Ratchet Effect of civilization (also see info below from the books: The Big Ratchet; Pandora’s Seed)

The Ratchet Effect - Why Technological Progress and the Expansion of Man's Habitat is Irreversible

https://jordan179.livejournal.com/164904.html

Introduction

A common science-fictional scenario is the post-apocalyptic story, in which some war or disaster has destroyed
civilization and the human race must rebuild from a low-tech foundation. And in real history, we see abundant evidence
that civilizations are mortal: Toynbee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_J._Toynbee) made a famous study of their
life cycles.

This has led to a theory that humanity can never engage in the long-term colonization of any region (such as the Moon
or the sea floor) which we could not survive in without an "advanced technology." The obvious analogy is made with the
Greenland colony of the Vikings, which perished when Greenland became too cold for medieval European farming
technology.

However, if one looks at actual history, one will see that the actual loss of a technology, especially in the sense of it
being lost to allhumanity, is very rare. For instance, while the technology of civil engineering definitely declined in the
post 5th-century AD Roman West, in what became Western Europe, it remained in practice in the East. As Robert Wright
points out in Nonzero, it is rare for anything important to be forgotten by the human extended mind
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny).

Why is this?

Knowledge As Self-Replicator

Technology is a form of knowledge, and knowledge is a self-replicator, whose habitat is the mind. A useful piece of
technology -- such as the principle of the wheel or how to smelt and forge iron into tools -- unless it fails to spread at
inception -- will be passed on to many other minds, and thus spread so widely that it is very difficult to exterminate.

This is why, as we observe the passage of centuries, we see a steady rise in human technology. This rise is independent
of the occurrence of "dark ages" -- in fact, since a "dark age" is the early springtime of a new civilization, a period in
which the cold restraints of the winter of the last civilization have been slipped, technological progress may
actually accelerate in a dark age, as happened to agricultural technology in the Western Dark Age of the early medieval
period. It is easily noted that each civilization starts from a higher level of technology than did its predecessor (compare
Europe in the 7th-10th centuries AD to Greece in the 10th-7th centuries BC) and rises to greater heights (compare the
Classical Greco-Roman world of the 1st century BC to the American-Anglosphere-European world of the 21st century
AD).

The Technological Ratchet Effect, and Cultural Competition

This is because any human culture is based upon certain technologies, which for this reason are important to that
culture. These technologies will be strongly embedded in customs which ensure that they are taught to the next
generations, and hence cannot be forgotten. What is more, because "human culture" is composed of numerous "sub-
cultures" (or will fragment into such given protracted political breakdown), if by horrid mischance some human culture
manages to forget an important technology, it will simply be outcompeted and displaced by other human cultures which
have retained that piece of technology.
The important point here is to realize that we speak of humanity as a whole, and in terms of centuries or even millennia.
It is quite possible for an important piece of technology (such as the construction of aqueducts) to be lost locally (as it
was in Northwestern Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire) for centuries. But note that building aqueducts is
only important if one wishes to build large cities, and it was precisely in Northwestern Europe that cities were of only
minor importance for everything save imperial administration. In Southeastern Europe and the Levant, the technology
was never lost, in fact was taken further with wind and water-mills -- and eventually spread backinto Northwestern
Europe, to aid in the rebirth of the cities in the High Middle Ages and Renaissance. The modern West builds water supply
systems which are far more sophisticated and extensive than anything Rome managed at her height.

Think of this as a "ratchet" effect. A ratchet gear permits motion in only one direction: it is easy to push forward, but
extremely difficult to push backward. The technological ratchet is somewhat less reliable than the mechanical one, but it
makes forgetting a technology extremely difficult. In general, once anything important to a civilization at a time is
discovered, it will not be forgotten.

Failed Colonies

But what of failed colonies? We can point to examples in which attempts to implant higher civilization failed: Late
Classical Britain, Viking Greenland, and the like. Surely this could happen to humanity if we attempt to plant colonies on
other worlds?

Yes, it could. But locally, temporarily, and only to a limited extent.

