SIO417: Does Our Evolutionary History Doom Us To Failure?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 417. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and I've got a fascinating one today. Gonna be joined by Dr. Timothy Waring from the University of Maine, talking about a paper that Lydia and I saw covered in some popular press, and it seemed to suggest that maybe humans, of evolutionarily, may not be equipped to handle things like climate change or other global kind of catastrophes.

I don't know if there's a comparable one to think of, but things like climate change that may happen in our future, I suppose. Wanted to have Dr. Waring on to talk about it. It's always fun, as my favorite part of doing this podcast is seeing an interesting study and contacting the people who actually did it and being like, "Hey, come talk about this." It's the best. This one's really fascinating. And it turns out it's maybe a big deal. To me at first because I'm not an expert. Yeah, cultural evolution. I mean, I love talking evolution in any sense. I means, it's just the most fascinating thing to me.

It's one of the reasons I was really hooked into atheism and skepticism and all that. I just love evolutionary biology. I love learning about that. It's such a fascinating concept. And so seeing this being put through the lens of cultural evolution definitely piqued my interest. And so let's talk to Dr. Timothy Waring about the recent paper called "Characteristic Processes of Human Evolution Cause the Anthropocene and May Obstruct Its Global Solutions." And also about this kind of new field and what it's about and how he looks at the world and looks at our evolutionary history and indeed our potential futures. Very excited to get on over to that.

As usual, before then, I want to pitch that if you go to patreon.com/seriouspod and support the show for as little as a dollar, you can get rid of the auto ads you're about to hear after I stop talking. Not only that, you get all kinds of goodies. We Awful Movies and other bonuses, by the way. We might do something a little different this month. We've actually got a lot of candidates, much good stuff.

So either a Seriously Awful Movies, which are always fun, or something else, which will be equally fun. The Hangout, the monthly Hangout, has been amazing. If you're a fan of Codenames, we may branch out eventually to other games, but I think right now Lydia and I have a great rivalry going in Codename. So, you for the near term, but we'll branch out.

Had a lot of people attend last time because Lydia did the very smart thing of of doing a poll, and seeing when most people could make it. So we're doing that again this month. That's for top two level of support of both shows, Show and Where There's Woke. And it's super fun. It's a nice little group we have going. And I'm looking forward to continuing and growing it. So anyway, many good reasons to join at patreon.com/ seriespod. Including skipping this terrible auto ad. Dr. Tim Waring, how are you doing today?

0:03:05 Tim: Well, thank you. For having me on the show.

0:03:08 Thomas: What happened was I woke up this morning. I was like, you know, what I need is more pessimism about our inability to battle climate change. And you know glad that you were available to provide that. I've already as pessimistic as I felt like I could get, but then, you Know, we'll see. We'll challenge that, challenge

0:03:23 Tim: So was I, and then I did this work.

0:03:24 Thomas: Oh boy. But it's so fascinating. I can't wait to talk about this study. You If wouldn't mind though, could you give listeners a bit of kind of basic biography stuff so they know who they're listening to?

0:03:35 Tim: Sure. My name is Tim Waring. I am a professor at the University of Maine. I study human cultural evolution generally, and I'm happy to explain what that means. But I also try to apply it to understanding how humans manage the environment and try to use it to improve the ways that we do manage the environment and make that more successful in shorter amounts of time. So, yeah, that's my background.

0:04:04 Thomas: Yeah. Well, actually I'm curious, does that come from more of a, like a evolutionary biology angle or like a revolutionary psychology angle that that you're, that you got there kind of.

0:04:14 Tim: Yeah, excellent question. Study, as I mentioned, human cultural evolution, which is definitely a biological sort of a process, right? So both of those fields can generally be sort of, you as evolutionary fields, but there's a lot of a lot lot of difference. So I would say that I'm an evolutionary biologist who studies human cultural change. I'm not a psychologist, certainly. I am a social scientist, but I'm more of a biologist that studies humans the way that an evolutionary биologist would study other species, except that humans are particularly weird.

0:04:24 Thomas: Hmm. Gotcha.

0:04:52 Thomas: Well, that's, it's interesting that you said cultural evolution is definitely a biological thing. Cause I wouldn't have known that or thought that necessarily. Do you mind, you don't have to do a whole lecture or anything, but how, how do you get there or how, how, how was that certainty kind know how are you so certain about that I guess mm

0:05:08 Tim: I'm glad I you zoomed in on that. That's a key point. And just simply, culture really is a biological thing because it is so clearly an evolutionary process. So been successful and across the world in large part because of our cultural inheritance. So the skills you have, the technology you use, the language you use. You know, your social systems that you're plugged into. Those are things that you inherited. You created actually a very small amount of them, right? And So you have this huge adaptive inheritance. So because of culture is so useful and adaptive and because it changes and because it varies and is transmitted really in parallel to genes, the appropriate way to think about what culture is is as a second uh stream of inherited adaptive information and so to understand humans you need to understand that we're not just genetically evolving organisms, we also evolve at this other level at the same time.

So I say it's biological in the sense that to really understand the way culture changes, you really need to understanding the way genes change because that's the basis and then we need to add a whole other layer on top of that in order to fully fully understand how evolution happens in a species with two streams of

0:05:30 Thomas: -hmm sure hmm Well, not only that, you got to add in memes, you know, you got to track that down too, or is that part of culture? I don't know.

