards developed the ability to lay eggs on dry land, dinosaurs and mammals how to regulate their body temperatures, etc.
One of the key elements in this general tendency towards more and more complexity was the development of intelligence. The nervous system of animals has led to greater degrees of intelligence throughout the fossil record until the emergence of homo sapiens. At this point evolution made a “quantum jump” with the emergence of culture. Alone among all species, human beings are the only one to use language to propagate and preserve innovative behaviours. This meant that cultural practices could evolve thousands of times faster than genetic natural selection. This initiated a similar but much faster evolutionary process that has taken place as different cultures develop agriculture, writing, bureaucracies, governments, irrigation, different types of crafts, the scientific method, industrial production, etc.
This means that (at least in the short term) the dominant evolutionary pressure on humans has ceased to be about our bodies, and is now about our civilization. Seen from this point of view, historians and archaeologists are able to describe how a particular civilization responds to a given stress. It can adapt and survive, or, it can fail to adapt and go extinct. This can mean the actual extinction of the human beings that live in a particular area, or, it can mean the destruction of the culture as it becomes assimilated into another, more dominant one.
Incidentally, the two different ways that a culture can go extinct has led to confusion about the definition of genocide. Birdhouse went on a significant digression about this issue because he felt that it helped explain a key way in which cultural evolution is different from biological.
To understand this point, consider the example of the residential school system in Canada. It was genocidal in intent towards indigenous populations because because it was specifically designed to destroy the culture of First Nations people---even though there were no extermination camps or death marches. This line of reasoning is very clear from the then Canadian Prime Minister MacDonald’s words on the matter when the school system was first introduced:
“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men." 1879
In actual fact, however, the First Nations’ culture of Canada did not go extinct because of the residential school system. Instead, under the extreme stress of this pressure, it mutated into creating a national and international sense of identity (hence the new title “First Nations”) and created new institutions, such as the Assembly of First Nations, which collectively were able to more effectively lobby the Canadian government than aboriginals had ever been able to do as individual tribes.
Birdhouse also used another example. The World Wars of the 20th century were spawned by the problem of extreme nationalism. The solution humanity found was a cultural mutation that led to the creation of global structures like the United Nations and the three political/military/economic alliances of the cold war: NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and, the Non-Aligned Movement.
Unfortunately, for most people the Climate Emergency didn’t seem to have the same sort of acute urgency that the world wars created. Moreover, at the same time as it emerged into popular consciousness, both Russia and the United States had retreated from their roles as “global policeman” and focused instead on their own forms of internal nationalist populism. This meant that there was a vacuum in traditional world leadership at exactly the time when it was most desperately needed. Even worse, at roughly the same time, a new form of world-spanning, laissez-faire capitalism emerged under the so-called “neo-liberal consensus”. This encouraged business globalism through emerging free trade agreements but also totally ignored the need to create multi-lateral treaties between nations to prevent business from undermining the progress that nations had already made in protecting workers, the environment, the poor, and so on.
Mr. Birdhouse pointed out that this meant that during the Climate Emergency human culture was in the midst of a cultural “extinction event”. The old structures were incapable of dealing with an existential threat to society and they needed to be swept away so new ones could evolve to fill the niche they left empty.
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