First, note that Late Classical Britain succumbed not to natural cultural decay (the withdrawal of Roman authority led to
political fragmentation but not technological decline) but rather to a barbarian invasion (that of the Angles and Saxons).
As for Viking Greenland, the problem there was a change in the climate: medieval Viking technology would have
sufficed indefinitely to permit organized survival in the Greenland of the Medieval Climatic Optimum, but survival in the
Greenland of the Little Ice Age was a much tougher proposition.

(Incidentally, climate change might have also been a factor in the fall of Roman Britain; note the extreme cold snap of
535-536, as described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536. There was also
a barbarian invasion in the case of Greenland, in the form of the arrival of the Eskimos).

Secondly, note that neither Britain nor Greenland remained permanently barred to civilization. The modern West has
recolonized both territories, in the case of Britain producing a brilliant culture which proved highly-influential in the
spread of the West worldwide; in the case of Greenland, at least rejoining it to the wider cultural sphere.

Finally, note that in each case the catastrophes were local. The fall of Roman Britain into darkness did not mean the fall
of the Classical legacy everywhere; its survival in Italy, Gaul and Ireland, in fact, proved decisive in eventual the
restoration of civilization in Britain. The fall of Greenland did not mean the collapse of all Scandinavian-derived cultures,
nor even of Norse seafaring. Because the technologies survived elsewhere in the mass human memory, they could
eventually replicate back into the regions from which they had been extirpated.

A Spacefaring Analogy

Imagine that, in the far future, humanity has colonized a star system possessing no planets habitable to unprotected
higher Earthlife, such that the maintenance of artificial habs is vital to human survival. Assume that there are at some
point six cultural zones in this system; call them Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta. Each of these zones
exploits various local resources, and trades them with the other habs.
Suddenly the star suffers a nova flare, causing great damage to the human civilization in that system. Alpha is caught
directly in the flare and vaporized; Beta takes lethal thermal effects, and computers are scrambled throughout the
system so that Gamma, Delta, Epsilon and Zeta all suffer losses of some of their knowledge. On Gamma and Delta the
loss of knowledge is so extreme that people no longer know how to run the hab life support systems very well, and over
the ensuing decades, most of the people in these colonies also perish. Epsilon manages to preserve life support
knowledge through embedding in cultural ritual, and on Zeta they used superior hardened computers and hence very
little knowlege is lost -- but with only limited trade from Epsilon and no trade from Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, the
Zetans are impoverished.

Now, what are the effects of what has happened?

Well, to begin with, the surviving cultures, Epsilon and Zeta, are clearly not going to be vulnerable to further nova flares
of similar magnitude. They have already survived the worst, and learned to buffer their cultures against the deletrious
consequences of such a nova.

Secondly, Zeta has both a clear motive and opportunity to attempt the recolonization of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta.
This may be slow due to limited resources, and of course in the case of Alpha there is a lack of infrastructure and Beta
perhaps a lack of optimism about operations so close to a lethally-variable star, but such recolonization is inevitable
barring an immediate recurrence of the catastrophe.

Thirdly, though the knowledge on Epsilon may be limited to bare-bones survival tech, it won't stay that way for long. The
technologies lost to the nova flare will return, in the form of copies carried by Zetan traders; this is inevitable even if the
Zetans don't want it to happen, because people will accidentally say too much, or deliberately defect: and in any case,
the Epsilonians will be shown by example what is possible.

On Gamma and Delta, small populations may survive. We may suppose for the sake of argument that the population of
Gamma completely fails (a "Greenland colony"), while on Delta ("Iceland") a small population persists using less-than-
optimum life support techniques in straitened circumstances.

Eventually, the culture of Zeta becomes decadent and inward-looking, but not before the Epsilonians have learned Zetan
technologies, perhaps from ambitious Zetan engineers who seek opportunities no longer available in their moribund
society. Their culture reborn by the influx of Zetan ideas, the Epsilonians trade with both Delta and Zeta, recolonize Beta
and Gamma, and eventually not only build new habitats in the long-lost Alpha region, but go on to found new colonies
at Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa and Lambda! And the new civilization, aware of the nova peril, hardens all its habs from the
start, so that future novae will do far less damage to their economy.

How long does this take?

Who knows? Decades, centuries, millennia. The point is that something like this is fairly inevitable. And if things went
worse in this system (call it Aleph), no doubt it would have been colonized from Systems Beth or Gimel. This or that
pocket of a self-replicator may be extirpated, but extermination is far more difficult.

Conclusion

Science marches on. Technological progress is irreversible. Catastrophes are local, and recovery inevitable. Assuming
that the human race is not annihilated, we have nowhere to go but up.
https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2014/fall/big-ratchet-human-resilience/

IN 'THE BIG RATCHET,' A LOOK AT HUMAN RESILIENCE

IMAGE CREDIT: HYE JIN CHUNG

By Michael Blanding

/ PublishedFall 2014

A few years ago in the midst of research, Ruth DeFries came across a curious hand-drawn illustration. It was in an
obscure paper called "The Human Population," written by an ecologist named E.S. Deevy for Scientific American in 1960.
It showed human population levels as a series of steep climbs, coinciding with advances in technology such as the
development of tools and the creation of agriculture. Between the surges in population were long flat periods.

IMAGE CREDIT: HYE JIN CHUNG

As DeFries looked at the population curve, one thing about it particularly caught her eye: It never went backwards. It
was almost as if the cosmos held a giant ratchet that only turned in one direction, and during brief moments of
technological innovation it gave it a big, universe-sized crank. "We tend to think of population growth as a linear
process, but this made me think that it isn't. It's related to these technological leaps," says DeFries, Engr '80 (PhD).
Deevy's paper didn't explain what it was that caused the human population to rise so rapidly at various points in history.
Nor did it explain why the global population never seemed to plummet.

Of course, there has been localized depopulation due to famine, war, or depletion of resources. Take one famous
example: the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century. For 300 years, the Irish population had been sustained by the
potato, a wonder crop imported from South America that was easy to grow and packed with nutrients. But the potato
had a fatal flaw—since all potatoes sprout from other potatoes, they are genetic clones, the ultimate monoculture. All it
took was one scourge in the form of a potato blight in 1845 to wipe out the crops of an entire nation, causing a million
deaths (more than 10 percent of the population) and a mass exodus from Ireland to America.
Stop there and the potato famine seems like an unmitigated disaster. But DeFries looks at history with a longer lens. As a
geology undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis, she became accustomed to thinking in epochal periods of time.
As a geography doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins, she zoomed out over global distances. As a specialist in remote
sensing by satellites at the University of Maryland, she zoomed out to the ultimate degree: looking down on the earth
from orbit. Seen from all of those perspectives, the Irish potato famine, tragic as it was for Ireland, was a blip on the big
stage. Within a few decades, the country's population decline began to level off, and by the mid-1900s it started to rise
again as farmers planted new crops, including blight-resistant species of potato. Never again would Ireland rely on one
crop so completely.

"When you produce more food, you ratchet up the number of people you can support, but you are also committing
civilization to feed those people," says DeFries, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental
Biology at Columbia University. The pattern has repeated itself for centuries, she says. Human beings come up with
ingenious new technology that increases the food supply and ratchets up the population. Eventually, when resources
can't keep up with the increase in people, localized areas experience starvation and collapse. DeFries calls that "the
hatchet." But human beings soon develop new ingenious technologies that allow them to avoid the full brunt of that
collapse and restore population. DeFries calls that "the pivot."

In her new book The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis (Basic Books, 2014), DeFries
investigates a series of ratchets, hatchets, and pivots throughout the centuries. Sometimes we humans pivot before the
hatchet takes a major toll, and sometimes we don't, but it always takes hard work to come up with the next big idea.
Never has that been more the case than now, argues DeFries, when technological advances in this century have
combined to create a Big Ratchet the likes of which has never been seen before. Had Deevy been alive to see it, the
leaps in his population curve before the second half of the 20th century would seem like bumps compared to the
explosion in population of the last 50 years. But along with that ratchet, says DeFries, we are facing a hatchet the likes of
which we've never seen before—for the first time, our problems may not come from scarcity, but from
overabundance—in food, in fertilizer, and in fossil fuels. The question is whether we can pivot in time to avoid them.

DeFries was a teenager in northern Virginia during the 1970s explosion of interest in environmental issues. "You could
say I was an Earth Day adolescent. I got very involved in the environment during those teenage years." She still looks the
part, sitting down in a conference room at Columbia University, dressed simply in a black scoop-neck T-shirt and casual
turquoise button-up shirt, with wire-frame glasses and curly salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a ponytail. In spite of
weighty topics like looming environmental collapse, she smiles infectiously, talking about the doom of civilization in a
disarmingly genial way.

"That doomsday message has been out there. It tends to turn people off," she says of the motivation for her new book.
"I wanted to create a different way of looking at the narrative." That point of view has its roots at Johns Hopkins, where
she studied under the tutelage of legendary professor Gordon "Reds" Wolman. Geography was then in a time of
resurgence, moving past studying the nature of landscape to take a more comprehensive look at how humans interacted
with the environment. Wolman was interdisciplinary a decade before it came into fashion, examining urbanization and
water issues through the lens of politics, science, and sociology. "Geography is a discipline that is all about the hyphen
between humans and nature," says DeFries. "It's all about that intersection between the natural world and human
society." For her doctorate, she looked at how land clearing by Europeans affected sedimentation patterns that changed
the ecology in Chesapeake Bay. She became fascinated by how, alone among the earth's species, humans have enacted
massive changes on the planet by hacking into the planet's physical and biological processes.

All the theories she'd been developing about the ways humans manipulate their environment came into new focus
when she moved to India for several years with her husband, Jit Bajpai, whom she met at Johns Hopkins (and who later
went on to become a director of the World Bank). Witness to new extremes of poverty and competition for resources on
a daily basis, she saw close-up how people and the environment were connected in everyday life. Her lofty
environmental goals faded against the reality of people scrambling for food and wood to fuel their cooking stoves.
"When I first went to India, you couldn't find trash cans because there weren't any— everything was recycled," she says.
"The relationship between the environment and people is always in your face."

Returning to the United States in 1983, she put that new awareness to use at the National Research Council. She worked
on the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an effort to confront long-term environmental issues such as species
extinction, deforestation, and the burgeoning threat of climate change. But after 12 years she wanted to get back to
original research, telling program head Hal Mooney in 1991 that she was leaving to work at the University of Maryland in
the emerging field of remote sensing with satellites. She hoped this would give her an even more global view of the
world's problems. Mooney counseled her against it. "She was doing such a brilliant job popularizing and bringing this
heavy-duty science together in an understandable way, I thought she'd get lost in such a vast, crowded field," he says.
"But she rose very quickly up to the top." At a time when other researchers were using satellites to categorize broad
land uses such as forest or agriculture, DeFries pioneered a more exact way to use smaller, discrete areas to show more
subtle gradations in the way humans interact with their environment.

"She was really interested in the deep questions, and thinking on multiple levels," says Chris Field, a professor of
environmental studies at Stanford University, who worked with her in a NASA-funded program. "And she was technically
amazing, able to use the remote sensing data for things I didn't think possible." Others similarly took notice. In 2006, she
was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2007, she received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship for her study
of deforestation. "It was 30 seconds of elation followed by five years of terror," DeFries recalls. "I kept thinking, 'I don't
deserve this.'" With the MacArthur money, she set up a private foundation in India whose mission was to fund scientists
working on sustainability issues. Her heightened profile caught the attention of Columbia, which was looking for a
professor of sustainability studies. DeFries came instantly to mind, says Shahid Naeem, director of science for Columbia's
Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability, who was impressed with DeFries' ability to simultaneously see
the world at village and satellite levels. "She is always scaling it way back up," says Naeem. "While others would be
staying at the village, she is trying to connect the conversation she just had with the farmer with what she would see
from space."

The Big Ratchet begins with a similarly cosmic view of the planet, starting with a discussion of factors, such as an
elliptical orbit and plate tectonics, that allow the planet to support life. The book briskly moves on to examine how
humans have evolved to manipulate the planet through an accumulation of social learning that allows ingenuity to be
passed down to new generations. Then it settles into its real agenda: food.

