Ecology And Evolution Quotes

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

We are most of us governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong

A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.

If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.

A biomarker of evolution, melanin is the color of life.

We create the world that we perceive, not because there is no reality outside our heads, but because we select and edit the reality we see to conform to our beliefs about what sort of world we live in. The man who believes that the resources of the world are infinite, for example, or that if something is good for you then the more of it the better, will not be able to see his errors, because he will not look for evidence of them. For a man to change the basic beliefs that determine his perception - his epistemological premises - he must first become aware that reality is not necessarily as he believes it to be. Sometimes the dissonance between reality and false beliefs reaches a point when it becomes impossible to avoid the awareness that the world no longer makes sense. Only then is it possible for the mind to consider radically different ideas and perceptions.

A sense of being part of the great all-inclusive life prompts us to reflect on our own place and on how we ought to live. Guarding others' lives, the ecology and the earth is the same as protecting one's own life. By like token, wounding them is the same thing as wounding oneself. Consequently, it is the duty of each of us to participate as members of the life community in the evolution of the universe. We can do this by guarding earth's ecological system.

In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that “this world” is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit—there is the sin.

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.

MichaelTobias Evolution does not condemn us. Only our choices can do that. It is imperative that we cherish, nurture, and endeavor to protect all life forms. That is the wake-up call of this generation. No environmentalist can be true to him/herself if they inflict pain on other creatures. Vegetarian ethics is basic to the last ecological frontier.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory.

the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.

Inside our skulls are fish, reptile and shrew brains, as well as the highest centers that allow us to integrate information in our unique way; and some of our newer brain components talk to each other via some very ancient structures indeed. Our brains are makeshift structures, opportunistically assembled by Nature over hundreds of millions of years, and in multiple different ecological contexts.

It isn’t the world at stake, Ender. Just us. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the earth is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust, it would get on with the next step in evolution. But humanity doesn’t want to die. As a species, we have evolved to survive.

From the Hive Manual. The relationship between ecology and evolution is extremely close, deeply implicated in organic changes among a given animal population, and profoundly sensitive to the density of numbers within a given habitat. Our adaptations aim to increase the population tolerance, to permit a human density ten to twelve times greater than is currently considered possible. Out of this, we will get our survival variations.

The predisposition to religious belief is an ineradicable part of human behavior. Mankind has produced 100,000 religions. It is an illusion to think that scientific humanism and learning will dispel religious belief. Men would rather believe than know... A kind of Darwinistic survival of the fittest has occurred with religions... The ecological principle called Gause's law holds that competition is maximal between species with identical needs... Even submission to secular religions such as Communism and guru cults involve willing subordination of the individual to the group. Religious practices confer biological advantage. The mechanisms of religion include (1) objectification (the reduction of reality to images and definitions that are easily understood and cannot be refuted), (2) commitment through faith (a kind of tribalism enacted through self-surrender), (3) and myth (the narratives that explain the tribe's favored position on the earth, often incorporating supernatural forces struggling for control, apocalypse, and millennium).

I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.

The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus.

The postmodern poststructuralists go from saying “there is no final perspective” (or “perspectives are boundless”) to saying “therefore there is no advantage in any perspective over another.” This leveling of perspectives is not an interrelation of all perspectives but is itself merely one particular and covertly privileged perspective (and thus ends up, as we have seen, being perfectly self-contradictory: there is no advantaged perspective except mine, which maintains that all other perspectives are not so privileged).

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as three years of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture were able to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent. This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four.

Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest.

Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive “fitness” but toward simply filling available ecological niches.

And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.

the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with “compassion” written all over it.

To claim the world as created is to claim God's care for it and our responsibility to care for it.

A sharp drop in global temperature 115 thousand years before the fall was the start of sporadic ice ages. The last glacial spell Earthers experienced ended only 12.5 TBF.

The great leap was one from adaptation to, to control over the natural environment.

As we have seen before, cities are like mad scientists, creating their own crazy ecological concoctions by throwing all kinds of native and foreign elements into the urban melting pot.

These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.

The planet’s witnessing the appearance of a new creature now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty. Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily-perhaps this is the way they communicate. The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic forgoing of all content unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits.

Roszak argued that modern psychology has split the inner life from the outer life, and that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.

Everything in that frame is judged in terms of the human, as if we are outside the ecological matrix in which we are embedded, as if evolution ended once and for all with our emergence, with the development of our brains.

First we have to step out of our dream of separation, the insularity with which we have imprisoned ourselves, and acknowledge that we are a part of a multidimensional living spiritual being we call the world. The world is much more than just the physical world we perceive through the senses, just as we are much more than just our own physical bodies. Only as a part of a living whole can we help to heal the whole. Just as we need to work together with the outer ecosystem, we need to work together with the inner worlds. We need their support and help, their power and knowledge. The devas understand the patterns of climate change better than we do, because they are the forces behind the weather and the winds. Just as plant devas know the healing powers of plants (and taught the shamans and healers their knowledge), so are there more powerful devas that know and guide the patterns of evolution of the whole planet.

. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness. . . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen. The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive. All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like. The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature. . . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory

The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key.

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

it’s human behavior, human social behavior, and in many cases abnormal human social behavior. And it is indeed a mess, a subject involving brain chemistry, hormones, sensory cues, prenatal environment, early experience, genes, both biological and cultural evolution, and ecological pressures, among other things.

As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.

Few ideas in all of human history have been more thoroughly misunderstood than the simple concept of evolution. Intellectuals in Victorian England, eager to use the science of their time to bolster a class system already cracking under the weight of its own injustice, invented the notion that some living things- and thus some people- are "more evolved" than others. That turn of phrase is still much used today, but in the real world, it is quite simple nonsense. Every living being is just as evolved as every other, because every living thing has been shaped by evolution over the exact same period of time since life first evolved

She is soft, but knows when to stand her ground. Natural disasters aren't a mistake. They're not just a big ol' whoopsy that happened when Mother Nature and Source were planning their calendars out. Mother nature is intentional. Everything about her is intentional. Every rainfall, is intentional. Every sunny day, is intentional. Every storm, is intentional and every natural disaster is intentional. She will roar when she needs, when she needs us to take a closer look. That's what natural disasters are. She won't rob us of our opportunity to rise up together- that's our evolution and she's not gonna do our dirty (epic) work for us. But she will nudge us. And she does nudge us. Do you notice? If we don't do our best to take care of global warming, the tides will rise and beach side cities will be wiped. Perhaps our kids or our kids' kids won't ever see the glaciers of today. She's not gonna cover up for us, but she will love us on our journey and gives us clues and signs. It's up to us to pay attention.

When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. .

We cannot undo what we've done; we cannot go back in time. Change - ecological, economic, social - is inevitable. Some of it will be tragic. We will lose things we love - species, places, relationships with the nonhuman world that have endured for millennia. Some change will be hard to predict. Ecosystems will reshuffle, species will evolve. We will change too.

The case I’ve presented in this book suggests that humans are undergoing what biologists call a major transition. Such transitions occur when less complex forms of life combine in some way to give rise to more complex forms. Examples include the transition from independently replicating molecules to replicating packages called chromosomes or, the transition from different kinds of simple cells to more complex cells in which these once-distinct simple cell types came to perform critical functions and become entirely mutually interdependent, such as the nucleus and mitochondria in our own cells. Our species’ dependence on cumulative culture for survival, on living in cooperative groups, on alloparenting and a division of labor and information, and on our communicative repertoires mean that humans have begun to satisfy all the requirements for a major biological transition. Thus, we are literally the beginnings of a new kind of animal.1 By contrast, the wrong way to understand humans is to think that we are just a really smart, though somewhat less hairy, chimpanzee. This view is surprisingly common. Understanding how this major transition is occurring alters how we think about the origins of our species, about the reasons for our immense ecological success, and about the uniqueness of our place in nature. The insights generated alter our understandings of intelligence, faith, innovation, intergroup competition, cooperation, institutions, rituals, and the psychological differences between populations. Recognizing that we are a cultural species means that, even in the short run (when genes don’t have enough time to change), institutions, technologies, and languages are coevolving with psychological biases, cognitive abilities, emotional responses, and preferences. In the longer run, genes are evolving to adapt to these culturally constructed worlds, and this has been, and is now, the primary driver of human genetic evolution. Figure 17.1.

It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the “I” and the “we” dimensions, it doesn’t understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs.

A huge shift in consciousness is underway in our time. A sea change from the “I and it” marketplace conception of the world to an “I and thou” sense of communal identity. Joanna Macy describes it as a “Great Turning” an ecological revolution widening our awareness of the intricate web that connects us. Teilhard de Chardin called it an evolution of consciousness, an emergence of the “planetization” of humankind. We have to think now like a planet, not like separate individuals. We need a “psyche the size of the earth,” James Hillman says, “the greater part of the souls lies outside the body.

Cultures and religions exist, and are explained, to the extent that they reliably express stucturally enduring relationships among mental states and behaviors and where these material relationships enable a given population of individuals to maintain itself in repeated social interaction within a range of ecological contexts. Cultures and religions are not ontologically distinct “superorganisms” or “independent variables” with precise contents or boundaries. They are no more things in and of themselves, or “natural kinds” with their own special laws, than are cloud or sand patterns. Although

The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.

Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, soil, and ecology. Richard Nilsen and Rosemary Menninger covered organic farming and community gardens. J. Baldwin was an impeccable source on “appropriate technology”—solar, wind, insulation, bicycles. Lloyd Kahn wrote about handmade houses. We promoted bioregionalism, restoration, and “reinhabitation” of one’s natural environment. There’s now an insightful book about all that by Andrew Kirk—Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007).

