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A look at our relatives
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Like humans, chimpanzees cooperate – a lot. Long-term studies have revealed that chimpanzees frequently exchange services, like grooming, support in fights, and food sharing.
Chimpanzees also exhibit similar social skills that enable human (and bat) societies to ensure the stability of reciprocal relationships. Chimpanzees demonstrate inhibitory control, capacity for numerical quantification, vengeance, helping behavior, as well as discrimination between intentional and accidental actions.
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Meanwhile, Duke anthropologist Brian Hare's experimental study of cooperation in bonobos and chimpanzees demonstrated that a greater degree of tolerance, calculated by a willingness to co-feed, enabled a group of bonobos to perform better than a group of chimps in a cooperative food retrieval task. This was the first experimental study to compare social tolerance and cooperation in chimps and bonobos.
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This study potentially helps explain why a bonobo will voluntarily share food with an unrelated bonobo, even when it could have eaten all of the food itself. This study also provides support for the theory that a more tolerant temperament in humans could have created a space for more advanced cognitive abilities to evolve.
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What is the root of human's cognitive differences?
Humans as young as two demonstrate an intuition to cooperate with relative ease. Human children have been shown to successfully coordinate their behavior with that of their partner to complete a joint task. This coordination shows that human children understand how their own role and their partner's role are interrelated with each other.
This actually isn’t that special. In Satoshi Hirata and Kohki Fuwa's 2007 experiment, two chimpanzees had to pull two ropes simultaneously in to gain access to food. The task required perfect synchronization. After a few rounds, the chimps were able to learn to wait until their partner was in the right position to pull the rope. Not only that but when given a choice, an individual would recruit the “most skillful” partner to conduct the joint activity with. So, like kids, chimpanzees were also able to discern their own role and their partner’s role in a collaborative task.
While both humans and chimpanzees are able to engage in sophisticated reciprocal relationships, one critical difference could be human’s advanced capability to share information about social behavior. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, has conducted numerous studies that support the unique ability of shared-intentionality in Homo sapiens. Shared intentionality refers to a collection of cognitive abilities in which individuals can share psychological states while performing a collaborative activity.
A simple example of shared-intentionality is joint attention. Chimpanzees are capable of gaze following, meaning they will follow your line of sight not merely out of reaction, but because they know that you are looking at something of interest. However, there is no evidence suggesting that chimpanzees are capable of joint attention, the understanding that you and I are both looking at something together - the acknowledgment of a shared experience.
Another pillar of shared-intentionality the capacity to form shared goals with others. In one study, human children demonstrated this ability by employing communication strategies to re-engage or direct their partner should they lose focus in a joint task. Chimpanzees in the same study would attempt to complete the task individually without ever trying to re-engage their partner.
As of now, there is no evidence that non-human species are capable of shared-intentionality. The chimpanzees that work so flawlessly together to gain access to food can still be interpreted as an individual using their partners as a social tool to reach an individual goal, not joining their commitment and intentions to pursue a shared goal.
Humans wouldn’t be able to develop this capacity for shared-goal making without the cave drawings turned nonsensical babbling turned the sophisticated languages we have today.
While other apes may be able to cooperate, only human apes can cooperatively communicate.
The ability to implant a complex thought directly from one person’s mind to another’s is arguably one of the most powerful traits that evolutionary pressures have selected for. Humans surely took advantage of it.
What makes humans special?
We like to say that humans “share” the earth with countless other living things. In a sense, this is true, but realistically our relationship with the rest of Earth’s species hasn't been so cooperative. We don’t like to share.
Humans have manipulated Earth's ecosystems more than any other species to provide for our lifestyles, with devastating consequences. Our systemized destruction of forests for timber is just one of many human activities that are crumbling vital animal habitats and causing the extinction of species across the globe. Scientists estimate that thirty to fifty percent of species will be facing extinction by 2050. Some scientists have called the massive losses in biodiversity that are already taking place a "biological annihilation."
A concrete measure of the decimation is hard to come by because we simply do not know how many species are being lost. It’s not possible when we don’t even have a solid idea of how many unique species exist on Earth to begin with. As biologist Bruce Wilcox said, “For every species listed as endangered or extinct at least a hundred more will probably disappear unrecorded.”
Many species that are suffering major population declines provide ecological services that are essential to maintaining human civilization as we know it. We need these animals to survive. So, scientists are racing the clock to answer how humans cause monstrous damage to this world we rely on and what to do about it. What makes humans special? It isn’t difficult to list ways humans are different from other animals from just a cursory glance. But perhaps our downfall does not stem from what makes us different and instead is grounded in what links us to every other creature that miraculously roams this common soil.