0:06:34 Tim: Well, when Dawkins first mentioned, of course, memes mean cat pictures now on the internet. But yeah, but when Dawkin's first came up with the idea of memes, he was talking about culture. And Literally, as we talk about them today in terms of a gif or a joke Online. Uh, know, you that's a part of culture, but so is language and institutions and technology and, you know, clothing habits.

0:06:39 Thomas: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Mm. -hm yeah Yeah. Yeah.

0:06:58 Thomas: I mean, I, I think so much of my communication, uh, for better or worse, can be through like memes, like it's, if it's taken up my, like, almost taken up my way of like making sense of the world in a way, like internal, will sometimes incorporate like, oh yeah, it's that meme. And I suppose we've always had that with like, you know, the Simpsons or something, other cultural references, but it does feel like a pretty powerful thing. So all of that, I guess, is you're saying that's all kind of subsumed in the cultural label there.

0:07:06 Tim: Right. Yes. Right. Yeah. I, yeah, I'd put it as a part of culture, for sure. Well.

0:07:30 Thomas: Yeah. Well, how did you get interested in this specific area? You.

0:07:34 Tim: Cultural evolution is really interesting for me, uh, started getting interested in it when scientist working in the Everglades and I was trying to see how is it that we could preserve this interesting ecosystem in South Florida. And it was clear to me that we actually had a lot of the ecological knowledge to do it, but we didn't have control of what was going on on the human side. It was also clear we weren't going to really do what needed to be done. And it's still the case. So, you, it really sort of felt like the human system is kind of out of control. And, you taken some economics, and I'd take in some anthropology. And I really got around to taking psychology, but I was never really impressed with social sciences in college.

0:08:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:08:22 Tim: And, and that's really what led me to understand. Well, you know, memes was a thing back, the back in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000. In, it was sort of considered maybe a way to understand what culture is. That led me into the study of cultural evolution, as a parallel to what happens with our genes, but with a number of really important differences. And of those differences are culture seems to evolve faster and perhaps more adaptively, for example. It also really has a lot of group level characteristics and structure, which are important. So that's how I got interested in cultural evolution. And once you start to understand the way heavily influenced by these streams of information that we inherit from our peers and our parents and our community, the more you see it all around you. And so it's a fascinating field of study that's growing a lot right now.

0:09:21 Thomas: Yeah, for sure. Um, that is That is absolutely super fascinating. And I want to know then then finally, how did you get to, and finally, as in we're starting the conversation, how do you get to the study that recently, I at least saw recent publicity on it. Was it just published recently?

0:09:37 Tim: It was technically published last year, but this is the new year. And so, yeah, just recently published and The is sort of hitting it now. Um, know, this, study this is interesting because I, I try to, my general work is to try to understand when humans come together to cooperate and, and share environmental resources or, preserve, or uh, the environment, um, groups and when they fail and succeed in doing that. I've always done that, you in sort of more focused areas, smaller scale. And, encouraged by my colleague, Peter Sorgard-Jorgensen at the Stockholm Resilience Center, to think about the global scale for this.

And he's good because he focuses on that a lot, as well as a lot of research out of that center. And I did. And it occurred to me that, you know, the Anthropocene, which is the period in which humans have a impact on the functioning of the world's ecosystems and just earth systems like circulation of air and water and nutrients. And that period is usually defined in terms of sort of geological processes.

And it occurred to me that really the way we should be thinking about it, or at least an additional way, is this is a major evolutionary event. And I hadn't ever seen that well explained or analyzed. And so I just sort of wanted to ask the question, what is the Anthropocene from an evolutionary perspective? And how did we get here? How did human evolution lead us to this unique place for the planet as well as for our species? And then what does that mean going forward? Yeah.

0:09:43 Thomas: Yeah.

0:11:17 Thomas: Yeah. Could you define a little bit more for for the layperson? And what do you mean by Anthropocene, I guess, in the sense before you've kind of tried to put a different lens on it? Is it a time period? What exactly is that?

0:11:28 Tim: Yeah, okay, sorry. The Anthropocene is a, proposed as a geological period, sort of like all of the geological periods in the past, you know, the Jurassic, the, you You know, the Cretaceous, for example, there are a number of different periods and epochs. And so this is a, let's see, Are a number of hierarchical stages of geological time demarcation. And this is the smallest one. So I forget if it's an era or an epoch. It doesn't really matter so much To me. What

0:11:58 Thomas: That's okay. I won't hold you to that part of it. It's fine. Yeah.

0:12:03 Tim: The definition is the idea is that even geologists who study rocks have realized that humans are changing the sedimentation processes and the weathering processes and the distribution of chemicals and nutrients on planet so much in our atmosphere and our water systems so much that it actually is changing geological processes. It's changing everything the planet. It has been impacted by human activity in some way. And so the proposal is that we need a new definition for this new era with this new level of geological activity. Now, some people I want to point out will say the Anthropocene isn't going to be an it's going to be an event, and it might come to an end soon.

0:12:49 Tim: That's a pessimistic way to look at it.

0:12:24 Thomas: Wow. Oh, if go, we then no more Anthroposcene. We'd move on. Whoever comes after us would name it a different thing, I think. Is that?

0:13:00 Tim: Or we go and yeah, things stabilize and go back to of a normal biosphere for a while. Yeah.