But while the evolutionary escalator is an incredibly common expression of a belief in human exceptionalism, it doesn’t have any real basis in ecological reality. The view is one Darwin specifically rejected, which makes it all the more ironic that it is the neo-Darwinians that have spread it about so much. Darwin’s own perspective, as the English philosopher Mary Midgley comments, is much different, he did . . . not see evolution as an escalator, but as a sinuous, branching radiating pattern—not a staircase, but perhaps a bush or seaweed. Life-forms diverge from each other to meet particular needs in their various environments. Our own species figures then only as one among the many, with no special status or guarantee of supremacy. This notion has, however, always been found far less exciting than the escalator model, which has been enormously popular ever since it was promoted by Herbert Spencer, in spite of Darwin’s own rejection of it and its evident complete irrelevance to this theory.13

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

If farming was “the biggest mistake in human history,” which triggered lots of evolutionary mismatch diseases, then why did it spread so rapidly and thoroughly? The biggest reason is that farmers pump out babies much faster than hunter-gatherers. In today’s economy, a higher reproductive rate often entails ominous connotations of expense: more mouths to feed, more college tuition bills to pay. Too many children can be a source of poverty. But to farmers, more offspring yield more wealth because children are a useful, fantastic labor force. After a few years of care, a farmer’s children can work in the fields and in the home, helping to take care of crops, herd animals, mind younger children, and process food. In fact, a large part of the success of farming is that farmers breed their own labor force more effectively than hunter-gatherers, which pumps energy back into the system, driving up fertility rates.20 Farming therefore leads to exponential population growth, causing farming to spread. Another factor that encouraged the spread of agriculture is the way farmers alter the ecology around their farms in ways that hinder if not prevent any more hunting and gathering. Occasionally

So many synapses,' Drisana said. 'Ten trillion synapses in the cortex alone.' Danlo made a fist and asked, 'What do the synapses look like?' 'They're modelled as points of light. Ten trillion points of light.' She didn't explain how neurotransmitters diffuse across the synapses, causing the individual neurons to fire. Danlo knew nothing of chemistry or electricity. Instead, she tried to give him some idea of how the heaume's computer stored and imprinted language. 'The computer remembers the synapse configuration of other brains, brains that hold a particular language. This memory is a simulation of that language. And then in your brain, Danlo, select synapses are excited directly and strengthened. The computer speeds up the synapses' natural evolution.' Danlo tapped the bridge of his nose; his eyes were dark and intent upon a certain sequence of thought. 'The synapses are not allowed to grow naturally, yes?' 'Certainly not. Otherwise imprinting would be impossible.' 'And the synapse configuration – this is really the learning, the essence of another's mind, yes?' 'Yes, Danlo.' 'And not just the learning – isn't this so? You imply that anything in the mind of another could be imprinted in my mind?' 'Almost anything.' 'What about dreams? Could dreams be imprinted?' 'Certainly.' 'And nightmares?' Drisana squeezed his hand and reassured him. 'No one would imprint a nightmare into another.' 'But it is possible, yes?' Drisana nodded her head. 'And the emotions ... the fears or loneliness or rage?' 'Those things, too. Some imprimaturs – certainly they're the dregs of the City – some do such things.' Danlo let his breath out slowly. 'Then how can I know what is real and what is unreal? Is it possible to imprint false memories? Things or events that never happened? Insanity? Could I remember ice as hot or see red as blue? If someone else looked at the world through shaida eyes, would I be infected with this way of seeing things?' Drisana wrung her hands together, sighed, and looked helplessly at Old Father. 'Oh ho, the boy is difficult, and his questions cut like a sarsara!' Old Father stood up and painfully limped over to Danlo. Both his eyes were open, and he spoke clearly. 'All ideas are infectious, Danlo. Most things learned early in life, we do not choose to learn. Ah, and much that comes later. So, it's so: the two wisdoms. The first wisdom: as best we can, we must choose what to put into our brains. And the second wisdom: the healthy brain creates its own ecology; the vital thoughts and ideas eventually drive out the stupid, the malignant and the parasitical.

Sure. When a behavior occurs, we behavioral biologists ask, “Why did that behavior just happen?” And it turns out that that’s like asking a whole bunch of questions. Part of what we’re asking is, “What occurred in the brain of that individual one second ago?” But we’re also asking, “What were the sensory cues in the environment a minute ago that triggered those neurons?” And we’re also asking, “What did that person’s hormone levels this morning have to do with making him more or less sensitive to those sensory cues that then triggered those neurons?” And then you’re off and running to neuroplasticity—over the course of months, back to childhood, and back to the fetal environment (which turns out to be wildly influential in adult behavior). And then you’re back to genes. If you’re still asking, “Why did that behavior occur?” you’re also asking, “What sort of culture was this person raised in?” Which often winds up meaning, “What were this person’s ancestors doing a couple of hundred years ago, and what were the ecological influences on that?” And finally, you’re asking something about the millions of years of evolutionary pressures. So it’s not just the case that it’s important to look at these things at multiple levels. Ultimately they merge into the same. If you’re talking about the brain, you’re talking about the childhood experiences when the brain was assembled. If you’re talking about genes, you’re implicitly talking about their evolution. All of these are a confluence of influences on behavior that are all interconnected.

The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that’s what’s marvel-worthy. How does optimization first arise in the universe? If an intelligent agent designed Nature, who designed the intelligent agent? Where is the first design that has no designer? The puzzle is not how the first stage of the bootstrap can be super-clever and super-efficient; the puzzle is how it can happen at all. Evolution resolves the infinite regression, not by being super-clever and super-efficient, but by being stupid and inefficient and working anyway. This is the marvel. For professional reasons, I often have to discuss the slowness, randomness, and blindness of evolution. Afterward someone says: “You just said that evolution can’t plan simultaneous changes, and that evolution is very inefficient because mutations are random. Isn’t that what the creationists say? That you couldn’t assemble a watch by randomly shaking the parts in a box?” But the reply to creationists is not that you can assemble a watch by shaking the parts in a box. The reply is that this is not how evolution works. If you think that evolution does work by whirlwinds assembling 747s, then the creationists have successfully misrepresented biology to you; they’ve sold the strawman. The real answer is that complex machinery evolves either incrementally, or by adapting previous complex machinery used for a new purpose. Squirrels jump from treetop to treetop using just their muscles, but the length they can jump depends to some extent on the aerodynamics of their bodies. So now there are flying squirrels, so aerodynamic they can glide short distances. If birds were wiped out, the descendants of flying squirrels might reoccupy that ecological niche in ten million years, gliding membranes transformed into wings. And the creationists would say, “What good is half a wing? You’d just fall down and splat. How could squirrelbirds possibly have evolved incrementally?

I do not believe that we have finished evolving. And by that, I do not mean that we will continue to make ever more sophisticated machines and intelligent computers, even as we unlock our genetic code and use our biotechnologies to reshape the human form as we once bred new strains of cattle and sheep. We have placed much too great a faith in our technology. Although we will always reach out to new technologies, as our hands naturally do toward pebbles and shells by the seashore, the idea that the technologies of our civilized life have put an end to our biological evolution—that “Man” is a finished product—is almost certainly wrong. It seems to be just the opposite. In the 10,000 years since our ancestors settled down to farm the land, in the few thousand years in which they built great civilizations, the pressures of this new way of life have caused human evolution to actually accelerate. The rate at which genes are being positively selected to engender in us new features and forms has increased as much as a hundredfold. Two genes linked to brain size are rapidly evolving. Perhaps others will change the way our brain interconnects with itself, thus changing the way we think, act, and feel. What other natural forces work transformations deep inside us? Humanity keeps discovering whole new worlds. Without, in only five centuries, we have gone from thinking that the earth formed the center of the universe to gazing through our telescopes and identifying countless new galaxies in an unimaginably vast cosmos of which we are only the tiniest speck. Within, the first scientists to peer through microscopes felt shocked to behold bacteria swarming through our blood and other tissues. They later saw viruses infecting those bacteria in entire ecologies of life living inside life. We do not know all there is to know about life. We have not yet marveled deeply enough at life’s essential miracle. How, we should ask ourselves, do the seemingly soulless elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, zinc, iron, and all the others organize themselves into a fully conscious human being? How does matter manage to move itself? Could it be that an indwelling consciousness makes up the stuff of all things? Could this consciousness somehow animate the whole grand ecology of evolution, from the forming of the first stars to the creation of human beings who look out at the universe’s glittering constellations in wonder? Could consciousness somehow embrace itself, folding back on itself, in a new and natural technology of the soul? If it could, this would give new meaning to Nietzsche’s insight that: “The highest art is self–creation.” Could we, really, shape our own evolution with the full force of our consciousness, even as we might exert our will to reach out and mold a lump of clay into a graceful sculpture? What is consciousness, really? What does it mean to be human?

We cannot seem to help ourselves they said. Thus, the hominid spark of intelligence flares, burns everything around it, and fades. Some humans will survive the great conflagration. Thus, begins an endless cycle of destruction spiraling downward until our species is gone. We can hope that before the sun begins to become unstable (it is about half way there now) evolution can produce a new and better intelligence that will have sufficient breadth and depth to understand the ecological consequences of its actions.

Our basic understanding of evolutionary theory (how evolution works) in the early twenty-first century may be summed up as follows:   1. Mutation introduces genetic variation, which may introduce phenotypic variation. 2. Developmental processes can introduce broader phenotypic variation, which may be heritable. 3. Gene flow and genetic drift mix genetic variation (and potentially its phenotypic correlates) without regard to the function of those genes or traits. 4. Natural selection shapes genotypic and phenotypic variation in response to specific constraints and pressures in the environment. 5. At any given time one or more of the processes above can be affecting a population. 6. Dynamic organism-environment interaction can result in niche construction, changing pressures of natural selection and resulting in ecological inheritance. 7. Cultural patterns and contexts can impact gene flow and the pressures of natural selection, which in turn can affect genetic evolution (gene-culture coevolution). 8. Multiple inheritance systems (genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic) can all provide information and contexts that enable populations to change over time or avoid certain changes.

starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call “the great reversal.” Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. “Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge”—and where is the empirical proof for that?