The Tapestry
A tapestry is a cohesive, gapless textile. When you run your hand across the finished product, it feels smooth, as if crafted from brushstroke. Each individual thread is hidden in the completed work like it fits into the perfect spot.
The incredible diversity of species that exist on Earth today resembles the same degree of intricacy in design as a tapestry. Each species a thread making up the grand tapestry of life. But after that, the tapestry metaphor falls apart.
Unlike a real tapestry that is consciously woven into its pattern, the tapestry of life was by no means deliberate. Starting from the same thread 3.7 billion years ago, every species was etched into the tapestry with no greater strategy than trial and error. Over time, species change due to environmental pressures that preferenced certain traits. They also change randomly. So yes, the abundance of life existing harmoniously on Earth today is the result of millions of years of reshaping a single thread, but there was no needle purposefully sculpting the perfect organism.
Thanks to one organism of our tapestry, Charles Darwin, this process of changing life forms is simply called evolution.
Extinction
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Earth's tapestry doesn’t continue to build upon itself indefinitely though. Threads are snapped all of the time, ending that species' living existence on earth and freezing its evolution for eternity. 99% of species that have ever existed have gone extinct through a process known as background extinction. It turns out it’s pretty hard to figure out how to exist for a really long time on the ever-changing tapestry with limited space and resources. Some threads will gradually recoil, and others will take their spots.
There's a difference between a species that goes extinct when the very last individual dies and a species that is no longer around because the species changed so much, it can no longer be considered the same species. There are plenty of species around today that are drastic variations of a previous species that has gone extinct via transformation. What exists today is so different from the ancestor, it has been coined a new species.
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Mass Extinction
On top of background extinction, there have been five mass extinctions when over 75% of Earth’s species went extinct due to a single event that changed the atmospheric conditions so drastically, few could make it through the end of the tunnel. The most recent of these mass extinctions occurred 65 million years ago - the death of the dinosaurs. These Cretaceous creatures met their match in a 6-mile wide asteroid that hurdled into now's Yucatan Peninsula at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour. Over time, the combination of a nuclear winter and dramatic global warming overtook 80% of all living things.
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Species are dying off at a similar rate today.
This time, however, the culprit is not an extra-terrestrial fireball.
It's coming from within the tapestry itself.
Just 200,000 years ago, the Homo sapien thread evolved into a spot in the tapestry, and it has surely made its mark. Unprecedented anthropogenic changes to Earth's very core are snapping countless threads, and if not, reducing the population sizes of many others to functional extinction.
Human-induced extinction is occurring at a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times the background extinction rate. But that only accounts for species that are completely eradicated from Earth. The total number of individual wild animals has decreased by up to 50% in the last 40 years. Those who study this phenomenon have deemed the current era the Sixth Mass Extinction in Earth’s history.
While this extinction may not be backdropped with apocalyptic meteors and toxic dust clouds, the causes of today's extinction are just as conspicuous. The major human-created threats to ecosystem health and biodiversity are the introduction of invasive species, habitat degradation and destruction, over-exploitation of ecosystems, pollution from agricultural fertilizers, and climate change from increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Humans must now face the reality that when everything was born from a single, shared thread, even the thread that spun its way passed all others cannot remain on top without the foundation of the rest of the fabric. It will all unravel.
What has gone wrong in this tapestry of life that was so painstakingly weaved by millions of years of trial and error?
Maybe the problem is that humans aren't actually special
The Game
Carved into the same cloth as all life, humans have come to exist because natural selection acted on our early ancestors in the same way it influenced the Galapagos finches we pride ourselves in understanding. In the game of evolution, every individual has the same objective – to not only pass down his or her genes to the next generation but also ensure that their children do the same. That is how you win. Those we call the most “fit” succeed the best, while others fail to reproduce at all. Humans play the game too.
Naturally, selection
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In any environment, not every single individual is going to survive and reproduce equally as well. Therefore, a struggle for existence must occur, and heritable variations in individuals strongly influence the outcomes of this struggle. Natural selection is a passive process that filters the types of genes in a species by favoring the traits more suitable for a certain environment. These environmental conditions are known as selection pressures, and those can be anything.
It's important to not confuse the process of natural selection with evolution. Evolution is genetic change over time. Indeed, this change is largely affected by natural selection, but changes can also be random.
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When an animal's ultimate goal is to produce "sexy sons" - sons that are going to reproduce a lot, that individual is going to be selfish. What other option does it have in an environment with not enough resources to go around? It's only natural.
Theoretically, the individuals with the best traits will win and pass down their traits to their kids, therefore improving the fitness of the next generation, and so on. So, always choosing individual gains over any common good has driven advantageous adaptations within a species and enabled that species to evolve to the state it is in today. In this sense, selfishness is a good thing.
