[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Taking Evolution Seriously

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 03 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Back in 1904, sociologist Max Weber proposed that the modern period was
witnessing "the disenchantment of the world" - a process which
traditional mythic ideas that wove meaning into human experience were
being replaced by the alienating and dehumanizing worldview of
materialist science. There's some truth to Weber's thesis, but I'm not
sure he anticipated the inevitable backlash: the Procrustean stretching
and lopping of scientific ideas in the popular imagination that has
turned many of them into substitute myths.

One example that has been much on my mind of late is the way the theory
of evolution has been manhandled into a surrogate mythology. The reason
it's been on my mind is simple enough: whenever I discuss peak oil at a
lecture, book signing, or some other public setting, it's a safe bet
that someone will raise a hand and ask what I think about the
possibility that the approaching crisis is part of our transition to a
new evolutionary level. I am always left wondering what to say in
response, because this sort of question is almost always rooted in the
notion that evolution is a linear movement that leads onward and upward
through a series of distinct stages or levels - and this notion is a
pretty fair misstatement of the way evolution takes place in nature.

Few things in the history of ideas are quite so interesting as the way
that new discoveries get harnessed in the service of old obsessions.
When X-rays were first detected in 1895, for example, one of the first
results was panic over the possibility that the new rays might make it
possible to see through clothing; the New Jersey state legislature
actually debated a bill to ban the use of X-rays in opera glasses.
Wildly inaccurate as it was, this notion was rooted in profound fears
about sexuality, and so it took many decades to dispel - when I was a
child, ads in comic books still claimed to sell "X-ray glasses" that
would let you see people naked.

Something not that different happened to the theory of evolution, and
thus nearly all of today's popular notions about evolution are shrapnel
from the head-on collision between Darwin's theory and the obsessions of
the era in which that theory emerged. Social class rather than sex was
the driving force here; as religious justifications for the English
caste system faltered, the manufacture of scientific justifications for
social hierarchy became a growth industry, and by the time the ink was
dry on the first copies of The Origin of Species (1859), evolution was
already being drafted into service in this dubious cause. The resulting
belief system was very nearly a parody of George Orwell's Animal Farm
(1945) in advance - all living things evolve, but some are more evolved
than others.

Now of course this is nonsense. A human being, a gecko, a dandelion, and
a single-celled blue-green alga are all equally evolved - that is, they
have all been shaped to the same degree by the pressures of their
environment, and their ancestors have all undergone an equal amount of
natural selection. We think of humans as "more evolved" than blue-green
alga because Victorian Social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer engaged
in conceptual sleight of hand, transforming the amorphous outward surge
of life toward available niches into a ladder of social status, with
English gentlemen at the top level and everybody and everything else
slotted into place further down. The concept of evolutionary stages or
levels was essential to this conjurer's act, since it allowed social
barriers between classes to be mapped onto the biological world.

In nature, though, evolution has no levels, it just has adaptations.
There is no straight line of progress along which living things can be
ranked. Instead, evolutionary lineages splay outward like the branches
of an unruly shrub. Sometimes those branches take unexpected turns, but
these evolutionary breakthroughs can no more be ranked in an ascending
hierarchy than organisms can. They move outward into new niches, rather
than upward to some imagined goal. There are any number of examples from
nature; the one I want to use here is the evolution of bats.

The ancestors of the first bats were shrewlike, insect-eating nocturnal
mammals, related to early primates, who scampered through the forest
canopies of the Eocene around sixty million years ago. For animals that
live in trees, the risk of falling is a constant source of evolutionary
pressure, and adaptations that will help manage that danger will likely
spread through a population; that's how sloths got their claws, New
World monkeys got prehensile tails, and many animals of past and present
got extra skin that functions as a parachute. If the extra skin bridges
the gap between forelegs and the hindlegs, the most common adaptation,
you get the ability to glide, like flying squirrels, colugoes, and the
like; you've got a viable adaptation, and there you stop.

If the extra skin is mostly on and around the forelimbs, though, you've
just jumped through the door into a new world, because you can control
your glide much more precisely, and you can put muscle into the
movements - in other words, you can begin to fly. Once you can do better
than a controlled fall, furthermore, the trillions of tasty insects
flitting through the forest air are on your menu, and the better you can
fly, the more you can catch. The result is ferocious evolutionary
pressure toward improved flight skills, and in a few hundred thousand
generations, you've got agile fliers. That's what happened to bats, as
it happened some 200 million years earlier to the ancestors of the
pterodactyls.

By 55 million years ago, bats almost identical to today's insect-eating
bats were darting through the Eocene skies. Sonar seems to have taken a
while to evolve, and some offshoots of the family - the big fruit bats
and flying foxes, for example - took even longer, but the basic
adaptations were set and, to the discomfiture of countless generations
of mosquitoes and moths, have remained ever since. As evolutionary
breakthroughs go, the leap into flight was a massive success; bats are
the second most numerous of mammal orders, exceeded only by the rodents,
but it's impossible to fit the breakthrough that created them into any
linear scheme.