Oppression as a causal explanation is deficient and inadequate in almost every respect, since, among other things, it simply does not fit the data curve. “These oppression theories,” says Chafetz, “are based on vaguely defined concepts often ill suited to operationalization, such as ‘patriarchy,’ ‘female subordination,’ and ‘sexism.’ The use of such emotion-laden but unclear terms, combined typically with a heavily normative approach to the topic of sex inequality, results in a maximum of rhetoric but a minimum of clear insight.” No, this polarization of the sexes—with males dominating the public/productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, to the detriment of both—has virtually nothing to do with male oppression and female sheepdom/subjugation. It has everything to do with life in the biosphere.

The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

Mutual Aid. Studies of friendship in Western contexts consistently find that people see friends as people they can trust to offer help, to care for them, to look out for their interests, and to make sacrifices in times of need.23 Of all the qualities of friendship considered here, mutual aid is also the most frequently cited behavior in cross-cultural descriptions of friendship (described in 93 percent of societies and never disconfirmed).

Friends (at least good ones) like one another, enjoy one another’s company, and maintain mutual goodwill. They help one another in times of need, listen to one another’s problems, make sacrifices, and provide emotional support when necessary. They share confidences and can be trusted not to divulge important secrets. Their relationship is personal and private, and it does not answer to a higher authority. They engage in constructive conflict management, and they try to resolve differences among themselves. Friends should not go to court to resolve a dispute. Ideally, friends do not care what they get out of the relationship but value the friendship for its own sake. They are honest with one another, feel free to express themselves to one another, but do not pass judgment. Finally, unlike partners in kin or work relations, one can choose one’s friends.

We are part of the natural world and evolved within its embrace. This understanding is perhaps as ancient as humanity itself. Giving children the gift of knowing nature as their home, of feeling themselves as part of the web of life is an invaluable life resource for exploring their inner self and for developing their ability to act in this world and on its behalf. It is perhaps our culture’s break with nature, the viewing of our planet as nothing more than a collection of things to be exploited and discarded, that has brought us to this time of crisis. And perhaps more than anything else, this time of turmoil and transformation calls for a rediscovery of humanity’s place within the earth community. This revisioning of our relationship with life on earth, rooted in indigenous wisdom and shaped for contemporary times, is perhaps the cornerstone of the human initiation and evolution being called for today. For children to discover their place within the natural world, to grow their connection with it, has everything to do with their ability to remain grounded in turbulent times, everything to do with their being able to grow their vision and play their part in this upcoming transition.

If we see the biologically differentiated roles of men and women as something imposed by men on women, then we to simultaneously assume the complete pigification of and the total sheepification of women. To automatically assume that differentiation of roles is the result of domination is to automatically define a particular group as victim, which automatically and irrevocably disempowers that group in the very attempt to liberate it.

The belief in the sanctity of one’s idiosyncrasy—especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery—is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More

In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.

The “Higher Self” camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be “one’s own choice”—the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit. This is not Eros; this is Phobos—a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It)—as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All.

Thus, he says, those who would “eliminate from the universe” what they think of as “inferior beings” would simply “eliminate Providence itself,” whose nature it is to “produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.

one of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.

Suppose that, through legislation (an artificial means) and through a government-run school voucher program (an artificially created market), public schools are privatized. "Natural evolution" will then take place: Schools will have to compete, only the best competitors will survive, and those schools that cannot compete will cease to exist. The surviving schools, by the Folk Theory of the Best Result, will be the best schools. It is an argument entirely based on two metaphors and a folk theory, all of which derive from Strict Father morality. Many people do not notice that Evolution Is Survival Of The Best Competitor is, indeed, a metaphor, much less a Strict Father metaphor. One way to reveal its metaphorical character is to contrast it with a metaphor for evolution that takes the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality: Evolution Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured. Here "best nurtured" is taken to include both literal nurturing by parents and others and metaphorical nurturing by nature itself. Where fitting an ecological niche is being metaphorized as winning a competition in one case, it is metaphorized as being cared for by nature in the other. Both are metaphors for evolution, but they have very different entailments, especially when combined with the metaphor Natural Change Is Evolution and the folk theory that evolution yields the best result. Putting these together yields a very different composite metaphor for natural change, namely, Natural Change Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured, which produces the best result. Applied to the issue of whether public schools should be privatized, this metaphor would entail that they should not be. Rather, public schools need to be "better nurtured," that is, given the resources they need to improve: better-trained and better-paid teachers, smaller classes, better facilities, programs for involving parents, community involvement, and so on.

In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).