Animals think about themselves - about protecting themselves and feeding themselves in order to recreate as much of themselves (or their genes) as possible. Even when it may seem like an individual is behaving for the benefit of the group, that's not the case. Those frogs that look like they're enjoying a relaxing pool party in your backyard pond aren't as friendly as they seem.
If an individual frog is only looking out for itself, why would it increase its competition by living amongst a large group? W.D. Hamilton provided an explanation with his "selfish herd" theory. In a population of frogs that share a lily pond with a water snake, all of the frogs scatter when they see the water snake, and the snake attacks the closest one.
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Even though the frogs have to compete for resources in the pond, they live together because each individual frog has a better chance of survival when the water snake has so many other tasty frogs to choose from. So, living in a group is advantageous to the individual. As the worn joke goes:
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“You don’t have to outrun the bear, you only have
to outrun your friend."
What’s great about that joke is how true it is with respect to natural selection theory. In Hamilton's scenario, predation is the pressure that selected for co-habitation as a survival strategy in this frog species.
Being selfish, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that the best idea is always to throw everyone else to the fire for any meager advantage.
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Rigging the game
Oddly enough, in the self-focused game of evolution, cooperation has turned out to be a successful strategy. Often times, an individual's best chance for survival is to work well with others, thus both helping their buddy and their self. The inherently selfish game has been rigged. And just like that, Jerry Maguire's iconic plea, "help me help you," takes on a new meaning.
When does it make sense to cooperate? Most of the time, cooperation within a species can be explained by indirect fitness, the idea that I could actually pass on my genes by helping my sister pass on hers since on average we share 50 percent of our genetic content. Hamilton called this “kin selection." So theoretically, in my lifetime, I should be working to maximize my own direct fitness and the fitness of people most closely related to me, altogether encompassing my inclusive fitness.
This also means that I would be much more willing to do things that are more "costly" to me for people that are more closely related to me. Sure, I'll help my cousin twice removed carry a box to her first-floor apartment. But I'll drive a U-haul from Los Angeles to Brooklyn for my twin.
There are also cases, however, of cooperation occurring between completely unrelated individuals. While this seems counterintuitive, cooperation between individuals with zero relatednesses is a strategy that can evolve. If both the giver and receiver gain immediate direct benefits from the interaction, why not? Or the giver obtains a future benefit in exchange for their initial investment. This cooperative deal is what Robert Trivers called reciprocity.
Human cooperation has evolved to function on a greater scale than any other species. It's impressive, but cooperation is not unique to us. Cooperative instincts evolved long before anything resembling a human took its first breath. Even single-celled, pre-nearly everything amoebas work together sometimes. When individuals are starving they join together into a clump called a slug that is able to pass through soil barriers that lone amoebas cannot.
One of the quintessential examples of cooperation in non-human species is observed in vampire bats. Vampire bats in Costa Rica have proven to go to bat, so to speak, for entirely unrelated individuals. If a bat in the cave fails to obtain their own food one night, another individual often dribbles a little bit of the extra blood it was able to slurp from the next door chicken into that bat’s mouth.
Bats who refuse to cooperate, or share blood with others, are known as “defectors.” To ensure that defectors do not win out in the end and produce a whole species of bats that never lift a wing, there need to be some control mechanisms. Bats in the cave will remember to not share food with bats that didn't share in the past.
A bat who refuses to share food when it’s able to takes a costly risk in a life where starvation occurs in just two to three days. In a way, societal pressures ensure the maintenance of a majority cooperative group. In the stable social environment of a cave, reciprocity works.
However, these bats are not entirely ‘cold-blooded.’ Vampire bats have also been shown to forgive others for not sharing, but only if the reason was that they did not have enough food to give up. Also, bats that were previously unable to share tend to be especially generous later on, as if making up for their previous frugality.
So, a cave of bats is not just a cave of bats. It's a complex social environment made up of individuals that must not only remember who previously snubbed them but also the reason why. Vampire bats continue to repair strained relationships with other bats as well as maintain the ties that they do have with other bats in the cave.
This may sound exhausting, but each decision doesn’t actually take too much thought.
Humans have similar social webs, and maintaining friendships usually doesn't require any deliberate calculations of direct costs and benefits. It comes easily. Our intuition is to cooperate. And we use numerous control mechanisms, such as punishments, ostracism, and reputation building to maintain and stabilize cooperative relationships. As leading vampire bat researcher Gerald G. Carter said, “We feel emotionally compelled to help others because natural selection has done the calculations for us”.
Like all other species, natural selection directed human evolution, favoring the traits and behaviors that give the individual the best chance of survival. It just so happens that helping out others is often in the individual's best self-interest.
