As you can see from reading other postings on this website, my understanding of population evo-ecology doesn’t allow me to see humans as having a ‘place’ within coevolving Nature, not just because of the faster-than-Nature evolution of technology but mostly because of technology’s niche-transcending capacity.1
Modern humans are not a species (hence the quotation marks when I use the word in reference to us) when we take the population ecologist’s co-adapted biological communities view and don’t define a species only in terms of its participation in biophysical cycles: the systemic-ecology view2.
We can say this because an animal’s niche is maintained by it’s structural/behavioural under-standing of inter-species ‘familiarity’; that is, its ecological ‘identity’ either shows up (co-adaptation)3, or does not show up (infestation)4, depending on the gene-rational familiarity an organism has with Natural environments that can and do change. With this simple one-species-one-niche rule5 and its occasional failure in mind we must conclude that, for a uniquely exploratory and technologically adaptive ‘species’ such as ourselves, ecological familiarity doesn’t last long enough to allow maximally diverse co-adaptation6 in the Natural systems we ‘infest’. (Farmed systems are another story7.)
But what about our long prehistory of nomadic foraging you ask?
The answer follows from another question: “how long is ‘long'” for Natural systems? When humans entered the American continent, making their way down the ice-free pacific coast and following the melting ice into the interior, their presence was indeed an ecocidal ‘extractivist’ infestation in comparison to the somewhat slower adaptations of existing ecosystems to a warming climate during this same period8. But then, since technology was changing slowly at first, further extinctions (of large and easy game animals and of competing predators mostly9) began to slow down also. And over this post-infestation period of ten thousand years or so their familiarity with (and to) other species—their animal “brothers” and vegetable “sisters”—started to look like the ‘adaptationist’ attitudes we’ve now come to associate with the at-one-with-Nature ‘ecologically sustainable’ traditions of the Anishinabek and other hunter-gatherer peoples that still survive today.10
But really, how ‘long’ was this adaptationist stage in evo-ecological terms? I think it is likely that, even without the further infestation of humans from Europe, the extinction rate would have begun to rise again as civilisation even here began to take hold and to expand—in the Andes, in Central America, and into North America—even as it had seven-thousand years or so previously in Africa and in sub-Asian cultural regions. In fact, the wheel was invented independently of “Old World” technology somewhere in what is now Mexico a few hundred years before the arrival of Europeans; though it seems only to have been used ornamentally at the time, probably because agricultural conditions in the the more developed regions, and the absence of potential beasts of burden everywhere, were deterring factors. 11
The Extractivist understanding of technological evolution mistakes his own learning-from-trial-and-error with ‘foresight’ because the trial part isn’t recognised as mental ‘reproduction’ and the error part is somehow seen as ‘intentional’! On the other hand, the Adaptationist understanding does not take technological evolution into account at all; its animal ‘short-sightedness’ doesn’t recognise that ecological familiarity even at the many-thousand-year animal ‘brothers’ and vegetable ‘sisters level is an ‘animal truth’ that, for a technological ‘species’, doesn’t last long enough for Natural adaptation to reach maximal diversity.
It’s still these two animal attitudes that shape our unexamined sense if human identity with respect to the Natural World today:12 the (relatively) short-sighted adaptationist belief that we can take part in fully diverse co-adapted systems without depleting them, and the extractivist delusion that our infestation is really ‘humans-improving-on-a-Nature’.
After all, how can Nature’s creativity be as good as ours when it does not involve ‘foresight’? (More about this in the next post13.) But, do we not have another choice? Here is my offer: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/ And if you have a better one, please join the conversation in the comments section, or you can engage more privately here: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/contact-us/
Notes and citations:
1) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2020/07/27/one-species-one-niche-why-humans-destroy-nature/
2) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2023/02/09/once-you-see-it-you-cant-un-see-it/
3) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/07/16/young-buddha-at-home-part-3-pandoras-box/ or review: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2020/07/27/one-species-one-niche-why-humans-destroy-nature/
5) As an ecological principle, competitive exclusion refers mainly to a species’ relationship to resources, and, as such, the principle has been shown in studies to work better in test tubes than it does in authentic ecosystems. This is because many factors in the Natural World come into play that fall outside the strict ecological meaning of ‘resource’; like relationship to croppers and predators (to which the species in question is itself a resource); like geographic range (plankton in the ocean have more opportunity to avoid competition than Gause’s yeast in a test tube); or like variability of conditions (a flash flood can create a carrion boon that the local specialists, i.e. vultures, can’t fully consume). Here I am using the broader meaning, where a species’ resources are the general conditions that favour its speci-fic existence; that is, where all these effects play out in the long term of evolutionary ecology to arrive at the ‘One Species, One Niche’ implications of the principle.
6) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2016/04/11/beethovens-fire/
7) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2023/01/09/of-whippoorwills-and-wolves-a-music-inviolate/
8) Technological “evolution” was only possible in the first place because of a bipedal primate’s adaptation to unfamiliar environmental conditions. But on top of that, the extended cycling of relatively short “Ice Ages” in the Pleistocene would have been ideal for extended the duration of a technological super-opportunist’s “pestilence” in a diversity-poor environment, where competitive exclusion of cognitive adventurism by better designed life-forms was not the controlling factor that it was in more stable times or during less protracted periods of dieback.
9) MacKinnon, J. B. 2013. The Once and Future World: Nature as it was, as it is, as it Should be. Toronto: Random House of Canada. (Vintage Canada Edition, 2014), pp. 65-66.
10) See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2018/02/10/indigi-futurism/
11) “Mesoamerican wheeled toys have been something of an enigma since they were first discovered by Desire Charnay in the late 19th century. At first, the discovery was met with scepticism and it wasn’t until controlled excavations at Tres Zapotes in the 1940s revealed two more wheeled figurines that their existence was considered authentic. There are around 100 known examples thus far and they vary in construction according to where they were found. Small solid-bodied examples were found around the Veracruz and northern coastal regions, whilst larger hollow-bodied examples have been found in Veracruz, Michoacan, Geurrero and El Salvador. If putting wheels on an animal wasn’t strange enough, the larger type are often flutes or whistles with the posterior or tail being used as a mouthpiece.” —http://www.famsi.org/aztlan/uploads/Tula&wheeled_animal_effigies.pdf
12) But what about the Futurist (Phase-C?) who intuits the “wrongness” of extractivism but also the limits to ecological adaptation as a human destiny? Gene Roddenberry and a succession of Star Trek writers seem to prefigure the Extremophile Choice argument, especially with the ‘Prime Directive’ trope and a noninterference attitude in general that a Star Ship captain must adhere to. Notice however that, despite the eco-evolutionary improbability, ‘humanoids’ are found on every planet. It seems even here the fundamentals of evo-ecological science, available in textbooks from the 1970’s, take a back seat to the more popular themes from all the other scientific disciplines.