Subspecialty : Botany Studies : plants Subspecialty : Zoology Studies : animals Subspecialty : Marine biology Studies : organisms living in and around oceans, and seas Subspecialty : Fresh water biology Studies : organisms living in and around freshwater lakes, streams, rivers, ponds, etc. Subspecialty : Microbiology Studies : microorganisms Subspecialty : Bacteriology Studies : bacteria Subspecialty : Virology Studies : viruses ( see Figure below ) Subspecialty : Entomology Studies : insects Subspecialty : Taxonomy Studies : the classification of organisms Subspecialty : Studies : Life Science : Cell biology What it Examines : cells and their structures (see Figure below ) Life Science : Anatomy What it Examines : the structures of animals Life Science : Morphology What it Examines : the form and structure of living organisms Life Science : Physiology What it Examines : the physical and chemical functions of tissues and organs Life Science : Immunology What it Examines : the mechanisms inside organisms that protect them from disease and infection Life Science : Neuroscience What it Examines : the nervous system Life Science : Developmental biology and embryology What it Examines : the growth and development of plants and animals Life Science : Genetics What it Examines : the genetic make up of all living organisms (heredity) Life Science : Biochemistry What it Examines : the chemistry of living organisms Life Science : Molecular biology What it Examines : biology at the molecular level Life Science : Epidemiology What it Examines : how diseases arise and spread Life Science : What it Examines : Life Science : Ecology What it Examines : how various organisms interact with their environments Life Science : Biogeography What it Examines : the distribution of living organisms (see Figure below ) Life Science : Population biology What it Examines : the biodiversity, evolution, and environmental biology of populations of organisms Life Science : What it Examines :

Humankind is now moving toward a time, possibly as soon as within a few generations, when we will no longer be able to expect nature to adjust rapidly enough to ensure our own survival. Rather, civilization on Earth will either have to adapt to the natural environment with ever-accelerating speed, or generate artificial environmental conditions needed for our ecological existence. From two magnificent yet local systems—society and machines—will likely emerge a symbiotically functioning technoculture, the epitome (as far as we know) of complexity writ large in nature[.]

Matter without any apparent life, i.e. abiotic matter, also supports our sustenance. Without Jupiter and Saturn orbiting out past Earth, life may not have been able to gain a foothold on our planet. The two gas giants likely helped stabilize the solar system, protecting Earth and the other interior, rocky planets from frequent run-ins with big, fast-moving objects. Sun and moon give us light and their pre-determined movements make our days and night liveable in terms of length and temperature. Due to the Sun and Moon’s gravitational pull, we have tides. Seas and rivers give us food and water. Likewise, forests, life in forests, mountains and bio-diversity together provide the ecological balance which helps in sustaining life.

Quoting from page 308: The Competitive Exclusion Principle. No two organisms that compete in every activity can coexist indefinitely in the same environment. To coexist in time, organisms that are potentially completely competitive must be geographically isolated from each other. Otherwise, the one that is the less efficient yields to the more efficient, no matter how slight the difference. When two competing organisms coexist in the same geographical region, close examination always shows that they are not complete competitors, that one of them draws on a resource of the environment that is not available to the other. The corollary of the principle is that where there is no geographical isolation of genetically and reproductively isolated populations, there must be as many ecological niches as there are populations. The necessary condition for geographical coexistence is ecological specialization. Quoting page 86: The Exclusion Principle in biology plays a role similar to that of the Newtonian laws of motion in physics. It is a prime guide to the discovery of facts. We use the principle coupled with an axiom that is equally fundamental but which is almost never explicitly stated. We may call this the Inequality Axiom, and it states: If two populations are distinguishable, they are competitively unequal. Quoting page 87: Because of the compound-interest effect, no difference between competing populations is trivial. The slightest difference--and our acceptance of the Inequality Axiom asserts that a difference always exists--will result in the eventual extinction of one population by another. Put in another way, the Exclusion Principle tells us that two distinguishable populations can coexist in the same geographical region only if they live in different ecological worlds (thus avoiding complete competition and strict coexistence). Quoting page 88-89: Recall now the sequence of development in the process of speciation. Initially, the freshly isolated populations are nearly the same genetically; as time goes on, they diverge more and more. When they are distinguishably different, but still capable of interbreeding (if put together), we may speak of them as races. Ultimately, if the physical isolation endures long enough, they become so different from each other that interbreeding is impossible; we then say that the two populations are reproductively isolated from each other, and we speak of them as distinct species. ... What are the various possible outcomes of the speciation process, and what their relative frequencies? In the light of our assumption, it is clear that, most often, the speciation process will go no further than the formation of races before the physical isolation comes to an end and the germ plasm of the two races is melded into one by interbreeding. If, however, the speciation process continues until separate species are formed before the physical barrier breaks down, then what happens? The outcome is plainly dependent on the extent to which ecological differentiation has occurred: Do the two species occupy the same ecological niche, or not--that is, are they completely competitive? It seems probable that the degree of ecological differentiation will also increase with time spent in physical isolation. On this assumption, we would predict that, more often than not, "sister species" will be incapable of coexistence: when the physical isolation is at an end, one sister species will extinguish the other. Quoting page 253: The example illustrates the general rule that as a species becomes increasingly "successful," its struggle for existence ceases to be one of struggle with the physical environment or with other species and come to be almost exclusively competition with its own kind. We call that species most successful that has made its own kind its worst enemy. Man enjoys this kind of success.

Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

Turtles all the way up, all the way down. What deconstruction puts into question is the desire to find a final resting place, in either wholeness or partness or anything in between. Every time somebody finds a final interpretation or a foundational interpretation of a text (or life or history or Kosmos), deconstruction is on hand to say that the total context—or Wholistic interpretation—does not exist, because it is also unendingly a part of yet another text forever. As Culler puts it, “Total context [final Wholism] is unmasterable, both in principle and in practice. Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless.”8 Transfinite turtles.

Just a few years ago, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis’s Department of Ecology and Evolution determined that many species of birds, including juncos, finches, and warblers, have ventriloquial abilities. (Her research focused on a yellow-rumped warbler and a stuffed owl.) Other studies followed, all demonstrating that birds can adjust their “acoustic directionality” in order to beam their alarm calls in chosen directions.

In his recent critique of fashionable ecological philosophies, Andreas Malm pointedly remarks: 'When Latour writes that, in a warming world, 'humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action,' he gets it all wrong: there is nothing intensively subjective but a lot of objectivity in ice melting. Or, as one placard at a demonstration held by scientists at the American Geophysical Union in December 2016: 'Ice has no agenda - it just melts.'' The reverse claim is that human interventions have only had such a menacing and even fatal consequences for our living conditions within the Earth system because human agency has not yet sufficiently freed itself from its dependence on natural history. This seems to be the conviction behind the 'Ecomodernist Manifesto,' for instance, which claims that 'knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, even great, Anthropocene,' and that a good Anthropocene 'demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.' In this confrontation, an age-old dualism has assumed a new guise: the attempt to establish a complicity with the forces of destiny - if necessary at the price of surrendering human subjectivity or perhaps involving other forms of self-sacrifice - is juxtaposed with the attempt to achieve human autonomy by subordinating the planet under the superior power of human ingenuity. These two positions, a modernist stance and a position critical of it, are usually considered to represent mutually exclusive alternatives. Actually, however, the two positions have more in common than first meets the eye. At the beginning of chapter 3, I referred to Greek philosophers who suggested that the best way to protect oneself against the vicissitudes of fate was to learn how to submit oneself to it willingly, sacrificing one's drives and ambitions while expecting, at the same time, that this complicity with destiny would empower one to master worldly challenges. What unites the seemingly opposite positions, more generally speaking, is a shared move away from engagement with the concrete and individual human agency (i.e., with empirical human subjects and with the unequal power distribution in human societies) toward some powerful form of abstraction, be it 'to distribute agency' or to use the 'growing social, economic, and technological powers' of humanity for a better Anthropocene. I suggest that we take a more systemic look at the role of humanity in the Earth system, taking into account both its material interventions and the knowledge that enabled them.

The problem is also not, as suggested by the technosphere concept, that human beings are incapable of controlling systems that have a larger range of behaviors than they do themselves. The problem rather lies in the question of what 'control' means in the first place. The stewardship of technological systems and infrastructures always depends on their specific nature (in particular, the way they are embedded in natural and cultural environment) as well as on their representation in knowledge and belief systems. Human cognition is always embodied cognition. There are historical examples showing that humans have been able to manage and sustain extremely complex ecologies and infrastructures of their own making over the long term. The systems' potential behaviors always far exceeded those of their human components, but these were typically ecologies and infrastructures in which the relevant regulative structures of human behavior had themselves been coevolving over long periods, including in their representation by knowledge and belief systems. As recent work on Japanese ecologies during the Tokugawa period (between 1603 and 1868) shows, age-old traditions had accumulated knowledge on how to sustainably manage a complex landscape providing humans with food, shelter, clothing, and energy. The knowledge was implemented through a complex system of governance and material practices ranging from sanitation to publishing.

One interesting aspect of his book is that it argued that the more specialized a species is, the less likely it is to continue to recognize appropriate habitats as conditions change. Species displaying a less plastic/diverse inventory of behavioral choices, such as those focusing on a single type of food, are the most susceptible. For instance, parasites often have a single host species, which does not present any problems for them as long as the host species does not become extinct. That is why, according to Eldredge, ecologically specialized species become extinct at much higher rates than do ecologically generalized species in the fossil record. The concept that specialization often leads to an evolutionary dead end was first proposed by Cope as the “law of the unspecialized” and has continued to be key for evolutionary biology since then. In Eldredge’s view, the balance of life will tend to produce ecologically specialized organisms because they often flourish more than generalists in the short run, but extinction then normally affects more the ranks of the specialists. In the long run, the generalists thus hang on—‘living fossils’ often being generalists—whereas the ranks of specialists are quickly refilled by the continuous evolution of new taxa. For him, taxa that descend from species that are already somewhat specialized tend to have a greater chance of focusing on a specific portion of the resources not completely exploited by the parental taxa. He designated this as a “ratchet-like mechanism” of the quick accumulation of evolutionary change as lineages keep splitting and new taxa are formed from old ones within specialized lineages. Thus, he directly connects behavioral/ecological specializations to cladogenesis and the rapid evolutionary events predicted in punctuated equilibrium. In turn, he argues that stasis is often related to generalist lineages because without a comparable degree of successful speciation, these lineages tend to have far fewer extant species at any one time than their specialized counterparts. That is, generalists are not really evolving at slower morphological rates: they are simply not generating so many new species. As a result, the gradual fluctuation of form among the members of the generalized taxa is not being fixed by cladogenesis, thus leading to new species.

We need to change the ways in which we talk about humanity and the environment and in order to do so, we need to change the way in which we think about them, not an easy task given that we use language to think and our languages make us conceive the environment as detached. A possible way out to help us approach problems, without being drawn back by the mental models that fail us, is Systems Dynamics (Meadows 2008; Sterman 2012). Unfortunately, Sterman explains, most efforts made by individuals and institutions to enhance sustainability are directed at the symptoms and not at the causes and systems (any system) will respond to any change introduced with what is known as ‘policy resistance’, that is the existing system will tend to react to change in ways that we had not intended when we first designed the intervention (a few examples are road-building programs designed to reduce congestion that ends up increasing traffic or antibiotics that stimulate the evolution of drug-resistant pathogens—for a longer list and further explanation see Sterman 2012, 24). Systems Dynamics allows us to calculate scientifically the way in which a complex system will react to change and to account beforehand for what we usually describe as ‘side-effects’. Side effects, Sterman argues, ‘are not a feature of reality but a sign that the boundaries of our mental models are too narrow, our time horizons too short’ (24). As Gonella et al. (2019) explain: ”As long as we consider the geobiosphere as a sub-system (a resources provider) of the human-made economic system, any attempt to fix environmental and social problems by keeping the business as usual, i.e., the mantra of economic growth, will fail. The reality tells us the reverse: geobiosphere is not a sub-system of the economy, economy is a sub-system of geobiosphere. As systems thinkers know, trying to keep alive at any cost the operation of a sub-system will give rise to a re-arrangement of the super-system – the geobiosphere – that will self-reorganize to absorb and make ineffective our attempt, then continuing its own way.” (Gonella et al. 2019)

Preface to the Paperback Edition The coronavirus, a severe acute respiratory syndrome, has unleashed a pandemic since the original publication of Epidemics and Society. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is still too new and too poorly understood to allow us to assess its ultimate impact, but its broad contours have become sufficiently clear, and several of its features relate closely to the themes of this book. Like all pandemics, COVID-19 is not an accidental or random event. Epidemics afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other. Microbes that ignite pandemics are those whose evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanization lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world. Particularly relevant is the multiplication of contacts with bats, which are a natural reservoir of innumerable viruses capable of crossing the species barrier and spilling over to humans.

The designer who aspires to build on the scale of an ecology must abandon the conceit of absolute control of her medium and instead seek the abstract understanding of the scientist, and then apply this understanding to natural processes with the force-subverting skill of the jujitsu master. We cannot specify an ecology, but nor are we powerless to affect its evolution.

Collaboration and Competition. We must re-educate and improve awareness of the falsehoods erected around Darwinism and increase the recognition that evolution and ecology are a dynamic balance of competitive and mutually supportive linkages.

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages. Only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain. That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

Animals learn what they need to learn and have specialized ways of sifting through the massive information around them. They actively seek, collect, and store information. (p. 270)

Empirical science left repercussions in its wake: the sudden advancement of technology upset the natural order. But the recent interest in ecology, the study of man's relationship to his environment, by 1970, have come too late. Certainly it is too late for conservationism, the attempt to redress natural balances. What is called for is a revolutionary ecological program that would attempt to establish a humane artificial (man-made) balance in place of the natural one, thus also realizing the original goal of empirical science: human mastery of matter. The best new currents in ecology and social planning agree with feminist aims. The way that these two social phenomena, feminism and revolutionary ecology, have emerged with such seeming coincidence illustrates a historical truth: new theories and new movements do not develop in a vacuum, they arise to spearhead the necessary social solutions to new problems resulting from contradictions in the environment. In this case, both movements have arisen in response to the same contradiction: animal life within a technology. In the case of feminism the problem is a moral one: the biological family unit has always oppressed women and children, but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive “natural” conditions, along with their cultural reinforcements. In the case of the new ecology, we find that independent of any moral stance, for pragmatic — survival — reasons alone, it has become necessary to free humanity from the tyranny of its biology. Humanity can no longer afford to remain in the transitional stage between simple animal existence and full control of nature. And we are much closer to a major evolutionary jump, indeed, to direction of our own evolution, than we are to a return to the animal kingdom from which we came.

…either we behave like intelligent, rational animals, respecting Nature and accelerating as much as possible the process of humanization we are only just beginning, or the quality of human life will deteriorate. Some of us are starting to have doubts about the rationality of human groups. But if we do not act rationally, we will suffer the same fate as some cultures and some stupid species of animals, of whose suffering and path to extinction all that remains are fossils. Species that do not change biologically, ecologically or socially when their habitat changes are bound to perish after a period of indescribable suffering.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.