Human cooperative behaviors go far beyond food sharing, however. We build bridges, we organize educational systems, and we blast natural gas out of shale rock to fuel many other activities that require humans work together. Humans have accomplished never before seen tasks in their tiny chunk out of the 3.7 billion years of life on Earth, all increasing the immediate survivorship of our species. Did humans win the game of life?
Or is human’s unparalleled ability to cooperate with
each other our greatest downfall?
Stephen Hawking said humans "are just an advanced breed of monkey."
He was wrong.
The Ancestors
Humans are not monkeys, but like monkeys, we are primates. We're apes to be (more) exact, along with five other types of species - orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (like the one doing yoga above), and gibbons. We did not evolve from apes. We evolved with them from a common ancestor that diverged from monkeys around 25 million years ago. We are most closely related to the four Great Apes (not gibbons).
Human evolution diverged from chimps and bonobos six million years ago. Many species emerged from this new hominin branch, but only one is still alive today - Homo sapiens. The last Homo species went extinct just 13,000 years ago, meaning we lived on Earth for most of our existence with other types of humans. Most of these hominin species went extinct without giving rise to other species. But, some of them are our immediate ancestors and fall into that latter category of species that went extinct because they changed so much. So, the best present-day window into how cooperation in Homo sapiens may have evolved uniquely is our closest living relatives - the chimpanzee and the bonobo, both of which share 98.7% of their DNA with humans.
How did 6 billion years of separation change our cooperative abilities?
"Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans."
-Louis Leakey
The Tool
For a long time, humans hailed "Man the Toolmaker" as our distinguishing ability among all other animals. Then Jane Goodall came along. For the first time, Goodall observed tool making in a non-human species. She witnessed a chimpanzee bend a stick, strip off its leaves, and then use the modified tool to fish termites out of a termite nest like a spoon. Upon reporting back to her boss Louis Leakey, he replied: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine human, or accept chimpanzees as humans."
Not only did Goodall upturn a long-held assumption of human nature, she also established the presence of culture in chimps. At the broadest level, biologists define culture as behaviors that are learned by observing or interacting with others. In this sense, chimps certainly exhibit culture by passing on tool-making knowledge.
Goodall's discovery was groundbreaking. But it doesn't take a chimp to realize how much more advanced an iPhone is from a bent stick. Human culture very well could be the tool that has enabled humans to inhabit nearly all corners of Earth successfully. Since there is no culture without cooperation, our cooperative language probabaly played a large role in our success.
Say what?
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One of the first tangible ways humans likely pursued a shared goal was in tool-making. In a 2015 study, University of California, Berkeley psychologist Thomas Moran explored the question of how much language helped modern humans learn to make the tools of 50,000 years ago as a proxy for the importance of language in early human's evolution.
The researchers separated 184 people into five different groups. Each group was tasked with creating Oldowan flakes, simple tools that were first made around 2.5 million years ago. While it is unknown which human ancestor first started to make the Oldowan tool, it is most often associated with Homo ergaster and Homo habilis. Producing a flake requires repeatedly striking one stone with another stone at a precise angle until it is sharp enough to pierce an animal.
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Each of the five groups had to create the tool through a different method. Students in the first group were given two stones and an example of a flake with no further direction. In the second group, one student had to learn how to make the tool by watching someone else do it, with zero interaction between the two. In the third group, participants actively demonstrated to others what they were doing, but without gesturing. In the fourth group, pointing and gesturing was allowed, but no talking. And in the final group, the “teacher” was allowed to say whatever necessary to the “learner.”
In the next round, the “learner” of each group became the “teacher," until 6,000 Oldowan flakes were created under these experimental controls.
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The results aren’t surprising. The group that was allowed communication through gesturing performed twice as well as the groups that were not allowed to communicate at all, and the group that was allowed language performed four times as well as the others.
The researchers conclude that the transmission and advancement of some of the earliest tool making would have required some form of communication and capacity for teaching. Therefore, individuals with this ability were able to produce better tools and perform as better hunters and natural selection would have slowly improved language abilities.
There were some limitations to this study. Humans today already have language so it makes sense that the verbal teaching group performed leaps and bounds above the others. Early humans would not have had the same language sophistication to start off. Additionally, participants were only given 25 minutes to make the tool. It is possible that if given limitless time, there would be no noticeable differences in the end product among transmission conditions.
Nonetheless, this paper provides a viable look into how language would have contributed immensely to the direction of human evolution and subsequently the advancement of human culture.
It makes sense. The ability to exchange information via language in real time confers an obvious advantage. It was really helpful for that last group in the study to be able to talk to each other. Imagine though if the "learner" was able to talk to everyone in history who has ever made an Oldowan tool. Written language is the extraordinary source of human power.
