Can human greed and denial ever end? The climate crisis as a transformational opportunity (2)

*Pic: Flickr, David Blackwell: ‘Walking home one evening in 2074 Paul wondered about the scientific breakthrough reversing the effects of climate change and its impact on his beach condo investment’ …

First published April 4

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(19) It is not merely co-incidence that the start and finish of several major geological periods coincide with mass extinctions – the time boundaries between these periods were defined on the abrupt changes in fossil faunas even before geologists and palaeontologists realised that these changes were the result of global mass extinction events.

(20) See Benton 2015 cited above.

(21) Although the idea that increasing sophistication of tool-making skills amongst early humans was an important driver of our cognitive development and language skills was for a time discounted amongst palaeo-anthropologists, more recent research has shown that it is indeed likely to have been fundamental to the evolution of those skills during Palaeolithic times. See Dietrich Stout, 2016: “Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist”; in: Scientific American special edition “The Story of Us”, Autumn 2016 for a popular account of these developments in palaeo-anthropology. See also Tattersall below.

(22) See Ian Tattersall, 2015: “Symbolic Thought, Creativity and Human Evolution”; In: Barbora Puta & Vaclav Soukup (eds.) “The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind”, Karolinum Press, Charles University, Prague, p.30-34. Tattersall similarly emphasises the role of symbolic thinking and language in driving the well-recognised acceleration of human tool-making skills and creativity during the last “Ice Age”.

(23) C.W. Marean, 2016: “When the Sea Saved Humanity”; in: Scientific American special edition “The Story of Us”, autumn 2016.

(24) See for example Vaclav Soukup, 2015: “From Animal to Humans: Anthropogenesis as a Subject of Scientific Research”; In: Barbora Puta & Vaclav Soukup (eds.) “The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind”, Karolinum Press, Charles University, Prague, p. 17-29. The simultaneous occurrence of the rigors of the Last Glacial Phase (“The Ice Ages”) after humans had spread from Africa into Europe, and the major acceleration of human cultural development which occurred at that time (involving the rapid development of language, self-awareness, and the consequent first appearance of evidence of religion in the archaeological record), is unlikely to be mere co-incidence, but instead was probably the challenge which drove our unprecedented cognitive development at that time.

(25) See for example Jared Diamond, 1991: “The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee”; Vintage Books, London, 360 pp. Whereas Diamond is a populariser and synthesiser of big ideas in anthropology, the evidence for a major acceleration of human cognitive development after the Last Interglacial warm phase circa 125,000 years ago and culminating by around 40,000 years ago during the Last Glacial cold phase, is widely accepted by palaeo-anthropologists who have referred to it using terms such as a “behavioural switch”, the “big bang of consciousness” or the “creative explosion”. A collection of essays summarising recent thinking in this field is provided by Barbora Puta & Vaclav Soukup (eds.), 2015: “The Genesis of Creativity and the Origin of the Human Mind”, Karolinum Press, Charles University, Prague.

(26) As discussed by Brian Fagan in his 2010 book “Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans” (Bloomsbury Press, New York), some anthropologists consider that the volcanic eruption of Mt Toba in Sumatra at 73,500 years ago during the early stages of the last Ice Age – one of the biggest volcanic eruptions known from the geological record – may have played a particularly important role in human evolution. This eruption blanketed huge areas of Asia in volcanic dust and its “volcanic winter” atmospheric effects are thought to have resulted in an intense global cold and drought phase lasting over a thousand years, at a time when glacial climatic conditions had already created more challenging conditions for survival following the end of the warm Last Interglacial phase circa 125,000 years ago. This sudden intense cold episode phase decimated vegetation and thus human populations in Africa and elsewhere, but it appears that these challenges also drove early Homo sapiens to survive by rapidly developing their already substantial cognitive skills into a fully modern human consciousness characterised by those communication, co-operation and innovation skills that have made our species so different from all others. A key academic paper describing the evidence for this is provided by: Rampino, M. R., and Ambrose, S. H., 2000, “Volcanic winter in the Garden of Eden: The Toba super-eruption and the late Pleistocene human population crash”, in McCoy, F. W., and Heiken, G., eds., “Volcanic Hazards and Disasters in Human Antiquity”; Boulder, Colorado, Geological Society of America Special Paper 345, pages 71-2 (DOI: 10.1130/0-8137-2345-0.71).

(27) See Puta & Soukup (eds.) cited above for recent palaeo-anthropological thinking on these issues. See also (if you can cope with his long-winded and obtuse writing style) the writings of Douglas Hofstadter on the role of feedbacks (“strange loops”) in generating consciousness: Douglas Hofstadter 1979: “Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”, Basic Books Inc., New York; and: Douglas Hofstadter 2007: “I am a Strange Loop”, Basic Books Inc., New York.

