For a biologist, the diagram above represents our worst nightmare. It’s scarier than Jason, or Freddy, or even Godzilla on steroids or Cthulhu on an acid trip… and the reason it’s so freaking depressing and unthinkable is because there doesn’t necessarily HAVE TO BE A RIGHT SIDE TO THIS DIAGRAM!! We have no guarantees ANYONE will survive a bottleneck like this and the fossil record tells us the sad fact that 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Period. End of story. God is an Experimentalist, not a Conservationist; life is not sacred, or a right, or a guarantee. In my FB notes, I’ve been hinting that the philosophy of metaevolution makes some dire predictions, and that there was a particular note that needed to be written. This is the note that has been haunting me and the one that i have been so hesitant to write.
When i was a young stoner, hippy, science fiction nerd, i used to think that living on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius was a cool thing, and a cause to be celebrated. Aquarius is my birth sign, to me it stood for Peace and Love and being unconventional. So i pictured the coming bottleneck as a culling of Ideologies. To me, it meant the death of old, bad, sick ideas that would then be replaced by newer, more enlightened, more humane ideas. Aaah, to be young and naive again. That was before I learned about climate change and overpopulation, and how the two were intimately and inextricably linked. That was before i had learned about a little concept called Carrying Capacity.
When i write about evolution, there is an underlying tone that nothing new has been added to the science in the 150 years of it’s existence. Of course, that’s not the case; many new concepts have been added over the years. Altruism, interconnectedness, symbiosis… all important ideas, but the problem is they never get any good publicity because there’s this survival of the fittest idea, or the pointless, unending controversy over creationism that sucks up all the intellectual oxygen in the room. One of those overlooked concepts that is about to come into play in a truly horrifying way is Carrying Capacity.
Carrying capacity states that for a given area of land, there can only be a finite number of individuals in a given species that will be supported by that piece of land. Go over that population number and there is a risk of a die off due to starvation. It’s a very simple concept, one that people can think about and intuitively see as true. Now take that concept and expand it to include the entire planet and ask, “What is the carrying capacity of the Earth when it comes to human population?”
Well, if the question is about food alone then the current answer is about 10 billion. We’re not there yet, but if the question instead is how many humans can there be on Earth while enjoying Western standards of living, that’s harder to calculate. Our best guess in this instance is somewhere between 2 and 3 billion, a number we passed back in the 1920’s… ooops!! That’s about the same time eugenics became a popular theme and the people of the time saw it as a great abomination, or the savior of the human race… or at least the supremacy of the white population. So eugenics got used to justify all sorts of evil shit, not because it was an evil idea, but because the human race just wasn’t capable of thinking about it in any objective way. To me, eugenics didn’t go far enough. Every man, women, and child on the planet should be chemically sterilized, not just those who are considered unfit…
That’s it, that’s the end of this note. Either we solve this problem ourselves, or Mother Nature will solve it for us in a very grisly display of survival of the fittest (or not surviving at all). Natural disasters, war, famine, pestilence… end times shit that will make the book of Revelations look like a peaceful pipe dream. So does the philosophy of metaevolution tell us how to avoid this, or how to be one of the survivors on the right side of the equation, or which agent of the apocalypse will be our undoing?? Nope, not a single clue. The take home lesson is be aware, be vigilant, be prepared. The return of the Lord is like a thief in the night. No science can predict it’s exact moment or how it will happen, just be aware that shit does indeed happen. Peace <3