0:13:06 Thomas: So, the pitch the of study seems to be, or at least the way it's reported, is that, you might be evolutionarily hardwired to not be able to deal with something like climate change. Is that a fair representation? And if so, then, you Know, let's get into some detail here.

0:13:24 Tim: Right. So, I don't want to use the term hardwired here. Is a little bit of how it's being reported. But, but, know, the study really is focusing on the cultural evolutionary aspects of people. So now, our ability to learn from each other and our language ability and all of this is is encoded genetically. So yeah, to the extent that, that those things are hardwired. Sure. But, um, you I'm trying to study is, so, so I don't want to say it's a hardwire, but question is, was really how has our species evolved to get us to this point in the first place?

0:13:26 Thomas: Okay. -hmm. Sure. Mm

0:14:01 Tim: And What, what was that process? And then how can we, we use that going forward. And so when we look at the -term evolution of humans, and this happens both in recorded history and in what we know of our evolutionary past, are lots of different features. But some of the key features that really make humans special and unique are our ability to communicate with each other, to plans, to coordinate and cooperate and achieve shared goals and objectives, like, for example, hunting large animals or collectively harvesting a lot of fish. For we look at what humans have done, is we see that that we have gotten better and better at coming together in groups and controlling and using larger and larger sort and diversity of environmental resources. So that's this sort of process that has taken us to this really novel time where now we are influencing the way the planet works as a whole, right? Right.

0:14:01 Thomas: -mm. Yeah.

0:15:10 Tim: And it's important to understand that that that happened through an process of cultural change where we're getting better and we have, you technology and better tools and better extraction and faster communication and all of these things. So,

0:15:11 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:28 Thomas: We've invented something like the Senate to stop us from ever fixing it. It's cool. It's a good, huge innovation, key innovation there.

0:15:35 Tim: Right, exactly. Right, exactly, yeah. These things are messy, right? And so that's one of the reasons I mentioned that culture is a biological phenomenon is because when you look at humans and you understand, you know, the messiness of biology, right. Right. And the crazy, wonderful diversity that biological systems give you, it's also really messy. Right. Not like a physical system or clean mathematical system. And then you look at human society. It really looks a lot like sort of crazy, messy biological phenomenon. Not like some rational bunch of rational actors. Right? Robots. Thoughts.

0:15:58 Thomas: Yeah.

0:16:13 Thomas: Do you mean like an emergent sense, like almost, you know, there's an emergent kind of property of it, of us as a whole that turns into that? Or do you mean like literally at the ground level, I guess we're in what sense do you mean that? I guess.

0:16:13 Tim: Yeah.

0:16:27 Tim: Just mean, you know, that's always been one of the things that struck me about, about the social sciences, are often unsatisfying is because their theories are, are often unsettling. You can, know, look at the natural world as this really complex and diverse and beautiful, you, flourishing, know, of life, uh, that, that can be largely explained through understanding how evolution unfolds and, you know, adapt species to different conditions and environments, right? And so the same thing is happening before our eyes with, with, know, human society and culture and behavior, um, it's really hard to sort of say that, well, humans are just, um, you, we're just intelligent and so therefore we're doing everything the same, but but it's smarter. No, a lot of it is driven by chance. We are making, you, progress in different domains. And a lot of diversity, and the diversity matters. So that's just the sort of general sort there about why, you, really understanding humans is really a lot like understanding the natural world in terms of evolution and ecology and complexity.

0:17:32 Thomas: Well, okay. So given, given that, Matt, how what question were you trying to answer? I think you've kind of talked about it a little bit, but specifically with this study and how do you go about researching that? How do you go about actually, actually, you know, the buzzword of operationalizing it or something, you know that theory you just gave us.

0:17:49 Tim: So first I want to say this is This is really just the first chip on a whole field that basically doesn't exist. One has sort of really taken the Anthropocene or even global human, human environmental modification and use an evolutionary lens on it sort of very successfully. And so we wanted to do that, and we wanted to try to be careful about it. And so a lot of what we've done is just sort of take that question seriously. So we did not collect, for example, new data on this, right? We just assembled what is already known about, so for example the changes in the human ecological niche over our evolutionary history, try to understand how it is that our cultural systems have changed. They've changed in the fact that our populations are getting bigger, our human groups, our societies are getting larger. We have exploited not more and more types of of resources, but we've exploited those resources in more intense ways and at larger and larger scales.

So there are a handful of key patterns that we see in the human cultural evolution look at going back easily 100,000 years. And one of them that I think is really important, is that can understand how it is that people are interacting with the environment know, through things like archaeological evidence about cooperative hunting, right, or the emergence of agriculture. These are very, you can talk to any archaeologist about these. These things are fundamentally group level features of society.

And a really important aspect because when we cooperate and coordinate, we can do better than kind of the rest of the ecosystem all at once, right? When you connect our ability to work as a swarm with our ability to adapt faster than the rest of the ecosystem, all of a sudden you realize, whoa, we're kind of unstoppable,

0:17:53 Thomas: Hmm. Oh yeah. Yeah.

0:20:02 Tim: Right?

0:20:02 Thomas: We're kicking the ecosystem's ass. Take

0:20:06 Tim: Thoroughly.

0:20:06 Thomas: That ecosystem, USA, USA.

