Evolutionary suicide? A matter for survival

Jared Diamond has pointed out that complex societies in the past have collapsed because the carrying capacity of their local ecosystems was stretched to breaking point. It is quite possible that our own fragile system of international society will also collapse into a radioactive ash for precisely the same reason. The system of international relations created after the end of the Thirty Years War seems unable to meet pressing global challenges.

Australia has both rejected the Kyoto Protocol, thus serving as an important barrier to its becoming a binding global legal regime, and is embarking on a major increase in the volume of uranium exports in response to the world's nuclear renaissance. This is a double whammy.

This is also toxic because we are not dealing here with distant future problems. As a Friends of the Earth study (PDF 644KB) correctly pointed out, "unless decisive action to halt global carbon emissions is taken in the next decade, it may simply be too late and the trigger point for irreversible, dangerous climate change will have passed. Even stringent actions after that time will not be able to stop a climate system charged with strong feedback mechanisms running away from our capacity to control it."

A distant Martian observer may be looking on in bemused detachment. Here we have a seemingly intelligent species that has created a system of industrial civilisation that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction because the tenets of modern economics are in conflict with the laws of ecology. The system of international relations that overlays the global economic system is unable to implement the sort of solutions necessary to deal with the problem.

According to the "modern synthesis" of evolutionary biology the unit of natural selection is the individual organism, if not individual genes. This opens up the theoretical possibility that some adaptive traits have been allowed to develop in evolution that are great for individuals but problematical for a given species as a whole. Theoretical biologists have extrapolated upon this insight in highly complex mathematical models that attempt to demonstrate the possibility of "evolutionary suicide".

This refers to an individual adaptation that would be so problematical for the species as a whole that it would lead to its extinction. This would be a fascinating paradox but it is seldom appreciated that that sometime rather annoying species, Homo sapiens, may provide the best illustration of the concept. Our higher intelligence has left us with the means to destroy ourselves. The capacity for scientific knowledge, whatever its origin, is no adaptation, but individual egoism and self regard is. This combination is deadly.

In the philosophical study of knowledge, epistemology, there appear a number of "problems of knowledge". This interface between human knowledge and survival may be termed "Russell's Problem", for Bertrand Russell. He was, it turns out rightly, throughout his life interested in human folly and the threats to survival that they pose, especially in the context of nuclear war.

In an important review paper (PDF 64KB) on the idea of evolutionary suicide it is stated that evolutionary suicide "is most likely to occur as a result of individual selection in the case where part of the costs involving a trait are borne by other individuals". In economic theory such a characteristic is called an externality and war is just one such externality. Cheney and Bush aren't paying for the war in Iraq, either in blood or money, but many others are. There are many externalities like that and they can be vicious.

The paradox opened up by evolutionary suicide would be most interesting in the case of Homo sapiens. This is because we may very well be responsible for the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth due to habitat destruction.

If so, we would have the interesting case of an adaptation for individuals of one organism that threatens not only its own existence but countless other species as well. Evolution by natural selection, operating at the level of the individual, would not be chosen by any self-respecting engineer as the guiding principle for the propagation of life.

For our Martian this would all be a matter for intellectual contemplation. For us it is a matter of survival and the choices we make now could be decisive. In which case we are presented with another paradox. Of all the generations of Homo sapiens that could prove decisive for the future of the species, given the possibility of evolutionary suicide, it just so happens that ours is it.

If John Howard and George Bush are our answer to evolution’s challenge then we are in deep trouble.