Man Lived in Harmony With Nature for Three Million Years

To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that.

Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are:

• Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter' he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food, and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a regional or global level. So natural selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction.
  
• In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about the next Extinction Event prematurely.
  
• After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species), if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one.

Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single, self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis, so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant, violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space.

In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity.

So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system.