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Like a wildfire
It's possible that other species are smart enough to pass down information across multiple generations like humans do. Both elephants and crows are on the exalted short list of "toolmakers" and are known to possess human-like intelligence. These species have the cognitive capacity - the memory and the communication abilities - but they don't have a physical enactment equivalent of written language. They aren't dextrous enough, yet.
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Humans developed the ability to write down ideas and unlock language from time. From that point on, the progression of human culture blasted into hyper speed.
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Individuals pursued their ultimate goal of reproducing successful offspring by using their capacity for written language and shared-intentionality in more earth-shattering ways with each new generation.
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Today, we control the flow rates of mile-wide rivers that were once described as untameable. We chop off mountaintops to access the coal we use to power our billions of lives. And now, we've emitted so many greenhouse gases that we are irrevocably changing the very climatic patterns of the same atmosphere our Oldowan-wielding ancestors once breathed.
None of this could have been accomplished by a single individual. We had to work together. This is human culture, and it is what makes us so powerful. It's the ability to influence each other through shared understanding without ever having to interact physically.
It seems silly now that we once tried to simplify man’s distinction to something as minimal as tool making. “Man the Thespian”, “Man the Politician”, and "Man the Theoretical Physicist” are a few of thousands of labels that apply singularly to humans. It’s as if we wanted to find superiority in humans in something so modest it reveals our undeniable genius.
Jane Goodall proved we're not unique in this intelligence. Other animals are capable of modifying the resources at their disposal to accomplish a task. Not only that, but behaviors within chimpanzees have been found to differ as well.
A 1999 paper in Nature co-authored by leading primatologists, including Goodall herself, documented 39 distinct behaviors among seven different chimpanzee groups that could not be explained by ecological factors. This means that two chimpanzee groups with local environments that mirrored each other used different techniques to accomplish tasks, like grooming each other or cracking open a nut. It was concluded that chimpanzees do indeed have cultural differences, just like humans.
Still, human culture is different because
we have the ability to cumulate our learned
experiences with each generation.
One generation can learn how to do something the way the previous generation did it. They can then make modifications to that technique and pass on the improved version to the next generation. The pattern continues like this until we have submarines and 3D printers.
To this date, there is no strong evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can compound knowledge. Most of the skills chimpanzees are capable of have been observed to come about intuitively in individuals that had no prior knowledge of the behavior. Since a naive individual can reinvent these behaviors in a single lifetime, it cannot be cumulative culture.
Meanwhile, I can learn about evolution from Darwin himself and use his words to inform "new" ideas. It's fair to say that nothing in human culture today was a created in a vacuum. Each human generation's ability to cumulate the culture of their ancestors and create something newer is certainly unique to humans. Our ability to compound their culture has resulted in tools and behaviors with magnifying effects.
Consider fire.
Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham provides evidence for the theory that cooking food is what allowed early humans to develop larger brains in his book Catching Fire. From the get-go, harnessing fire provided warmth, protection, and a means to cook food for the first humans with this capability. But the effects didn't stop there.
When our ancestors started to eat cooked food, they no longer had to spend an exorbitant amount of time chewing raw meat (many of our primate relatives spend up to 6 hours a day just chewing). Instead, they could dedicate time to cultural innovations, like tool making. The body also didn't have to use so much energy digesting uncooked meals anymore. When humans made the transition to cooked food, the calories that used to be spent internally on digestion could then be allocated to increasing brain size and capacity. Therefore, Wrangham argues that fire is responsible for making humans the big-brained primates we are today.
Last, but definitely not least, protection and warmth from fire enabled human dispersal out of Africa and eventually everywhere else. We owe a lot to fire.
Birds today that seek out fires to catch prey running from the flames provide clues to the same instincts that may have attracted our early ancestors to the inferno. Some raptors even transport embers with their mouths to start a fire in a new location, demonstrating a basic capacity for fire management. Only humans, however, have been able to harness fire so effectively that we caused amplifying effects beyond the immediate benefits of warmth, protection, and cooking.
While the progression of human innovation has grown at unprecedented rates, it's the unforeseen consequences of human activity that sweep the earth like a wildfire.
We can take a deeper look at what burning fossil fuels has done for us. Humans are capable of extracting mass quantities of oil from the earth that is then used as energy. One barrel of oil is equal to 58 gallons, which is equal to 5.8 million British Thermal Units, or BTU. What does that mean? Well, 75 BTU are needed to boil one cup of water. So, one barrel of oil can boil 77,333 cups of water.
Let's give this a little more perspective. One human adult working a standard 40-hour week would have to labor for at least 10 years to produce the amount of energy in a single barrel of oil. According to the Oil Market 2016 report, 96 million barrels of oil are consumed every day. Given the human population of 7.3 billion people, each and every one of us would have to labor for 48 days to produce the amount of energy we consume in just a single day.
