A favorite description of mankind is that we are dumb for letting the planet get into the condition it is in. I've been thinking about that and I'm not sure that dumb is a good description. The thing is that we are pretty smart to have been able to get the planet into this condition. And the reason we have gotten it into kind of a mess is that we just weren't evolved to live in large masses.
The huge number of people we have on the planet is the main reason that it has gotten a bit messed up. But the only reason that there are so many people is that we are so adaptable. Most life forms on Earth are adapted to a fairly specific environment. Most life forms have to rely on evolution to provide adaptations to meet changed conditions. We humans however can generally look at a different environment and almost on the spur of the moment produce cultural changes that allow us to live in those conditions. So we have been extremely successful at moving into all the habitats that used to be filled by other animals (or plants for that matter).
But at the same time we were adapted by evolution to live as hunter gatherers. Life was generally a feast or famine situation. Some years we would have good hunting/gathering, but some years we wouldn't. And there was no way to predict what would happen this year, as compared to last year. So we didn't really learn to think on a long term basis. We basically lived from year to year and didn't really have any thing to push us to think about the far future (like 2 or 3 years ahead).
Then came the growth of technology, particularly the industrial revolution. Since we hadn't been evolved to think about the far future, we just basically kept on the same way we started out. Work for something to keep us going through this year. We did start thinking farther ahead, maybe 5 or 10 years, or even to the time when we would be too old to work. But it was still a pretty short term thing. When we evolved what we did had a fairly small effect on the environment around us so we didn't realize that with the increased population we would start having a large effect on the environment.
Also it is hard to get people to see the long term effects of their actions, because in a hunter gatherer society I suspect that conservatism is a valuable thing. Fixing something when it ain't broke can lead to all kinds of troubles, so it works best if we keep on doing things the way we always did. There has always been a place for innovation, but it always had to battle against the ingrained conservatism. So evolution really hasn't adapted us to quick responses to things that don't have an immediately obvious result.
So the fact that we have lasted this long seems to say we are pretty smart, it's just that we have new challenges, and our innate conservatism is fighting to keep things the way they are. We can work things out and technology is what will get us through it.
Bill Gill