0:20:11 Tim: Exactly. That's a little bit of the problem right there. Too strong and we're too fast. We adapt faster than all of the rest of the species in the ecosystem, by and large. Because we're able to work as a swarm, we're kind of like, you know, the gray alien goo that's taken over the planet. My favorite picture is to look at these photos of Earth from space at night, where you look at humans from that distance, we don't look like mammals, like the friendly mammals we're used to thinking we are. We look like a glowing radioactive slime mold that's covered the surface of the planet. And That's actually kind of more, I think, a more appropriate way to understand our moment in evolutionary history. Right, that's what's just happened to the planet we live on, right? That's the appropriate kind of perspective, right? We are the gray goo, and the question is, what happens to a planet when a gray goo goes from nothing to taking over, right? That going to work

0:20:46 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:21:14 Thomas: I think what happens is the planet develops a cough and it coughs up Elon Musk and Elon Musk infects the next planet down possibly if it's not careful. So Mars better wear a mask, I think is what,

0:21:27 Tim: Right, exactly, yeah. Well, Mars, Mars has got a pretty strong defense mechanism.

0:21:31 Thomas: Yeah. It's got a mask of, not a suitable environment for humans, really. It's good, it's protected for now, natural immunity, yeah.

0:21:36 Tim: Yeah. Yeah. That's Right, exactly. And, and importantly, I mean, there's a, there's a thing about that where, you, of the, the major issue here is that it, space travel or space exploration or settlement, because the reason we can't do space settlement, despite what people like Elon Musk think, that you can take a bunch of rockets to another planet and land there and then just start a city.

0:21:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:00 Tim: Can't do that because in order to really do that, you have to be able to take the ecosystem with you, right? Because you're not going to be getting delivered from Earth, right? You have to grow it, and we actually don't know how to manage a closed ecosystem, period. Like, we haven't really done that effectively at any scale for any period of time that that is successful. And, and putting a stamp on so

0:22:05 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:22 Thomas: Saw Biodome Yeah, I know. Unfortunately, I'm one of the few people who saw Biodrome.

0:22:24 Tim: Right. Yeah. Uh, I, I have never seen it, but I know, I know it's a Polly Shore movie.

0:22:33 Thomas: That somewhat based on like a real concept

0:22:36 Tim: It's based on a real concept. It is based on a sort of popular science press stunt that happened in 1990s called Biosphere 2, which is, I, a really important example of was not good science. Was not well designed. It was designed for a lot of attention. And it did that. But I think even though it was not good science, think it's, we learned some things about it, because they put a bunch of people in a closed environment with a sealed atmosphere and with a number of sort of different habitats and hand a farm and all of the tools and everything they thought they would need. The idea was for them to be in there for a couple of years and to see how they could survive. And ended up fighting each other. Atmosphere went all screwy and they started starving. So it was a big failure. So in a lot of ways, the lesson of Biosphere 2 actually is, oh yeah, we know how to do this, and we really need to study that better, yeah.

0:22:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. For one, think we should just send Elon up figure to it out by himself and see. He could do it. He's a genius. He'll figure it up. That would make my life better.

0:23:46 Tim: He certainly believes he is, yeah. Yeah. That'd make all, I could add, add to that list that could make a number of our lives better. We could maybe get Twitter back.

0:23:48 Thomas: Yeah. How Yeah. How thing that just kind of goes off in my mind over this is capitalism. You know, does this, I apparently new field or, you know, this way of looking at things that you're talking about, how's it view something like capitalism? Because it seems to me to be pretty key to all of this. You know certainly the industrial revolution would be when, know, a you lot of the problem started, yeah.

0:24:12 Tim: Sure. Yeah Well, that's a great question. Um, know, I think there are aspects about capitalism which rightly should get a lot of attention, and even, and has, you know, is a way to organize human activity by monetary and a number of other features, which certainly we can pin a lot of environmental disasters on, particularly market capitalism, where if we have unregulated markets, companies will exploit, and the environment. Problem. But the fact is, you can regulate markets effectively so that companies don't do that. Other major thing is that, remember what I said earlier, is humans are out of control. Right, there is a, there's a little bit of a belief, I think, among people both on the left and the right that capitalism is a thing, um, and I understand why it is, why that belief is there. Um, uh, look, humans are out of control.

Um, you could rewind the clock, you know, start off another, uh, intelligent primate species, um, they're going to end up just as out of control as we are, right? So if they have culture, right, they're going to be able to cooperate and, you know, best the environment again and again, take over the ecosystem again, and they'll probably end up with something that looks like corporations or nations again. The reason for that is that we're really good at finding solutions which give us more resources and matter and energy at our disposal, right. Right.

0:24:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:44 Tim: So if the thing that we call capitalism now is that way, the reason it is that way is not sort of, so to speak, capitalism's fault. The reason for that is much deeper. The reason is that that system has perhaps unlocked a lot of energy and resources. Can call it capitalism, for sure. But I think the that we get to the situation where we have very powerful groups of humans with a huge ability to modify the environment is not fundamentally capitalism. It's fundamentally our inherent ability to adapt so rapidly and with such efficacy, which is undergirded by our cultural capacity.