Energy production from burning fossil fuels is a quintessential example of how human cooperation and cumulative culture produced something with effects far greater than a single individual could have achieved.
With this power, the simplest actions can have profoundly complex effects.
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The important question is no longer what makes human special, but instead, what is special about our effects on Earth?
The Effect
In the intro, I claimed that humans have manipulated Earth's ecosystems more than any other species. I lied. Well, it depends on how you define "more". The impacts of humans go far beyond an activity's intended effect, like the consequences of harnessing fire I just discussed. A line of efficacy is crossed when hunting for survival grows into over-exploitation and collapses an entire habitat. The broader environmental impacts of our actions are generally not intended.
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Notably, we are not the only species to have inadvertent earth-shaking environmental impacts.
To understand the type of effects humans have, we can examine other life forms that made their mark in similar fashions.
Side effects
Take a breath. It's actually not necessary to tell you to do that because you do it without even thinking about it. This wouldn't be possible without a simple water-dwelling organism called cyanobacteria that is responsible for the oxygen we breathe today. No need to thank it, though. It didn't mean to.
Around 2.45 billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved to utilize an unprecedented metabolic process - photosynthesis. Cyanobacteria began to store energy in its cell by converting carbon dioxide to sugar. This process also produced oxygen that the organism later used to break down the sugar into usable energy.
A consequence of photosynthesis is that it produced more oxygen in the cell than it needed. The high concentration of oxygen within the cyanobacteria relative to the low-oxygen environment outside of the cyanobacteria resulted in the movement of oxygen into the aquatic environment and eventually to the atmosphere.
This was a big deal. Without the evolution of photosynthesis, Earth would have likely remained a low-oxygen environment much longer and its tapestry would be restricted to low oxygen-demanding organisms, like bacteria and maybe clams. Today, oxygen makes up 21% of the atmosphere, and cyanobacteria is still responsible for 50% of it. With its (r)evolutionary oxygen-producing process, cyanobacteria casually catalyzed the evolution of all of Earth’s oxygen breathing creatures.
The important thing to understand is that cyanobacteria’s literal Earth-changing effects were not intentional. There is a difference between direct effects from the pressures of natural selection (like competition) and the broader indirect effects that the very nature of that adaptation creates. Like all other life forms, environmental pressures caused cyanobacteria to develop more advantageous traits that gave it a better chance for survival. Incidentally, these traits resulted in significant changes to the chemical composition of the world. Quite the side effect.
So, humans are not the only type of life form to have had wide, penetrating effects on Earth’s ecosystems. We're also not the only species to over-exploit the environments we depend on.
When selfishness hurts
A fingernail-sized critter is wreaking havoc on the Great Lakes ecosystem. Native to Ukraine, the quagga mussel was first sited in Lake Erie in 1989. Since then, it has spread throughout all of the Great Lakes, but Superior, reaching a population upwards of 750 trillion. It now blankets the bottoms of lakes Michigan and Huron to depths of 400 feet, and it has extraordinarily transformed the lake ecology.
Quagga mussels have nearly decimated the algae populations in the lakes through their very efficient filter-feeding process. A study by University of Michigan researcher Mary Ann Evans found that algal production in lakes Michigan and Huron is 80% lower than 1980s levels. This is bad news for nearly every other organism in the lakes.
In particular, Diporiea is a tiny shrimp-like creature that almost every fish in the lakes relies on at some point in their life. With no algae to eat, Diporiea populations have also crashed, and effects on fish populations (easily observed through the panicked fishing industry) are already occurring.
While there is no evidence that quagga mussels are slowing down any time soon, it is likely that they will continue to filter the algae in the lakes until there is nothing left for them to feed on or their population contracts to a sustainable size.
Quagga mussels are ideal examples of the workings of natural selection theory. Each individual mussel will continue to take all that it can until the entire population suffers from it. So, selfishness can hurt.
How did that tiny creature get from Ukraine to Michigan to begin with? It most likely hitched a ride in the ballast tank of a large commercial ship and found itself dropped off in Lake Erie along with the rest of the tank water that was dumped out in that spot. So, the quagga mussel’s devastation on the Great Lakes would not have been possible without humans.
The quagga mussel is not only causing tremendous harmful ecological changes but also potentially doing so to its own detriment.
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Our problem
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These days it's hard not to tie any human activity to a greater environmental impact beyond that activity’s intended effect. A great example is the Haber-Bosch process.
