Paul Ehrlich
"Human Nature: Genes, Cultures, & the Human Prospect"
Wednesday, June 11, 2003, 12:30 PM
Dr. Paul Ehrlich is Bing Professor of Population Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He is best known for his efforts to focus public attention on the connection between human population, resource exploitation, and the environment. Population explosion coupled with a technological revolution have perpetrated an extinction crisis; the global process of deforestation and over-fishing; rapid changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere as concentrations of greenhouse gases increase; the depletion of the ozone layer; the depletion of topsoil, groundwater, and clean air; the toxification of the environment; and the exponential growth of the human population.
Dr. Ehrlich has conducted field research on every continent. He has studied in a wide variety of areas, from the genetics of insect populations and ecological and evolutionary interactions of plants and herbivores, to the effects of crowding on human beings. His field work includes an insect survey in the Canadian Arctic to which he credits his interest in human cultures. Dr. Ehrlich joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1959 where he began his 35-year study of local checkerspot butterfly populations, the most thorough research ever done on their ecology and evolution.
LECTURE SUMMARY
Paul Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, wrapped up the 2003 Environment Matters Lecture Series with a spirited romp through human evolutionary history and a geneticist's rebuttal to evolutionary psychology and genetic determinism. His hope for the future? Rapid cultural evolution.
He began by emphasizing that understanding human nature and behavior is key to tackling environmental problems. Why? Because, for the most part, we already know what the these problems are: over-population and over-consumption leading to pollution, depletion of natural resources, and climate change. But we're headed in the wrong direction anyway.
Why can't we get things headed in the right direction? With the emerging consensus between ecologists and economists that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment, why aren't we taxing gasoline for its full costs? Why do we now have what amounts to a war on the environment, on women, on civil rights? Why are we creating global gated communities while promoting policies that lead to jealous have-nots possessing nuclear weapons?
How do we change this destructive human behavior? The search for an answer begins with understanding human behavior. And an understanding of our behavior begins with a look at our evolutionary ancestors several million years ago. To summarize, first we got upright - about three million years ago. Then we got smart, with steady increases in brain-size for the last two million years. Ehrlich illustrated two important phases in our history, first with a slide he called "tough luck Ku Klux Klan" showing humans migrating out of Africa 150-200,000 years ago. A second slide depicted what a previous Environment Matters speaker, Jared Diamond, calls "the great leap forward" showing an explosion of creativity - in tools, artwork, and therefore culture - sometime around 50-60,000 years ago. This, after 2.5 million years of essentially the same old tools. (Stephen J. Gould would call this "punctuated equilibrium.")
We still don't fully understand what triggered this rapid advance. But at this point we stopped being an evolutionary animal and became a revolutionary one. Cultural evolution outpaced biological change. In rapid sequence, humans occupied the New World, and fomented revolutions in agriculture, writing, industry and information. (Are we now participating in the dis-information revolution?)
Some social scientists and evolutionary psychologists would say that we're genetically driven to competitive, destructive behavior. Ehrlich disagrees. He offers four lines of evidence for cultural factors being dominant over genetic determination of behavior.
Firstly, the few careful studies of twins, such as the famous Siamese twins Cheng and Eng, and the Dione quintuplets, show that these genetically identical siblings are in fact very different as individuals, in temperament, tendencies and skills. Secondly, people transplanted at an early age from one culture to another adapt to their adoptive culture rather than behaving like their biological parents. Thirdly, culture over-rides such biological tendencies as violence, stealing and most of all the "out-reproduce your buddies" directive. We could, but we don't produce twenty offspring in a lifetime. Finally, we just don't have enough genes to control behavior. We have 26-30,000 genes. But one trillion neurons (each with 10-1000 synapses) control our behavior. So each gene would have to code for one billion connections in our brain. Not likely. The big miracle is that with we manage to get our heads on the right end, most of us anyway. So the brain needs the environment to develop. For example, someone deprived of sight until age twenty will never see properly.
Ehrlich has been asked repeatedly about the prospect of breeding only those people with "good genes" but claims he has never been asked this question by someone he thought should be in the breeding group. And, anyway, if you sterilized 95% of a population and let the others breed, it would take 200 years to see discernable behavioral differences, assuming a 20-year breeding cycle.
Cultural evolution, by contrast, is much faster. Ehrlich claimed that he and his audience were culturally evolving in real time right there in the First Congregational Church. He later cited examples of rapid cultural evolution such as the improved - yet still unacceptable - condition of minorities in America, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So how do we get "better?" According to Ehrlich, ethics. It's unique to humans. Ethics require a combination of four things: a sense of self, attribution, empathy, and a system -language and syntax- for sharing the first three. This last condition is the one that chimps lack.
Ethics evolve. Read Plato and Aristotle on slavery. Two hundred years ago, Saddam Hussein would not have been an issue. Foreign tyrants were not a problem for nation-states as long as they left you alone. One hundred and fifty years ago it was acceptable to beat a horse. Now it isn't. Is the expansion of ethical considerations a hallmark of cultural evolution?
Ehrlich argued that we are at a crossroads where our behavior must evolve, where yesterday's ethics are inadequate. With bigger populations, higher consumption, high-speed commerce and communication, we can do far more damage to others. For example, Ulysses Grant could not increase the temperature of the earth. Now, we can. (Unspoken was the corollary that we now have the capacity to do far more good for others.)
Yet we're abrogating our responsibility to others by insisting that nothing interfere with our level of consumption. For example, the Kyoto Treaty was nixed by the United States on the grounds that it might delay, by two years, our 100-year projection for being 5 times richer. Ehrlich asked, what would it mean to be 5 times richer?
Not everything is grim. First-rank ecologists and economists are working together on a synthetic understanding of resource consumption. The Montreal accords, regulating ozone-depleting pollutants, were successful. The IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) is a model for how scientists, industry and policy makers -with the exception of our current administration- can move forward on environmental issues. As previously mentioned, lynchings are no longer social events as they once were in the south, and the Soviet Union is gone. Family sizes have decreased faster than Ehrlich predicted in the 1960s.
Still, we have daunting challenges in front of us demanding further rapid cultural evolution. And the most important focus has to be how we treat each other and our environment. How do we change people's thinking?
Ehrlich maintained that we do exactly what he and the audience were doing on 11 June. Participate. Be active. Ask questions. Keep working on the political system. Demand leadership from policy-makers. Join groups that enable this. Engage actively in rapid cultural evolution.
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PAUL EHRLICH REDUX
Paul Ehrlich returned for a special event on December 3rd 2008, to broadly outline the themes in his new book, The Dominant Animal. Briefly, the big threats:
• Climate Disruption
• Environmental Toxins (100,000 and counting)
• Conflict over natural resources
Ehrlich's first step toward avoiding these things? A Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior, that is, figuring out how we can be smarter about managing our environment and ourselves.
Paul Ehrlich helped ignite the modern environmental movement with The Population Bomb in 1968. Paul and his wife Anne are back with a new book,The Dominant Animal, which takes a new look at our future on the planet as evidence mounts that the population bomb may have gone off.
The 40-year anniversary of The Population Bomb and the publication of The Dominant Animal provide a great opportunity for an in-depth look at Paul Ehrlich’s original warning to the world in 1968, his legacy, and his continuing work to understand and explain the crisis facing our civilization.
More on Ehrlich's new book:
http://www.dominantanimal.org
And his Island Press blog:
http://blog.islandpress.org/author/paulehrlich