0:26:29 Thomas: Well, I feel like, uh, part of the equation would have to be like the drive, right? I mean, it's one thing to have, we have abilities, sure, but like, what those abilities are, you know, tools, abilities are, I can't, I think kind of mostly, I don't know if neutral is a good word, but without that drive, I wonder what, when I think about capitalism, uh, agree that not as a thing in itself, per se, but but as an expression of, you know, who we are as humans. I think, you think of greed, and it's so much needing resources as it is like needing excess. You know, like that's the part that seems confusing. If you just take take a look back, you're not like, OK, it's one thing to be like, yeah, we want to meet our needs. And of course, we have a drive to do that. But it's like the excess, you that feels like uniquely capitalist a

0:26:40 Tim: Yeah. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes.

0:27:13 Thomas: Little bit.

0:27:13 Tim: Absolutely. Well, yeah, for sure. I think there's a lot of different ways to look at this. And I completely agree. A Western industrial consumer capitalist society really a high value on individual material consumption. And that is directly causing a lot of the environmental problems that we see. So, yes, yes. Absolutely. But and, you know, where does that greed come from? And I don't want to say that I actually think your point is good, which is to say a lot lot of, you ability, for example, to just order stuff on Amazon willy -nilly and have it driven to my house, you a fossil fuel transportation system, you of that, that's all culturally constructed, right?

0:27:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:59 Tim: So, yeah, we can call that system, we can call it a, you know, a system for sure. It certainly, certainly is, and I don't wait to deny that Guess I do want to say it is possible to regulate markets of corporations whose job it is to make money. But you need to regulate them well with regards to all sorts of things, the way they treat people who work there, the way they treat the environment and even the the just the fundamental things they're allowed to do, how the markets are defined, whether we allow a market in a certain location or not. Know, I think we have a very immature and young concept of markets are useful for, they're very useful and they're they're powerful, and that's exactly why they should be highly control.

0:28:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:28:42 Thomas: It

0:28:42 Tim: So we're looking at this sort of rapacious consumption of, you know, Earth's resources. And no matter how you slice it, if you sort of want to paint capitalism into that picture, you need to understand that still capitalism is the result of a process of cultural and adaptation over period. Even without perhaps the of it we see today, we might have something different, but it was still very consumptive.

And so the of our paper is to try to look into a deeper time window to understand the emergence of of the behaviors that we see today. And see really a couple of major things. We see that humans are really good at consuming the environment. And in some cases, we don't just control and exploit the environment, we will also modify it and manage it in ways that can be sustainable is perhaps a strong word, but in ways that are durable for a very specific resource that we care a lot about. That's a good sign, right?

We manage irrigation water in some cases well. We, know, we manage the crops that we care about and the nutrients inputs that give them. We, you in some cases will manage fish stocks well, although we have a sustainable forestry program so that we know that we can keep growing and using, you know, forest resources, for example. So of these are sort of amazing ways to protect biodiversity, but they are examples of places where we have developed systems that do preserve some limited capacity of the environment to support us. That's a good sign, but of course it's not everything we need.

0:29:41 Thomas: Feels like to me, like we're really good once we can visibly see the consequences immediately in our direct of sight. If If it's anything that's slightly out of the way or down the line, we're like, nah, that doesn't exist. Sorry. Enough of us are like, Nah, don't care. There.

0:30:35 Tim: Yes, Yes, Tom. That's That is right. No, you put your finger on it. And that is actually one of the things that we draw out in the paper. And research needs to be done on this, but it really, I have never seen anything that is even close to strong evidence it's in the other direction. Humans don't develop good systems for environmental management after we have already developed good systems for environmental exploitations, right?

0:30:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:31:10 Tim: So the exploitation comes first. We start using the resource, and then only after we use the resource do we say, oh, there's a problem and we should deal with it, right, yeah.

0:31:17 Thomas: Yeah. And it Feels like, the just, some basics, by the way, about the paper, for anyone who hasn't read it. I'm sure they might, they might be having a hard time maybe grasping what's, what's in it at this, this point, but, you know, you, you look, you look back through time, uh, you found is that essentially you found examples to try to, you know, buy analogy for different things. And I guess the question I would have is, is the current, like, climate crisis unique, um, a way that's serious enough to make it, you, lot more difficult than past instances that we might have gotten through one way or the other? Yeah.

0:31:49 Tim: Yeah, that's the question, and the short answer is yeah. Yeah. You know, The climate crisis is different, and different primarily because it's a global problem. And we've talked about, we look back to see what our evolutionary sort of past and trajectory has been. And then we try to use that to understand what that means for solving global problems like climate change. I want to point out that the point here, here generally, the paper generally isn't about climate change in particular. It's just the first example of a global environmental challenge that we need to solve in order to sort of keep living on the planet. There are very much likely going to be a number of other ones that follow on its heels.

0:31:53 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. If We have the privilege, yeah, if we get so lucky. Yeah.

0:32:40 Tim: And right. That's right, precisely. Now, the thing is, we should actually be thankful for climate change because of exactly what you said.

0:32:40 Thomas: Uh. This Is Gonna Take some convincing. I don't know.

0:32:49 Tim: Yeah, we'll listen to this. So what are the other challenges that are going to come lined up behind climate change? So are things that are maybe slower moving and even harder to perceive, where payoffs and the costs are more unevenly distributed. So we're looking at saltwater intrusion, low, we're depleting our fresh water and poisoning our fresh water supplies in various places, uh, are those, are local issues, right? Um, we look at things like, uh, structure we have been simplifying, um, and the Environment And And losing biodiversity for a long time, and, and we have really no, no idea what that is likely to do, other than it weakens global ecological systems. So at what point is that likely to cause some major problems? We have no idea.

