A Natural History of the Future: What the Laws of Biology Tell Us about the Destiny of the Human Species by Rob Dunn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Flash in the Pan

According to Rob Dunn, the growth in the human population and its expansion to every climatic zone on the planet occurred more or less instantaneously (in evolutionary terms) over the last 12,000 years. This he refers to as “A train crash. An explosion. A mushroom rising from the wet ground of our origin.” No other species has ever accomplished this. According to the measure of ‘presence’ we obviously dominate the many losers in the Darwinian race for survival:

“By one estimate, 32 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass on Earth is now composed of nothing more than fleshy, human bodies. Domestic animals make up 65 percent. Just 3 percent is left over for the rest of vertebrate life, the remaining tens of thousands of boney animal species.”

So our sense of entitlement, of having been given ‘dominion’ over the other life forms with which we share space, seems to be justified.

But it turns out we are size-ist, ageist, humanist, and somewhat Swede-ish when it comes to assessing our place in the world. The millions of insect species, the billions of bacterial species, and the trillions of species of phage that live off the bacteria make us less than amateurs in the long-haul adaptiveness required in order to continue our hegemony. And this doesn’t even count the unknown number of microbes which inhabit the Earth’s crust and which have life-spans of millions of years. We have been confident only because we have been ignorant:

“As we confront the future, our collective bearings are off, and our perception of the world around us is deeply flawed. Nothing is where it used to be. We have begun to crash into things; we find ourselves blindsided by life.”

For our blindness, Rob Dunn says, we can thank the great 18th century Swedish botanist and zoologist who was the first to attempt a systematic catalogue of life on Earth. He apparently missed a lot that didn’t exist for the naked eye in the North Woods. So it’s taken some time for science to catch up with our actual situation which, as many suspected, is not nearly as sanguine as conventional metrics might indicate. Since our appearance on the evolutionary scene, Dunn says, we have been breaking all the rules of ecology, and we ought to stop it now that we’re less ignorant.

And there are many such rules, all intellectually interesting and with fascinating implications. The rule of natural selection is the most well known but taken in isolation it has been used as evidence of human evolutionary superiority. Other rules are equally relevant and suggest that we may not be so well-placed in the evolutionary hierarchy. For example the “diversity-stability law, states that ecosystems that include more species are more stable through time.” So as we cause the extinction of untold numbers of species that failed to adapt to us (or simply put them at a safe distance), we reduce our own survivability. This is reinforced by “The law of dependence ‘which states that all species depend on other species.” Others like the species-area law, the law of corridors, the law of escape, and the law of niche are derivatives of the requirements for diversity.

What Dunn doesn’t mention, however, is a law from another discipline, that of cybernetics. This is the Law of Requisite Variety which in essence states that any living thing must be as flexible in its response to environmental change as the range of changes in that environment. In other words, unless the diversity of possible responses is at least equal to the diversity of the potential changes around it, the species will not survive. It seems to me that all of Dunn’s ecological laws are in fact subsets of this Law of Requisite Variety.

Dunn suggests that we must become more adaptable by reversing our insistent violation of the laws of diversity. The argument is that this will increase the level of environmental stability, thus reducing the range of conditions to which humans must adapt. But it seems to me that there is a fundamental issue with his logic, and indeed that of a number of well-meaning environmentalists. This logic presumes that human choice to stabilise the environment, even if that were politically possible, is a rational objective. It is at least possible that such efforts are merely whistling in the dark.

Look at the facts Dunn provides. The most adaptive species on the planet are those microbes living in the Earth’s crust. Their environment is very stable, they need do nothing to survive until an expanding and dying Sun consumes the entire planet. Then there are the bacteria and their phages. These adapt rapidly and effectively to every environment known on the planet, from the Arctic wastes to the deep sea vents of methane gas, even to the presence of human beings. Whatever the planet has thrown at them, they have been able to use to their advantage.

The species Homo Sapiens is another matter altogether. We have evolved relatively slowly into a relatively stable environment. Our adaptations to this environment are almost exclusively technological rather than genetic. That is, we protect, feed, shelter, and multiply ourselves through our knowledge of the world, and our collective abilities, that is to say, through language. Language is our fundamental technology through which we have managed to survive and thrive. It is language that allows Dunn to communicate his laws and to suggest what we have to do to stabilise the environment.

But isn’t this the ultimate in anthro-centrist arrogance? As Dunn says, “Most of what is knowable is not known.” Indeed, most of what is knowable will never be known, will never be brought into language. The complexity of interaction and dependencies among species makes theories of nuclear physics look like casual conversation. This quite apart from the fact that non-biological possibilities for environmental change - from sun spots and changes in magnetic polarity to large-scale volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes - can make any understanding of current dependencies irrelevant at a stroke.

Dunn’s proposition that knowledge is the key to species survival is in itself paradoxical. Such knowledge can only be obtained by technology, the very technology which promotes the violation of Dunn’s laws of evolutionary biology. Philosophically speaking, he is recommending that we dig the hole we are in even deeper. It seems to me that our “train crash” actually occurred when our species found/created/developed language. We have been able to exploit a very narrow window of environmental stability pushing that capability relentlessly. We have been temporarily successful with this unique evolutionary strategy which depends acutely on a continuation of that stability, a very unlikely scenario even without human involvement. Dunn wants to push the technological strategy even further.

I prefer to think of us as a fragile aberration in evolutionary history, a genetic blind alley of over-specialisation, in short a flash in the pan of life. Dunn claims a 20th century American entomologist, Terry Erwin, as creating a Copernican Revolution in biology through his de-centring of biology so that Homo Sapiens was no longer its implicit focus. Perhaps what is necessary now is a kind of Einsteinian Revolution which recognises not just that we are not the top of the evolutionary heap, but that we don’t even qualify in the heats for the evolutionary race.

Dunn’s “first law of palaeontology” is that we will one day be extinct. We are likely to conform with that law with as quickly as we rose from species-obscurity. Pity the poor cockroaches, rats and bedbugs that will go extinct with us. Do they not bleed?

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