All living things need nitrogen, and for most of Earth’s history it was a limited nutrient. Plants were restricted by the amount of nitrogen available to them in the soil, and the number of plants limited primary consumers and so on. In 1909, however, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a way to artificially convert nitrogen in the air to ammonia, which is the form of nitrogen that plants need to grow.
Within four years the power of the human collective expanded this process to an industrial scale, improving the conversion rate of nitrogen in the air to ammonia from 125 ml per hour to 20 tons per day. Initially, the products of the Haber-Bosch process were used in ammunition production during World War I. The game-changing use of the process though was synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Now, humans were adding artificial nitrogen to Earth’s soil, transforming a once limited vital nutrient into an ostensibly infinite commodity.
The Haber-Bosch process intensified human’s ability to grow food. It was easy. We could grow a lot of it to sustain a lot of people. As a consequence, the human population ballooned from 1.6 billion in 1900 to today’s 7.3 billion. Now, 50% of the nitrogen in your body comes from the Haber-Bosch process.
That means up to 50% of the human population
today is sustained artificially, outside of the natural
capacity of Earth's ecosystems.
It is worth noting that our ammonia creation is not inexhaustible. A key ingredient is hydrogen molecules that are blasted from natural gas. So, food production for human's growing population is no longer limited by Earth's natural nutrient cycles, but it is limited by the finite amount of fossil fuels left.
That’s not it. The ratio of nitrogen that we add to the soil to the amount of nitrogen our food actually needs to grow is not one to one. Farmers around the world oversaturate their crops with nitrogen. The plants don’t even absorb half of it. That unused nitrogen then remains in the soil or flows into nearby water sources, polluting aquatic habitats and greatly upsetting Earth’s natural balance of nutrients.
Our massive disruption of the nitrogen cycle is not something we’ve thought about too much since food production has always been the bottom line.
With the boom in crop production came a massive expansion of the animal agriculture industry. The domestication of animals may have had humble, low-scale beginnings. But, the bulk of what we eat isn’t coming from ma and pop’s farms.
Drive through the heart of Nebraska, and you'll feel like you're flanked on both sides by endless rows of corn and soybeans mile after mile, hour after hour. A lot of land is dedicated to growing just these two crops – and yes the large majority of it is chemically fertilized. But humans aren’t eating that. More than half of the corn and 80% of the soybeans in the world are used to feed livestock, particularly cattle.
Around 56 million land animals are raised and slaughtered annually for human consumption. We would not have been able to sustain this large livestock industry without the Haber-Bosch-grown food to feed them.
The meat we eat comes with a lot of unintended strings attached as well. Cows may be cute, but they’re not environmentalists.
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More than two-thirds of all available agricultural land is dedicated to farm animals for grazing and growing feed crops. All of this space needs to come from somewhere. Deforestation to clear land needed for livestock or feed crops emits about 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Also, a cow's digestive process emits methane into the atmosphere, which is a significant greenhouse gas. One cow’s flatulence can’t do a lot of damage, but billions and billions together are responsible for roughly 40% of the annual anthropogenic methane emissions. Agriculture is a huge contributor to climate change. Taking everything that goes into the livestock industry into account, the animal agriculture sector contributes 18% of human-induced GHG emissions. That’s more than transportation’s share of the emissions pie.
There are obvious advantages to breeding animals. We have immediate access to numerous products – milk, eggs, and meat right at our fingertips. Finding a way to artificially fix nitrogen also makes sense. Why not make food production easier however possible? But polluting our soils and rivers, upturning the nitrogen cycle, and warming the planet via cow farts were not part of the deal.
The ability to grow a lot of food to feed a lot of cows to feed a lot of humans had conspicuous environmental impacts beyond of direct benefits to us. That’s the difference between direct results of our actions and the unintended, broader implications. That’s our problem.
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Worst of both worlds
Like humans, the power of the quagga mussel and cyanobacteria came in numbers. They have these significant impacts because there are so many of them. However, the difference between the indirect environmental impacts that humans cause and those that the cyanobacteria or quagga mussels cause are that humans produced these effects through cooperation – deliberately working together.
As I discussed at the beginning, it's advantageous for animals to work together. Take an ant colony. Tasks are divvied up amongst all ants in the colony with the ultimate goal of helping the queen reproduce more ants for the colony. An individual ant would not be able to survive without the rest of the colony. In fact, a lot of ants in a colony are sterile. It’s okay though. Since all ants in a colony are related (the queen is the ultimate mother), they all get their own genes passed on by helping the queen reproduce.
Like humans, ants are exponentially more powerful working together in a colony than individually.
Unlike humans, however, a collective of ants does not make the individual ant substantially more powerful. In humans though, what the human collective can achieve gives the individual human astonishing power.