0:33:21 Thomas: Biodiversity Or Yeah, yeah.

0:33:40 Tim: Those problems are complex, and might be slow moving. They might all of a sudden become fast. They're probably going to be different in different places. What's really nice about climate change is a couple of, even though it is going to impact our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren in a gigantic and perhaps terrifying way, it is happening at level which is both strong enough to start to cause real costs to people around the world, and shared. We are seeing it, and around the world, individuals and groups are realizing, whoa, this is a big deal, and it's getting worse, and we need to do something about it. And that is not the way that some of the other systems are likely to work, right? They're likely to be more complex, slower moving, more heterogeneous, etc. Et cetera. And so it's really good that we have this nice shared one that's really clearly a bad deal first.

0:33:39 Thomas: I Guess what's

0:34:40 Tim: Always somewhat local. You can pollute the atmosphere and you can polluted the oceans. But otherwise, it's always going to be confined to the watershed or to pick a patch of land or a particular water body. Right. And so the thing is, we can be simultaneously polluting many water bodies all over the planet. Right. Are. And it is always a local problem for the short term. Right. So we can fail many. So you see the problem. It's much harder for us to collectively realize we're all in a problem with the fact that we're polluting our lakes or our rivers. Climate change, we all know there's a single atmosphere. So that's actually a really that's absolutely perhaps the most hopeful thing that I'm going to give you today.

0:34:57 Thomas: And we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:35:21 Thomas: Well, I dash it by saying I don't think we actually learn anything. I think, I think If you look, you Could have also cast the pandemic as like, well, that's a good trial run for climate change, and, uh, no, I don't think that that Worked At All. Yeah,

0:35:27 Tim: Sure, it is. And we failed. It Is. No, we failed the pandemic. And specifically the way in which we, I want to say, taking the U.S. as a key example here, failed to learn the lessons of the pandemic is, you know, look, the pandemic was also wonderful in the sense of it should be a wake up call for us to be able to have better systems. And what are those systems? Well, we had a global virus, a viral pandemic that killed millions of people. And what do you need in order to avoid that in the future? You need group level systems to detect those viral threats early, and need reserve capacity on the ready to be able to deploy contact tracing and to take care of people on the front lines as soon as new viruses start happening. And then you need, of course, to be able to ramp up the vaccines and the rest of it. And guess what? We don't have a a new national viral readiness agency.

0:35:34 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:31 Thomas: I Was just gonna say, I mean, my impression of all this is like the thing, thing that makes it hard to to think about, maybe unless I'm misunderstanding, in the way that you're saying, is we have the capability to do all this stuff and more, like we're capable Of any of this, and it just feels Like the problem is us, it's like information, or it's, it's something Something about us that just prevents us, you know, from doing this. And so, is that the point? I mean, is that how are you looking At that

0:36:44 Tim: Right. Yes. Yep. That's the point. Absolutely. No, that's exactly the point, and so to understand what that thing is about us that makes it so hard, helps to understand sort of patterns of cooperation cooperation tends to emerge, right? Simplest analogy is to think about a sports team. So let's take, you bunch of people who want to play soccer. Right.

0:36:57 Thomas: Okay

0:37:18 Tim: You put them on a field.

0:37:18 Thomas: Dang I'm Such A sports guy, and they pick the one sport I, I don't care about.

0:37:22 Tim: Give me a sport you care about.

0:37:24 Thomas: Hockey.

0:37:24 Tim: Give Me a team sport. Hockey. Right? Hockey example. So you put a bunch people on the ice and you give them a puck and they start slapping it around.

0:37:26 Thomas: Yeah, hockey is my favorite sport. Sure.

0:37:32 Tim: And and everyone has a lot of fun. Right, and but who's going to play goal. Okay. Not, not, nobody actually wants to, you know be a goalie or, you you have someone, you know, who's, who hogging the puck. It's a little bit harder to do. Think with hockey than it is with, with soccer, you can have people, you know, a ball hog right on the field. All right. And, that's just going to be what what it is. It those people are not going to cooperate, right? Because the guy who has the puck is going to have the most fun. He doesn't want to share it because he's having fun. So, when do you get that cooperation? Well, you get the cooperation when you get another group of

0:37:33 Thomas: That's roughly what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Only the weirdest guy wants to be in that. That is for sure.

0:37:56 Thomas: Yeah. Because

0:38:12 Tim: People who also wants to play hockey, and you put them on the field too, right. And then all of a sudden, those people who weren't cooperating before, they're going to cooperate because they're trying to face the other team, right?

0:38:24 Thomas: It Is not fun to lose. Yeah.

0:38:25 Tim: Not fun to lose. And we are really good at noticing us versus them situations and responding to it by cooperating within the group and competing between groups. And of course, that is part of the long story of human evolution. It also is a general phenomenon that happens within any system. Right. So cooperation within groups is always stronger when there's competition between groups.

0:38:55 Thomas: Need to hire some aliens. We need to put it out There on The job Board, please.

0:38:58 Tim: That's right, Thomas. That's correct.