At its heart, The Big Ratchet is a food book, deserving a place on the shelf alongside work by the likes of Michael Pollan,
Mark Bittman, and Marion Nestle that criticize our modern system of industrial agriculture. Where DeFries' book differs
is in taking a broader view of the trade-offs that occur in any system of food production. In her view, human beings'
inexorable cycle of ratchet-hatchet-pivot always makes us the victims of our own successes. "This is our most recent
experiment," says DeFries, "but we'll always be experimenting. There is no silver bullet. We are always manipulating
nature to feed ourselves, and our solutions will always create more problems."

We rarely think about how complex—or fragile—the global system of food production is that provides our daily
breakfast. Even if we consider the network of farms and transportation that contribute to, say, producing the eggs and
raising the wheat for our toast, we may not think about the scientists who created the pesticides and fertilizer, the dams
that diverted the water, or the fossil fuels that powered the farm equipment. Yet each is an essential strand in the web
that supports our system of food production. And each has been refined over centuries of ingenuity to support ever-
vaster populations of people.

Take fertilizer, one of the little-considered technological innovations whose evolution DeFries traces. With the ratchet
that came with domestication of agriculture 12,000 years ago, mankind quickly created a problem. Growing crops rob
the soil of nutrients such as nitrogen that are necessary for later crops to thrive. "There had to be a way to get nutrients
back, or the soil would be depleted and that's the end of civilization for a long time," says DeFries.
The earliest solutions to that potential hatchet came from returning the byproduct of human consumption to the fields.
In China, for example, citizens perfected the art of carrying euphemistically termed "night soil"—human waste—back
from the city to the fields at night. The slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by indigenous societies was a similarly low-
tech way to return nutrients to the soil. Clearing forests for nutrients worked for a time in Europe as well, but by the
14th century, deforestation combined with a drop in temperatures that decreased crop yields contributed to agricultural
shortfalls that led to famine, war, and disease.

In response, farmers pivoted with the new art of crop rotation, growing different crops in succession and sometimes
letting the ground lie fallow to replenish essential nutrients. That worked to stave off famine for about 300 years, until
another looming collapse in the 17th century due to drought and depleted fields threatened the ability to feed a
growing urban population. This is when Thomas Robert Malthus famously articulated the doomsday point of view still
cited by environmentalists today: Since the earth's resources grow linearly while the earth's population grows
exponentially, human beings are doomed to outstrip the capability of the planet to support them.

Despite that dire warning, the hatchet in Malthus' own time never fell. Rescue came from the unlikeliest of places:
islands in the Pacific Ocean covered in hundreds of feet of nitrogen-rich guano deposited by generations of seagulls.
Europeans "discovered what the Incans had already known for a long time: bird poop is really good fertilizer," says
DeFries. "And so there was a booming trade in bird poop. Here we go from human and animal waste cycling back to the
countryside to this continental trade in excrement." For the following half-century, European countries competed to
bring valuable guano halfway across the world, even starting wars over possession of contested rocks off the coast of
Peru and Chile. After depletion of the guano supply, they turned to mining another South American commodity,
saltpeter, which was also rich in nitrogen.

By the early 20th century, a fertilizer shortage was again looming on the horizon. That's when a German scientist named
Fritz Haber perfected a new process to convert nitrogen to ammonia, making it nutritionally available to plants and
ushering in the modern age of chemical fertilizer. "That was a really huge pivot," says DeFries. "Environmentalists like to
think about carrying capacity as finite, and when we run out of resources, we drop off a cliff. But human beings are not
like other animals—we are so adaptable—so you've got to take into account our ingenious ways of manipulating the
planet."

As DeFries describes in the book, humans went through a series of similar ratchet-hatchet-pivot processes with other
resources— developing irrigation and dams to channel water; breeding special hybrid seeds through natural selection to
increase yields; and perfecting pesticides to keep pests from destroying harvests. While each of these advances in
technology could be considered amazing, together they have changed the face of the planet as never before. Sometime
in the middle of the 20th century, says DeFries, they combined to create the Big Ratchet, a convergence of chemical
fertilizer and pesticides, new hybrid seeds, modern dams, and oil-driven machinery. "It's a culmination of all of these
different ratchets, and all of these constraints being lifted at the same time, which made it possible to have such
abundance," says DeFries.

During this period, the amount of corn and rice produced worldwide each year tripled, and production of wheat more
than doubled. Average lifespan rose, and with it the world's population—from 1.5 billion people in 1900 to 2.5 billion in
1950, and up to 7 billion today. (It's expected to level off at around 9 billion by 2050.) Despite more predictions of food
shortages, the amount of food more than kept up with the number of mouths throughout the 20th century— from an
average of 2,200 calories per person per day in 1960 to 2,700 calories today. Of course, that implies that food is evenly
distributed around the world, which is not the case. Says DeFries, "We have more than enough food to feed everyone,
but still we have people without enough food. That's a symptom we haven't figured out how to deal with."

That food inequality has led other environmentalists, including DeFries' colleague Shahid Naeem to see the history of
the human race in bleaker terms than those espoused by DeFries. "The evidence of our success is the large number of
individuals we have and the fact that we are spread all over the planet," says Naeem. "But if an alien entity came and
gave us a report card, they'd see a billion hungry people, 2 billion people in poverty, and 3 billion people without
sufficient water. I don't think they'd give us an A, I think they'd give us an F."
DeFries acknowledges food inequality as a sad consequence of our current system of production. She notes not just
scarcity but overconsumption, which affects not just the developed world but is more and more common in developing
countries. Obesity rates in Mexico are on par with the United States at around 35 percent, and the rest of Latin America
is not far behind. Even in China, where overall obesity rates are 5 percent, they are as high as 20 percent in some cities.
"Spreading obesity and unhealthy diets seem to be a big hatchet on the horizon—for individuals as well as society as a
whole considering the spiraling health care costs," says DeFries. "What's different about this Big Ratchet is that the
problems coming from it are much more about abundance than shortage. Previously the problems were how to
overcome shortages. Now we have to overcome the problems that abundance creates." Run-off from fertilizer clogs
streams and lakes with weeds, choking off water supply and hurting biodiversity. And there is the pollution from fossil
fuels accelerating climate change—perhaps the biggest looming hatchet on our horizon.

Despite the obvious dangers of climate change, DeFries treats it only glancingly in her book as one of a list of looming
environmental dangers that includes species extinction and a world shortage of phosphorus, a component as crucial in
chemical fertilizers as nitrogen. While that might raise eyebrows with some readers, it's symptomatic of DeFries'
seeming delight, at times, in upending conventional environmental priorities. She takes issue, for example, with some
environmental evangelists who see the future in the locavore movement: eating only food produced within a short
number of miles from home. While there might be good reasons to eat local food because it's healthier and supports
local economies, says DeFries, that doesn't make it more sustainable. "It's not necessarily the way of producing food
that leads to the lowest greenhouse gas emissions," says DeFries. "People focus on the transportation issues, but
transportation is not always the greatest contributor to emissions." She adds that locavorism could contribute to
worldwide inequality by depriving farmers in poor countries of export markets.

DeFries also parts ways with some environmentalists who have attacked genetically modified foods as anathema. "We
have manipulated genetics for 12,000 years. This is really [just] a different way of manipulating genetics," she says. She
sees GMO crops as part of a continuum by which humans have always selected for favorable characteristics in plants,
and notes that early experiments with GMOs have reduced famine in developing countries. "The biggest problem right
now is that they are in the hands of private corporations whose interest is not in feeding the poor but in making a profit.
But I am not against them on principle."

In part, DeFries' take on controversial issues such as GMO foods stems from her long-lens view of the world. But she also
sees it as an attempt to move beyond polarizing ideological debates to focus on practical solutions. "I wanted to present
both sides, or rather multiple sides," says DeFries. "These issues are not black and white, and looking at them that way is
what gets us into ideological stalemates between the doomsday people and the technological optimists, which isn't a
productive way to move forward."