You carry the weight of the human collective's power in your personal vehicle, or rather it carries you. An average car with a 12-gallon gas tank saves its owner two years of labor that would be necessary to produce that amount of energy.
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We are the worst of both worlds. We have the concentrated power of the colony and the individualist drivers of other animals. We work together to realize a shared goal and make the individual’s footprint on the Earth heavier and heavier.
Are you special?
The Unraveling
How do we think about us?
From one perspective, we’re relatively feeble. We are not the strongest. We’re not the biggest. We’re not the fastest. But we know from the quagga mussel the size of a fingernail, you don’t need to be any of these things to be destructive in a world so delicately interconnected by countless threads
From a more accurate perspective, humans are strikingly powerful. I don’t mean the 7.3 billion strong human conglomerate. I mean you, as one person, possess tremendous power.
You can have nearly anything you want. You can fly to the other side of the earth in less than a day. You can grow an acre of food on nonarable land. You can plug in your computer and read centuries worth of information straight from your lap and then use that to create something that makes you and every single other human even more powerful.
We are an unparalleled player in the game of natural selection. We are improbable, yes, but not impossible. In any game of chance, there can be extreme outliers. And that's just what we are - unprecedented outliers within set bounds.
The way that we function within the game may seem like too great of an aberration from what we consider “animal.” It’s not.
Everything that on the surface may seem to make us special is in fact fundamentally the same as all other species. All of our traits serve the same mechanical function as those in other animals – to help us survive and reproduce more individuals that reproduce.
The first time I read an analysis of humans that reduced our actions to the same straightforward explanations of all other animals I pushed back. That’s grossly oversimplified, I thought. We’re too smart. We have history books. We learn and then learn even more. It just can’t be.
Don't human interactions deserve contextualization that natural selection theory does not provide? We cannot simply break down the nuances of human cooperation across so many different cultures into one dimension.
I am right. I am also wrong. Humans are indeed complicated. However, that argument does not actually contradict the fact that we are life forms subject to the same biological pressures as all life.
Our advanced intelligence and abilities are mere products of the game’s terms.
Behaviors amongst cultures can be distinct, unique, and impossible to understand without context. Nonetheless, they all still participate in the same dynamic. There can be different ways to achieve the same objectives in the game.
Earlier I asked whether our traits that allow for advanced cooperation have enabled us to win the game or if they are our greatest downfall.
In fact, they are both.
We can be a thread in the tapestry, a successful one at that, and at the same time unravel that very tapestry to our own peril.
Therein lies our paradox.
Our failure to grasp how our behavior no longer works in our favor is a problem of incongruent time scales. The timescales of our species, our power, and natural selection do not line up.
Less than 200 years ago, we tapped an elixir from the ground that gave us the potential to greatly increase our odds in the game, with the caveat of substantially altering all life around us. Like any good selfish life form we fulfilled that potential.
In no time at all, we’ve exerted our power with lightning speed. The rate of human's impact on the Earth has exponentially sped up, while everything else is still confined by the slow, trial and error process of natural selection. Almost nothing can keep up with our power, including us.
Our DNA may be most similar to the bonobo and chimpanzee, but our effects on the earth mirror those of the quagga mussel on the Great Lakes.
We need 1.7 Earths to sustain the current average resource consumption and CO2 waste of humans. We’re moving too fast. We're running out of resources. We’re running out of time.
Maybe an untimely end to human existence as we know it is inevitable. If that’s the case though, it surely won’t occur in an instant flash. Before the end, it will hurt, for a long time, if not for you us than for our children and certainly for our grandchildren.
Heat waves. Floods. Droughts. Fires. Malnourishment. Disease. Violent conflict. These unintended effects of our behaviors will ravage every corner of the earth, just as we have.
We are the threat, and we are threatened.
But, we have one edge over the other players. The quagga mussel does not know that it is decimating the ecosystem it relies on for survival. We do. We can choose to act on that. We can course correct.
Our cognitive capacity is what got us into this position and is our one sliver of hope out of it. We are smart enough to realize that we can push back. We can redefine cooperation beyond the confines of the game. We need to.
The human thread stumbled its way into the tapestry, like all other species. But along the way, its impacts became magnifyingly greater than any other thread, and it began to change the very tapestry itself - snapping threads left and right. In our honest attempts to win out along with all of the other threads, we've begun to collapse the gilded staircase beneath our feet with each step upwards. To ensure the longevity of the ecosystems we depend on and the sustainability of our own species, we need to understand this.
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The only thing that will truly separate us from all other species is if we deliberately decide to forgo our own immediate success for the sake of communal survival.
We have to quit the game. Only then will we be special.
Will we voluntarily unravel ourselves before our actions unravel the rest of the tapestry?
If you are actually special, you'll have to prove it.