A new study led by the University of Maine suggests that inherent aspects of human evolution may be hampering our ability to combat global environmental problems like climate change.Humans dominate the earth using tools and systems for exploiting natural resources, which have been continuously refined through thousands of years of cultural adaptation to the environment. Tim Waring, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Maine, wondered how this process of cultural adaptation might impact the goal of solving global environmental problems. What he found was counterintuitive.
The project seeks to understand three core questions: how human evolution unfolded in the context of environmental resources; how human evolution led to multiple global environmental crises; and how global environmental constraints may alter the outcome of future human evolution.
Waring's team outlines their findings in a new paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Other authors of the study include Isle of Man alumnus Zach Wood and Eörs Szathmáry, a professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.
human expansion
This study explores how human societies' use of the environment has changed over evolutionary history. The research team investigated changes in human ecological niches, including factors such as the natural resources humans use, the intensity of their use, the systems and methods used to use these resources, and the environmental impacts of using these resources.
The work revealed a series of common patterns. Over the past 100,000 years, human groups have gradually used more types of resources with greater intensity, scale, and greater environmental impact. Subsequently, these groups often spread into new environments with new resources.
Humanity's global expansion was facilitated by the process of acculturation, which resulted in the accumulation of adaptive cultural traits - social institutions and technologies that help exploit and control environmental resources, such as agricultural practices, fishing methods, irrigation infrastructure, energy technologies, and the social institutions that manage these resources.
"Human evolution was driven primarily by cultural changes that were faster than genetic evolution. This faster rate of adaptation made it possible for humans to colonize all habitable lands around the world," said UMaine's Sen. George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions and associate professor in the School of Economics.
Furthermore, this process is accelerated by a positive feedback process: as groups increase in size, they accumulate adaptive cultural traits more quickly, thereby providing more resources and achieving faster growth.
"This has been good news for our species as a whole over the past 100,000 years." "But this kind of expansion relies on a lot of available resources and space," Walling said.
Today, humans have also run out of space. We have reached the physical limits of the biosphere and taken over most of its resources. Our expansion is catching up with us. Our cultural adaptation, particularly the industrial use of fossil fuels, has created dangerous global environmental problems that threaten our security and future access to resources.
global limit
To understand what these findings mean for solving global challenges like climate change, the team looked at when and how sustainable human systems emerged in the past. Wolin and his colleagues found two general patterns. First, sustainable systems tend to develop after groups have struggled or failed to maintain their resources. For example, the United States regulated industrial emissions of sulfide and nitrogen dioxide in 1990, but only after we determined that they contributed to acid rain and the acidification of many water bodies in the Northeast. Today, this delayed action poses major problems as we threaten other global limits. When it comes to climate change, humans need to fix the problem before it causes collapse.
Second, the researchers also found evidence that strong environmental protection systems tend to solve problems within existing societies rather than between them. For example, managing regional water systems requires regional cooperation, regional infrastructure, and technology, which emerge through regional cultural evolution. The existence of an appropriately sized society is therefore a key limiting factor.
Effectively addressing the climate crisis may require new global regulatory, economic and social systems - ones that are more cooperative and authoritative than existing ones such as the Paris Agreement. To establish and operate these systems, humans need a practical earthly social system, and we do not yet have such a system.
"One problem is that we don't have a coordinated global community to implement these systems, we have sub-global groups, which may not be enough," Waring said. "But you could imagine cooperative treaties to address these common challenges. So, it's an easy problem to solve."
The other problem is much more serious, Walling said. In a world filled with subglobal groups, cultural evolution among these groups tends to address the wrong problems, favor national and corporate interests, and delay action on shared priorities. Cultural evolution among groups often intensifies competition for resources and can lead to direct conflict between groups and even global human extinction.
"This means that global challenges like climate change are harder to solve than previously thought," Wolin said. "It's not just that they are the most difficult things we humans have ever done. They absolutely are. The bigger problem is that core features of human evolution may very well run counter to our ability to solve these problems. To solve collective global challenges, we have to swim upstream."
Looking to the future
Waring and his colleagues believe their analysis could help people navigate the future of human evolution on a finite planet. Their paper is the first to suggest that human evolution may work against the emergence of global collective problems, so further research is needed to develop and test this theory.
Wolin's team proposes several applied research efforts to better understand the drivers of cultural evolution and to find ways to reduce global environmental competition based on principles of human evolution. For example, research is needed to document the patterns and intensity of human cultural evolution in the past and present. Research could focus on the processes that led to human dominance of the biosphere in the past, as well as the ways in which cultures adapt to their environment today.
But if it turns out that the general outline is correct and that human evolution has tended to work against collective solutions to global environmental problems, as the authors suggest, then we will need to answer some very pressing questions. This includes whether we can use this knowledge to improve the global response to climate change.
"Of course, there is hope for humanity to solve the problem of climate change. We have built cooperative governance before, but never like this: on a global scale." Walling said.
Developments in international environmental policy offer some hope. Successful examples include the Montreal Protocol to limit ozone-depleting gases and the global moratorium on commercial whaling. New efforts should include the promotion of more conscious, peaceful, and ethical systems of mutual self-limitation, particularly through market regulations and enforceable treaties that bring the human community on Earth closer together as a functional unit.
But this model may not hold true for climate change.
"Our paper explains the reasons and differences for establishing cooperative governance on a global scale, helping researchers and policymakers become more aware of how to work toward global solutions," Wolin said.
The new research could lead to a new policy mechanism for addressing the climate crisis: Changing the process of adaptive change among businesses and countries could be a powerful way to address global environmental risks. As for whether humans can survive on a finite Earth, Wolin said: "We don't have any solutions to this idea of a long-term evolutionary trap because we barely understand the problem."
"If our conclusions are close to being correct, we need to look more closely," he said.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily