The Success of the Species
It’s not all good news
How did we do it?
We, we humans I’m talking about, have infested every continent including the one that’s completely inhospitable to human life (why are we in Antarctica again?), and I’m with the polar bears on this one. We have not been good news for the rest of the living things on this planet.
How did this happen?
I remember watching a two-part series on NOVA called “Becoming Human” that gathered the then-latest data to trace the rise of this unlikely apex species.
The part that fascinated me was the fact that the bipeds that eventually became Homo Sapiens were not the only ones walking upright, making and using tools, creating art and developing rituals. There were numerous types of hominid bipeds wandering the plains of Africa two million years ago but then a funny thing happened.
Global climate catastrophe.
Nearly a millennium of unprecedented climate upheaval wreaked havoc on all life on the planet. Adapt and fast or line up for extinction. The extinction line became long as untold numbers of species bit the dust including most of those other interesting bipeds. As recently as 12,000 years ago, however, “we” included Neanderthals and another type of hominid nicknamed Hobbits (they were small but the fossil record says nothing about hairy feet). They held out as long as they could, but eventually, even they lost the adaptation lottery.
According to “Becoming Human” that millennium of drought, ice ages, floods, raging brush fires, more drought, wiping out of food sources, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, more floods, and disruption of water availability stressed everyone to the point of snapping. At one point (again, according to this documentary) Homo Sapiens were down to roughly two to three hundred breeding pairs on the entire planet.
Look at us now
One feature, or glitch depending on your point of view, that our millennium of hell bestowed upon Homo Sapiens was our big brains. Massive, weighty, ridiculous things that require a lot of calories and make giving birth tricky but which certainly have turned out to be up to the challenges of surviving the unsurvivable.
I seem to recall being told in science classes in the dark ages of the 1970s that bumblebees are aerodynamically incapable of flight. It turns out that’s not true but it’s an interesting analogy here.
Homo Sapiens would have seemed to be at a real disadvantage even in the post-apocalyptic world in which they were the last humans left. We only have one or two offspring at a time and it takes decades for them to mature. We’re shockingly ill-equipped to withstand predation from the big guys. No scales or armor, can’t really run fast, no horns or serious teeth. We would seem to be the ultimate sitting ducks in a world filled with big, hungry things.
Except for that brain.
That and the interesting phenomenon of ditching fur and heavy body hair in order to facilitate cooling by sweating. This gave us an edge when it came to long-distance running. We can’t run fast but we can run for hours without overheating and no wildebeest or gazelle can do that.
We came out of that millennium of extreme climate havoc with some impressive gifts but those gifts have proven to be problematic not only to everyone sharing the planet with us but to ourselves as well.
Big brains need stuff to do
It turns out that having a massive, always-churning, insanely adept pattern-seeking mechanism between our ears is sort of like having the largest and most well-equipped standing army the world has ever known.
That army needs to fight. A country with an army that powerful will inevitably find itself constantly at war (gee, who does that?).
A species with an enormous, ever-computing brain needs to keep that sucker busy. Now it’s true that many of the things our busy, busy brains have come up with are pretty awesome. Art, culture, comfortable shoes, music, literature, adjustable beds, dance, language, elevators, cuisine, and pilates come to mind. We’ve transformed much, if not most, of the planet in order to make ourselves comfortable (ok those with the money get to be comfortable and screw those losers without resources). We have cities filled with every entertainment and convenience. Very few of us need to be able to run a wounded wildebeest to ground in order to have dinner.
But there’s a darker list of shit these restless brains of ours have conjured that is going to be the death of us and, unfortunately, a whole bunch of other innocent bystanders (sorry polar bears).
Feel free to add to this list.
- Cars
- Hand-held electronics
- Opioids
- Racism
- Domesticated animals that we eat
- Agriculture (which seemed like such a great idea at the time)
- Strictly adhered-to gender roles
- Air conditioning
- Urban development
- The interstate highway system
- Guns
- Bigger guns that can shoot planes down, etc.
- The Atom Bomb (the biggest gun so far)
- Air travel
- Television
- Day-time television (so onerous it deserves its own bullet-point)
- Social media
- New media
- Sexism
- Tax havens
- Nuclear power plants
- Global trade agreements
- Fossil fuel
- Wars
- Healthcare insurance companies
- Credit cards
- Politics
- Mass manufacturing
- Nationalism (which is just tribalism writ large)
- Blockbuster movie franchises
- Single-family homes
- Advertising
- Organized religion
- Banks
- Bank bailouts
- Garbage
- Plastic surgery
We could invent a parlor game naming the multitude of ways in which these big ass brains of ours are ruining things for us and all the others just trying to live, fuck, and die their natural(ish) death on this planet.
And now we have COVID-19.
I’d caution our friends, the polar bears, not to get their hopes up. If we managed to survive The Black Death with medieval healthcare we’re very likely going to face this one down even more effectively. I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: we are the mammalian equivalent of cockroaches.
It’s going to take a direct asteroid hit to take us out (and even that’s not a given).
There seems to be a built-in self-destruct glitch, or feature depending on your point of view, in this species. It’s something that fascinates me so that I find myself veering around in big circles through other topics and returning to this one. The really interesting aspect, to me, is that over and over we’ve stood at the very brink of total species-wide annihilation and then we pull our shit together and explode the population. While many humans applaud this I’m ambivalent. It would be nice to give someone else a chance to be the apex species. They almost couldn’t make a worse mess of it than we have.
I say give the polar bears their shot!
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