0:39:01 Thomas: Come you cosplay. It's like Three Amigos, one of my favorite old movies, you know, it's like aliens come Here, put on show, you know, be, be villains so that we can all be like, oh, well, you know, let's focus on that. Ah.

0:39:08 Tim: Yep. Yes. No, exactly right. You know, if aliens showed up, it would terrify us. And if aliens show up, it could be great in a lot of ways. Of course, they'd probably just devastate us right away. In the ideal world, aliens show up and they arrive and they take over like Mars and Venus and like they manage Mars really well. But whoever is doing Venus, they do a terrible job of it. And we can see. Right.

0:39:38 Thomas: Yeah.

0:39:38 Tim: And then we can learn. Don't do what they did on Venus, but do do whatthey did on Mars. Right? So that is the problem that we're facing. So in the paper, we identify a thing called the population structure problem. Of human evolution in the Anthropocene. That population structure problem points out something that's key that has characterized how we have evolved generally, which is that we're actually capable of solving really complex and hard problems. I mean, look at the computer that we're using to have this conversation, for example, right? How on earth did we do that? The answer is by groups of people over very long periods of time, refining and refining and refigning and improving, You know, this solution. So we can solve really hard problems and we we do it in groups, but we don't do it just in a single group over time. We do it when there's a whole population of groups, right, all of the different companies in the semiconductor industry, right? In the computer industries, They're right. All competing. If Apple goes out of business, well, whatever. We don't have really expensive and really pretty computers anymore.

We still have computers, right, fact, they'll probably be cheaper, which might be nice. And same principle lacking in our current situation. In the Anthropocene, we have one global group. And actually, importantly, we don't really even have that group, right? Globe filled with sub -global groups. We have nations, you wehave corporations, and that's where the action is, right. Are the things that are evolving rapidly that have huge impact with policy. Have some global level institutions.

We have the United Nations and related global institutions, but they're relatively weak. And importantly, there's no place for the globe to look at or for the United Nation or other global to look At other alternatives about the way other planets have been managed and to learn those lessons. We can't, you group level cultural evolution at the level of the planet work. We have no one to learn from.

That's And a problem because managing a giant complex biosphere ecosystem, the size of a planet is actually a lot harder than managing the other environmental resources we've ever managed for. We don't even know how hard it is. We didn't even do it with Biosphere 2. And that was a 3.2 acre system.

0:40:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:42:05 Tim: The problem. It's not actually, as you point out, that we can't do it. For we could have solved the COVID problem kind of in a permanent way. We still can't. We just need to take it seriously and fund it if we feel like it. The same is true with climate change, right? We actually know what needs to be done with climate change in general terms. And all we need to do is start taxing each other for people who are emitting too much carbon. We'll start solving the problem right away. Issue is, do we do it and do we implement those systems.

0:42:09 Thomas: That's What's So, so Frustrating. Yeah. If We feel Like it, Yeah, it's Crazy Yeah, Yeah, No,

0:42:38 Tim: And right.

0:42:38 Thomas: Oh, Yeah, sorry, I thought that was a question. I've Got the answer for you. No, we don't. Yeah, Not until we start really seeing consequences. It does feel like it's happening more though, it really does, like it, just the fact That the major weather events are getting more and more like directly tied to climate change and kind of the national, or Even global Story of it, you know, I really think that's making a difference.

0:42:42 Tim: Well, we haven't yet. So does. Yeah, I agree.

0:43:06 Thomas: But speaking of communicating in memes, I mean, it really, I'll never forget, it's from, I don't know, a decade ago at least, the Onion headline that was like, "Scientists remind us that they're ready to go with renewable technology whenever." Something like that. You know, it's like, hey, whenever you want, as soon as you guys Are ready for it. Yeah, yeah.

0:43:06 Tim: And Yep, exactly. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. I like that. And, you that's the key, right, that is exactly why we should be a little bit, even though climate change is a big deal, we should kind of be happy that the costs are mounting and it is increasingly perceptible. Right. So I'm in Maine and winter and I look outside and there's no snow on the ground. Know, it's January. And like my children are supposed to be cross -country skiing here in Maine. They're not there. Instead, they're still doing what they call dry land practice where they just run for, you know, exercise until wait.

0:43:56 Thomas: And That's Boring. Get, bring back snow. I agree.

0:43:59 Tim: Right. Waiting for the snow. To bring it back to, what's the hope for climate change in the, in the shorter term? Right, the costs continue to mount, as climate change gets worse and worse, hopefully that changes the pressures that nations and corporations and other groups that now are feeling in way that it aligns with our interests as a planet. We know very much what our interests as a planet are. The problem is there's no one there to protect our interests as a Planet. So hopefully the interests of nations will start to align with the planet as things get increasingly crazy.

And I think we're beginning to see that. And so that's a silver lining in here. Doesn't solve larger problem, though. So change. Think it's possible. And I am actually hopeful about the costs getting more and more clear, as you pointed out. Out. But there's a longer term problem, which is really unexplored. And really, it's a question that hasn't been asked, which can you sustain a of culturally evolving organisms on a single planet? We don't know the answer to that. So We highly adaptive and so rapid rapid at finding and exploiting new environmental resources, that it might just be that this thing doesn't work.