(28) Soukup 2015 (cited above, p. 22, 24) notes that early archaeological indicators of religious belief appear in Neanderthal burial sites from around 80,000 years ago onwards, but became quite sophisticated in Cro-Magnon sites during the Upper Palaeolithic (40,000 – 11,000 years before present) when the dead were sometimes buried with food, tools, amulets and decorations which all imply an expectation that the dead would be needing these things in an after-life.

(29) See Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Grenberg & Tom Pyszczynski, 2015: “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life”; Random House, New York, 274 pp. This important book provides recent insights from psychology into the central role that a dawning awareness of death and personal mortality accompanying the evolution of full-blown self-consciousness must have played in humanities invention of religion as a cultural coping strategy to enable us to live with the otherwise devastating impact that awareness of personal mortality would have had on our very capacity to cope and survive.

(30) The concept of ‘The Axial Age’ was established by Karl Jaspers (1949: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Munich; English translation: The Origin and Goal of History, Translated by Michael Bullock, London: Routledge& Kegan Paul / New Haven: Yale University Press: 1953). A recent examination of the nature and significance of the Axial Age is provided by Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas (eds.), 2012: The Axial Age and its Consequences; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 548 pp.

(31) It is worth noting that this approach – which is in essence “the scientific method” – has been used by humans since prehistory. It’s what we learnt a long time ago to do on a pragmatic day-to-day basis to solve the problems of survival. However until the Axial Age, the method of critical inquiry was hardly articulated – it was what we did if we had a practical problem to solve, but we rarely if ever conceptualised or thought of it as a method to understand the world with; instead we conceptualised our understandings of the world as “just-so” stories and myths.

(32) Björn Wittrock; “The Axial Age in Global History: Cultural Crystallizations and Societal Transformations”; in: Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas (eds.), 2012: The Axial Age and its Consequences; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p.106.

(33) Björn Wittrock; “The Axial Age in Global History: Cultural Crystallizations and Societal Transformations”; in: Robert N. Bellah & Hans Joas (eds.), 2012: The Axial Age and its Consequences; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p.102-125.

(34) Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, 1972: “Punctuated equilibria: An alternative model to phyletic gradualism”; in: T.J.M. Schopf (ed.) “Models in Paleobiology”, Freeman Cooper, San Francisco, p. 82-115.

(35) See: Michael Le Page, 2016: “In the Fast Lane”, in: “Origin, Evolution, Extinction – The Epic Story of Life on Earth”, New Scientist: The Collection, Vol. 3, Issue 2, pages 86-90. Le Page describes examples of substantial evolutionary changes that have now been observed in many species in recent decades as they have adapted to changing conditions, and notes examples that have occurred within human groups over periods from centuries to millennia, such as the emergence of increasing resistance to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease amongst the Fore people of New Guinea, and the biological adaptation to high-altitude living that occurred amongst Tibetan people after they split from the Han people of China some millennia ago and settled in the high altitude regions of the Tibetan Plateau.

(36) See: John Hawks, 2016: “Still evolving (after all these years)”; in: Scientific American special edition “The Story of Us”, autumn 2016. Hawks provides additional examples of recent and rapid human evolution including those mentioned in the text. Of particular significance, Hawks points out that the outcome of modern international travel, migrations, and multi-cultural societies is not likely to be the breeding of a homogenous mass of pale-brown humans who all look alike, but rather an increasing diversity of gene expressions, some of which Hawks notes we are already starting to see, such as dark-skinned, freckled blondes and people with green eyes and olive skin.

(37) See: John Hawks, 2016: “Still evolving (after all these years)”; in: Scientific American special edition “The Story of Us”, autumn 2016.

(38) Robert Wright, 1994: “The Moral Animal”; Vintage Books, New York, p. 34.

(39) See: John Hawks, 2016: “Still evolving (after all these years)”; in: Scientific American special edition “The Story of Us”, autumn 2016.

(40) The anthropologist David Sloane Wilson provides an over-view of current thinking about this issue in “Evolution of Selfless Behaviour”, New Scientist, 6th August 2011, and references cited therein.

(41) Paul Gilding, 2011: “The Great Disruption; Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World’; Bloomsbury Press, New York.

(42) Fagan, Brian, 2010: “Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans”; Bloomsbury Press, New York.

(43) “Economy and Pleasure”; p. 277 in: “The World-ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry” Selected and Introduced by Paul Kingsnorth, 2017, Allen Lane (Penguin Random House UK).