CULTURAL EVOLUTION MAY BE BLOCKING ECOLOGICAL SOLUTIONS

Cultural evolution refers to the way humans create tools and social systems to adapt to and shape their environments. Find out how the tension between our cooperative and competitive natures may be preventing us from solving the ecological crisis humanity faces.

Like most boys, I played a lot of team sports growing up. It was mostly pickup games in the schoolyard or in the huge backyard our neighbours, the Findlays, had.

I also played organized softball in the summer. It always seemed to me that team sports involved a contradiction between coaching unity within our own group and encouraging rivalry with our opponents.

Now that I’m ostensibly an adult, I belong to a credit union, which is a cooperative financial institution that belongs to its depositors, or members. Even so, my credit union has to compete with privately-held commercial banks.

TENSION BETWEEN HUMAN COOPERATION AND COMPETITION

Scholars from a range of disciplines have thought about this tension between cooperation and competition among humans. In his groundbreaking work The Evolution of Cooperation, Dr. Robert Axelrod outlines how natural selection leads to cooperative behaviour, as does Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.

In his classic essay The Tragedy of the Commons, Dr. Garrett Hardin showed how groups sharing unowned resources tend to overuse and deplete them. Nobel Laureate, Dr. Elinor Ostrom challenged that assumption by outlining the design principles by which local communities can pool their resources.

Dr. Tim Waring is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Maine. He’s been studying the dynamics of social cooperation and cultural evolution for the past two decades.

HUMANITY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH NATURE AND ECOLOGICAL ISSUES

Professor Waring led a study that the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B published last week. The scientists wanted to find out how humanity’s relationship with nature affects our approach to addressing ecological issues.

The researchers began by examining changes in the way human societies use natural resources. They delved into how humanity’s ecological niche has changed based on our resource use and how those changes affect the natural world.

The team’s findings show that over the last 100,000 years, the kinds of resources we use, the intensity with which we use them, and the impact we have on the environment have all increased. This is due to a process that scientists call cultural adaptation to the environment.

‘HUMAN EVOLUTION IS MOSTLY DRIVEN BY CULTURAL CHANGE’

As Professor Waring explains, “Human evolution is mostly driven by cultural change, which is faster than genetic evolution. That greater speed of adaptation has made it possible for humans to colonize all habitable land worldwide.”

This process is self-sustaining. As our groups get larger, our cultural evolution goes faster, consuming even more resources and driving still further growth.

“For the last 100,000 years, this has been good news for our species as a whole, but this expansion has depended on large amounts of available resources and space,” Professor Waring said. Ecologists have started calling this period of human dominance the Anthropocene epoch.

ECOSPHERE REACHING ITS PHYSICAL LIMITS

The resource and space requirements are the bad news on the horizon. We’re running out of room now, the ecosphere is reaching its physical limits, and climate change and mass extinction threaten our resource access and even our survival.

In the next phase of the study, the team studied historical cases of cultural evolution toward more sustainable human systems. They noticed two patterns.

First, these sustainable systems were usually reactive, only springing up after a major failure to manage resources. Secondly, most of the sustainable changes only called for cultural evolution inside a community, not between groups.

‘WE DON’T HAVE A COORDINATED GLOBAL SOCIETY’

“One problem is that we don’t have a coordinated global society which could implement these systems,” Professor Waring said, “We only have sub-global groups, which probably won’t suffice. But you can imagine cooperative treaties to address these shared challenges. So, that’s the easy problem.”

So, what’s the hard problem, according to Professor Waring? It’s that cultural evolutionary tension between cooperation and competition we’ve been discussing.

“This means global challenges like climate change are much harder to solve than previously considered. It’s not just that they are the hardest thing our species has ever done. They absolutely are,” according to Professor Waring.

‘WE HAVE TO SWIM UPSTREAM’

“The bigger problem is that central features in human evolution are likely working against our ability to solve them,” he continued. “To solve global collective challenges we have to swim upstream.”

The study isn’t all bad news. As Professor Waring put it, “There is hope, of course, that humans may solve climate change. We have built cooperative governance before, although never like this: in a rush at a global scale.”

So, we seem to need a blend of optimism and realism to solve these issues. We definitely need to view cultural evolution’s obstacles much more seriously.

AND ANOTHER THING…

The researchers’ findings tap into a growing realization that humanity’s survival calls for a new kind of cultural evolution. We need to work toward a future age that some are calling the “Ecozoic era.” It’s a vision of a radically changed humanity believing in a new story explaining the global interdependence of all living beings, to replace the Anthropocene view of our planet as a chunk of resources we exploit.

For at least fifty years, the environmental movement has recognized humanity’s need to, in Professor Waring’s phrase, “swim upstream” against cultural evolution’s exploitation. As Audrey Hepburn explains to Humphrey Bogart’s character in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put in this world to rise above.”

Professor Waring wrapped up the discussions by saying, “If our conclusions are even close to being correct, we need to study this much more carefully.”

We always have more to learn if we dare to know.

LEARN MORE:

Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, says new study

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions

Human Tolerance Evolved From Living in Harsh Conditions

Friendly Faces Drove Human Evolution

Belief in Evolution Promotes Tolerance