Applying an ecological concept to human social systems always takes
tinkering, but there are good reasons to accept the idea that societies
are capable of evolution; like populations of other living things, human
communities face pressures from their environments, and adapt or perish
in response. Here again, though, the evolutionary process moves outward
in all directions rather than ascending an imaginary hierarchy of
levels. Hunter-gatherer systems seem to have been the original form of
human society, but other forms branched off as adaptations opened doors
to possibilities that were likely as appealing at the time as the
bug-filled night sky must have been to the first clumsily flapping
proto-bats.

Where large herbivores could be tamed, therefore, nomadic herding
societies came into being; where many food plants could be raised in
intensive gardens, tribal horticultural societies were born; where
extensive fields of seed-bearing grasses offered the best option for
survival, agrarian societies took shape. As it turned out, grains could
be bred to yield large surpluses that could be transported and stored,
and so the agrarian system opened the door to large-scale divisions of
labor and the rise of cities. These in turn made complex material
culture possible, and ultimately drove the creation of the machines that
broke into the Earth's stockpiles of fossil carbon and gave the modern
world its three centuries of exuberance.

Thus industrial society is not "more evolved" than other societies, or
for that matter "less evolved". It was simply the most successful
adaptation to the evolutionary pressures that opened up once fossil fuel
energy had been tapped, and it outcompeted other systems in something of
the same way that an invasive exotic outcompetes less robust native
organisms. As fossil fuels deplete and climate change unfolds, the
balance of evolutionary pressures is shifting, and as the new reality of
limits takes hold, selection will favor those systems that are better
adapted to the new ecological constraints of global climate instability,
energy scarcity, and resource shortage.

The fact that those new systems are better adapted to new realities,
however, does not free them from the human condition. This is where the
rubber meets the road, because the people who ask me about the prospects
of a new evolutionary level are rarely asking whether the societies of
the future will be better adapted to an environment of resource
scarcity. They are generally asking whether societies on the other side
of an imagined evolutionary leap will be free from problems such as
poverty, war, and environmental destruction.

The best way to assess this, it seems to me, is to consider what
happened the last time human social evolution yielded a breakthrough to
a new way of living in the world: that is, the rise of industrial
societies beginning around 1750. Agrarian societies suffered from
poverty, war, and environmental destruction, and so did all the other
"evolutionary levels" or, rather, adaptations, right back to the
hunter-gatherers. Many hunter-gatherers among the First Nations in North
America, for example, had sharp social inequalities, a busy slave trade,
and a long history of fierce tribal wars. Their ecological relationships
were less problematic, since those native societies that failed to find
a balance with nature, such as the Mound Builders and the people of
Chaco Canyon, collapsed long before 1492.

Just as bats faced the same experiences of hunger, social squabbles, and
the unfriendly attentions of predators as their ancestors, the societies
that took up industrialism experienced poverty, war, and environmental
destruction just like earlier societies, and it's hard to think of a
good reason why the new societies that emerge in response to the
evolutionary pressures of the deindustrial age should be exempt from the
same troubles. Evolutionary adaptations can make things easier for
living things - plenty of predators in the Eocene must have been
discomfited when bats evolved the ability to flutter away to safety -
but no living thing is exempt from the balances of the natural world.
It's a mistake, in other words, to see evolution as a movement toward
Utopia.

When I've tried to explain any of the above in public, though, someone -
and it's not always the same someone who asked the original question -
usually insists that this may be how biological evolution works, but
spiritual evolution is different. Some of my readers just now may have
come up with the same objection. All I can say in response is I know of
none of the world's great spiritual traditions that would approve the
claim that people living extravagant lifestyles of wealth and privilege
- this is, after all, a fair description of life in modern industrial
societies from the standpoint of the rest of human experience - can
expect a sudden leap to an even more comfortable and convenient life,
just because they happen to want it, and would find it a useful way to
avoid dealing with the consequences of their own shortsighted choices.

This may seem unduly harsh. Still, the notion that an evolutionary leap
will extract us from the mess we've made for ourselves is as much a
distortion of the realities of the evolutionary process as any Social
Darwinist screed. If people want to believe that a miracle will rescue
them from the predicament of industrial society, they have every right
to their faith, but it would confuse communication a little less to call
it a miracle, instead of trying to wrap it in the borrowed prestige of
Darwin's theory. Perhaps it's the bias instilled by my own Druid faith,
furthermore, but it seems to me that if we are going to use evolution as
a metaphor, we need to start by taking evolution seriously, rather than
imposing our own fantasies on the very different stories that nature is
telling us.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/taking-evolution-seriously.html


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