The one thing that today's problems share with past problems, says DeFries, is that they deny easy solutions. While the
book stops short of being prescriptive, she praises recent initiatives to create more efficiency in the food system,
including using less fuel, water, and fertilizers, noting that one promising trend in reducing use of fertilizer is in
recovering sewage from cities and distributing it back to fields—a variation on the night soil concept developed by the
ancient Chinese.

No solution is ever perfect. But by presenting the various trade-offs and consequences created by past solutions, DeFries
hopes that she can challenge human ingenuity to pivot away from new hatchets before they fall. In some recent cases,
she notes, we have done just that— for example, rapidly addressing the depletion of the ozone layer by restricting
chlorofluorocarbons before that became a catastrophe. In other cases, such as climate change, the jury is still out on
whether we will move quickly enough in the future. Modern humans, at least, have a huge advantage over our ancient
forbearers, she says: modern science, which can help us identify and deal with problems before they become crises.
That is, if we heed its warnings. "It's human nature to respond to what's immediately in front of us," says DeFries.
"Science can identify the upcoming hatchet—and then it's up to society to determine how to respond."
Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization

By Razib Khan | November 5, 2010 3:03 am

32

The cockroach as we know it has been around for ~140 million years. That’s a rather long run. The evolutionary design of
the cockroach seems to be well suited to avoiding obsolescence; it’s withstood the test of time. I suspect that the
particular example of the roach is often used to illustrate the blindness of evolution because of its lack of aesthetic
alignment with the the values of modern humanity. Unlike the elegant wasp or the industrious bee the cockroach seems
to have few redeeming characteristics on first blush. The Hutus referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches before and during
the Rwanda genocide of 1994. And yet the roach succeeds, it breeds, and it flourishes.

Some of the same class of issues pertain to our own species. What we feel to be edifying, to be aesthetically pleasing,
may not comport with the final judgement of history, of evolution. The narrative of man ascending which has become so
popular since the Enlightenment turns out to present us with some problems when one realizes that our species seems
to have regressed on particularly transparent metrics such as height and cranial capacity since the last Ice Age. But the
prevailing wisdom of the ancients that we descend from an Edenic Golden Age also does not seem to necessarily
comport with the record at hand either. Just as the past is cloudier than we once perceived it to be, so the future often
looks muddled from the perspective of the present. How did man come to be? What should we be? And why should we
be? These are a combination of positiveand normative questions, and Spencer Wells tackles them in his newest
book, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.

Wells is a relatively prominent public intellectual. He came to the fore in the early aughts with his book The Journey of
Man: A Genetic Odyssey, which was made into a documentary of the same name, and led to Wells heading National
Geographic‘s Genographic Project. A geneticist by training the history of the human species has always been one of his
passions, and that topic has become the current focus of his career. But while The Journey of Man was a historically
inflected work of genetics, Pandora’s Seed is a scientifically inflected work of history; political, social, and economic.
There are broad family similarities to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, but Pandora’s Seed is both more tightly
written and broader in scope. Wells describes the past, posits some tentative predictions about the future, assesses the
present, and questions whether we need to reclaim a firmer and clearer grasp of the aims of the well lived life.
 The first third of the book is focused on the Neolithic
Revolution. Or perhaps more accurately the agricultural innovation. In its broad outlines I agree with Wells’ thesis that
the transition to an agricultural lifestyle resulted in greater morbidity because of the shift away from a diversified diet to
one based on grains. With the judicious use of charts and illustrations Pandora’s Seedoutlines how pre-agricultural
sedentarists of the post-Ice Age Natufianculture had to adopt the conscious planting and harvesting of grain due to a
change in their environment. That change was the exogenous shock of the Younger Dryas, which saw a reversion back to
dryer and colder conditions. The model of adaptation in the face of inclement conditions is persuasive precisely because
it so human. In extreme circumstances human populations set in their ways must abandon tried & true traditions which
are found wanting and explore the space of possibilities so as to maintain their viability. This ingenuity in the face of
resource exhaustion or scarcity has occurred many times in human history. The critical factor distinguishing the present
from the past is not the reality of innovation itself, but the rate of innovation.

But at this point I must enter into the record a major caveat, and even object to the veracity, of the story which unfolds
in Pandora’s Seed. I will quote the section which raised my eyebrows in full:

…As the land dried out, the wild grain retreated from the lowlands, remaining only in the higher mountain valleys, where
it could get enough water. The Natufians had to travel farther and farther from their lowland settlements to gather
enough to survive. This would have put tremendous pressure on food supply, and probably esulted in an increased
mortality rate in these people accustomed to a land of plenty. It was humanity’s first real encounter with Thomas
Malthus’s conjecture that popualtion growth will eventually produce more people than can be supproted by the
availalble food supply.

Spencer Wells has a doctorate in biology, and great breadth of knowledge. So

perhaps there is some detail or nuance I’m missing here, but the fact is that all organisms are subject to Malthusian
laws except in the transient state of resource surplus. The term “carrying capacity” is one which one learns in
introductory biology courses for a reason. The hunter-gatherers no doubt pushed up against their carrying capacity. I am
aware of arguments that weaning and infanticide constrained hunter-gatherer populations, but even granting such
forethought would not abolish the vicissitudes of exogenous disruptions in climate and ecosystem. Even the most
culturally anti-natalist tribe would at some point be faced with a situation where circumstances outside of their control
would leave the adults above the Malthusian limit of their local territory. Wells argues that for much of human history
we were expanding in a transient. But this does not negate the broader point that animals generally move up to the
carrying capacity of the local ecosystem rather quickly because of the nature of natural increase. In the course of history
exogenous shocks generally produce periodic culls of the herd. Spencer Wells implicitly endorses this reality by his tacit
support for the Toba catastrophe theory.

Many of the other arguments which implicitly argue for the superiority of the hunter-gatherer mode of production over
the agricultural one are somewhat tendentious, but in those cases Wells usually presents the “other side.” For example
he is skeptical from what I can tell of the idea of widespread organized war among hunter-gatherers, but he grants
evidence of relatively high mortality rates due to conflicts of a more limited scale, but still significant when judged
against the small sizes of the ancient bands. The main big picture reality seems to be that hunter-gatherers were
generalists with few material goods. The world of The Gods Must Be Crazy was no utopia, but it illustrated how physical
objects of value and scarcity could introduce conflict and tension, above and beyond the mundane realities of human
existence (also see The Pearl).

Much of the second half of Pandora’s Seedleaps forward from

the Stone Age to the present, and attempts to grapple with the reality that many of our competencies are not much
advanced over that of the hunter-gatherer despite the fact that we are embedded in a world of extreme sophistication
and specialization. I’m reminded of the old 1990s hit Mo Money, Mo Problems. Over the past 10,000 years our species
has ascended up an irreversible ratchet of population density, complexification of society, and specialization of labor.
And for what? In some ways Pandora’s Seed presents a profoundly pessimistic case, and verges on being a 21st century
update of the idealizations of the Romantics of savage peoples who lived in enchanted worlds without worry. The title of
the book seems justified.

But then he asks a real question: why? Why to be, as opposed to not to be? With the rise of mass agricultural society
such questions were answered definitively by philosopher shamans. At least in their own minds. In China they were
called Sages, in India Rishis, and in the West the philosophers, prophets, and Church Fathers. The names may have
differed, but this specialized caste spoke and wrote, and the other rentiercastes listened and gave nominal fealty to the
theories propounded. Over the last few centuries this old world of certainty has collapsed, and a cacophony of voices
have arisen, over which looms an operational nihilism. The consumer society which is the apotheosis of “development”
is characterized by an all-you-can-eat buffet of gadgets, sensations, and social signalers. Even the religious philosophies
which theoretically stood opposed to this sort of gluttony have in part been absorbed or co-opted. Spencer Wells does
not come to any conclusion that I can see to resolve this existential Gordian Knot. But a serious conversation needs to be
started amongst those of us who no longer bow to the gods, the cosmos, or the ancients. It must be remembered that
in some versions of the myth of Pandora hope remains within the jar which she opened.