Can humanity buck the trend?

It’s a pattern that’s played out time after time throughout the fossil record: complex dominant species almost always lose out in the event of rapid environmental changes. It’s their very nature that excludes the flexibility needed to survive.

During resulting extinction events, the number of higher species is radically reduced, along with the number of individuals of the surviving species, making more space for evolution to act in the context of the prevailing environmental conditions.

It’s this relationship with our environment that may be the reason we evolved into our current form. Given our complexity and attendant vulnerability, the evolutionary response to our unpredictable world was to produce a more adaptable and flexible form.

Walking upright freed our hands and coupled to a bigger brain has allowed us to develop existing tool use and problem solving skills. In the natural world we’re puny creatures, but adaptation is our greatest asset, but one that can be applied in two ways.

Millions of years have passed and we’ve become accustomed to altering the inconvenient parts of our environment rather than adapting to new conditions, but one day we’ll come to a point where the magnitude of change is too great.

It’s inevitable that the current abnormal period of climate stability will come to an end, and my concern is that we’ve become too numerous and rigid in our social organisation to apply the fruits of our evolution to the task of rapid adaptation.

We’ve become optimisers rather than innovators, trying to extract every last drop instead of searching for different solutions. We assess everything in terms of it’s cash price and expend our efforts in developing new regulations. We fail to find the important solutions when we need them, should we be surprised?

Imagination is the best part of being human, and it needs time and intellectual freedom to thrive, commodities I’ve found to be increasingly rare in our modern world. A return to uncertainty may be what our species really needs to rediscover it’s full potential.