0:44:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:44:48 Thomas: That Those

0:45:26 Tim: It might not be even sort of possible in any, even on an alien world where an alien society develops culture. It might not work. To say, maybe we solve climate change, but then after it come all of these other problems. Fact of the matter is we have to act as a unit in to protect the planet from our own consumption. We have to act at a unit at the level of the whole planet. And that's hard for us to do because we don't generally see ourselves that way. The hope, right? And so if there's a message that should come out of this, is that it actually is really important

0:46:04 Thomas: Aliens get their asses over here and Start In Their Three Amigos costumes. I agree. Yeah.

0:46:06 Tim: Get Over Here Yeah, well, maybe something a little bit more intimidating.

0:46:15 Thomas: Well, so, kind of drawing to a close, I mean, you've mentioned a a few times that this is, you developing, this is pretty preliminary. Where do you plan to go from here in terms of, the um, way the lens you're putting to this, what, the, what, what are you hope the next step is?

0:46:28 Tim: Thank you. So there's a, there's a whole bunch of research that needs to happen, and I need other researchers to join me, because there's no way I can get it done, uh, in my career or lifetime, and we need to get it done faster than that anyway.

Um, some fundamental basic science questions that need to be asked about human evolution, right, uh, of the stuff that I'm proposing is kind of on the cutting edge about the way we characterize human evolution generally as being really sort of primarily determined by A, culture, and B, groups. That is a message that has yet to really catch on in all components of studying human behavior. So we need to get serious about that, and we need have stronger measures about that.

Because just exactly how, how much that determines, you know, human behavior is really critical here. Another thing that I think we need to start doing, well, first of all, I hope that there's some, some people out there at the funding agencies in the United States and around the world, the National Science Foundation, who decide, "Oh, yeah, you know what, we should start funding these sorts of research projects," because, because we're behind. And take, for example, the Biosphere 2, you in the '90s.

That was, you scientific boondoggle, yes. But it was exactly in the type of research agenda that needs to be done in here. The one research agendas that needsと be done much more seriously. We do not know how to manage social ecological systems. Period.

0:47:54 Thomas: I've got it. I've got the plan. We, we rebrand it Marvel's Biosphere. Then the sequels just flow. I mean, we'll get Biosphere Three, Biosphere Four. We'll have a the whole universe Of biospheres, just Marvel Buy it, take that IP. Yeah.

0:48:04 Tim: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Well, actually, what I like to do here is something that's, you need those We just put them all over the planet, right? We do it in different countries. We do it in different ecosystems, we know some of them can have closed atmospheres, they don't all need to, there's literally things that we can do simply on regular organic farms that need to be a funded, for example. So, are some of the challenges there's, and there's this other challenge is even a basic theoretical question, right? We need mathematical and computer models of human evolution to, to ask the question, can, you cultural evolution, a population of organisms that evolves both genetically and culturally at the same time, can that persist on a single planet, period, in even theory? And we just, we don't even know.

0:48:57 Thomas: That just sounds so hard. I mean, so that, that involves you coming up with an awful lot of ways to quantify things and set, you, variables to it and set values, right, and see how that plays out. That strikes me as very difficult. Yeah.

0:49:08 Tim: Yes, I'm ready. I'm ready to go. I just need the funding. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:49:10 Thomas: Oh, Okay, well, If Any hedge fund billionaires are listening, they're huge fans of my show, so you're going to be fine.

0:49:17 Tim: Yeah. Yeah you just point them my way.

0:49:20 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent.

0:49:23 Tim: A lot of research to be done, I think, on this. And I think there's also just a general appreciation that, you we're faced with a novel moment in history, and that's well appreciated. But we need to understand it's not just a novel moment in history. It's a novel moment in the evolution of our species and the evolution of the planet. And in all three of those cases, it's clearly a turning point. And no matter what angle you come at it from, there are really two ways to go forward. One involves competition, and that does not lead to a happy place. The other involves the very hard work of building building cooperative governance at the scale of the planet. And that's extremely difficult and will be a of hard work, but it's really the only way that we have the capacity to protect the shared resources that we all depend on. So,

0:50:20 Thomas: We're screwed, but No, excellent. Well I that's a good place to leave it. I do always give people the opportunity. You've sort of plugged stuff already, but I give people the opportunity to plug something that they'd like to plug. Do you want to send listeners for whatever? It could be anything you want.

0:50:36 Tim: Gosh, that's wonderful. Like to say to people is, you you're interested in these things, either the environmental stuff or cultural stuff, I would say take a look at the new and emerging field of human cultural evolution. It's rich. It is a very fresh way to understand the crazy weirdness that we humans are. And it really helps. Gives you so much to chew on. So every I introduce it to a student, a graduate student, they always get excited. Often it the way that they see things and start trying to solve problems differently. And that's what I would suggest. Take a look at it. There's some really great great books out there on it. I'll

0:50:59 Thomas: Oh, any of you want a toss out or?

0:51:16 Tim: I mean, one of the classic ones is my at Harvard, Joseph Henrich, has a number of books. I will start with his basic intro, which is The Secret of Our Success. That's about what humans special. It's about cultural evolution and how it works. And, and that's a really good place to to start. That's a good jumping off point. And there's a handful of other wonderful books that have emerged, but that'll be the good place to start."

0:51:41 Thomas: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Tim Waring. Appreciate your time.

0:51:44 Tim: You so much, Thomas. I really appreciate your time.