a new and insidious tactic is threatening to undermine our efforts to build a more sustainable future: climate delay

many experience a freeze response (fear and inability to act), or indeed a flight response - avoiding the problem altogether.While it can feel counter-intuitive, meeting climate dismissives with compassion can go a long way and help them break free from denial.

dismissives

Climate deniers are victims not villains

Bateson defines schismogenesis as a “creation of division.”

peacemaking and mediation expert Olivia Lazard. We talk about: Ukraine and complexity, the risks to the global economic system and order, and the impacts that decarbonization will have on Global South via 'rematerialization'. Here is a short teaser clip: (Full episode on thegreatsimplification.com, youtube and your favorite podcast platform Wednesday morning 2/15)

Take a deep breath and pause when you feel your body ramping up for a fight.

will cause the people you are trying to influence to reject your argument.

The desire to be right combined with the brain’s protective mechanisms make it that much harder to change opinions and beliefs, even in the presence of new information.

belief perseverance

Confronting facts that don’t line up with your worldview may trigger a “backfire effect,”

It can feel like an attack on you if one of your strongly held beliefs is challenged.

people’s desire for sweet and fatty tasting foods.

Some of the challenges people face today, however, diverge quite a bit from those faced by their ancestors. Such divergences can lead adaptive psychological mechanisms to “misfire” – to respond in ways that might have been adaptive in the past, but that no longer produce adaptive consequences today.

Psychological adaptations have been designed over thousands of generations of human evolution. The adaptations humans possess today, then, were designed to operate in the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, a composite of the social and physical challenges as they have existed for hundreds of thousands of years

Adaptations are designed to solve specific adaptive challenges that arose in ancestral environments.

we describe a conceptual framework for understanding adaptive sources of dysfunction – for identifying and combating “adaptations gone awry.”

Each reflects the operation of psychological mechanisms that were designed through evolution to serve important adaptive functions, but that nevertheless can produce harmful consequences.

What do anxiety disorders, domestic violence, racial prejudice, and obesity all have in common?

mismatches between current environments and ancestral environments

from aggression and international conflict to overpopulation and the destruction of the environment, people display a capacity for great selfishness and antisocial behavior. Can an evolutionary perspective – with its inherent focus on the functionality of human behavior – help explain the occasionally self-destructive and maladaptive side of human nature?

Relative to the evolutionary past, social relationships in modernized western societies tend to involve a much wider variety of relationships, along with relatively less immediate connection with close, kin-based support networks

From an evolutionary perspective, social anxiety is designed primarily to help people ensure an adequate level of social acceptance and, throughout most of human history, this meant acceptance in a tightly-knit group based primarily of biological kin

Although social anxiety can serve useful functions, it can also involve excessive worry, negative affect, and exaggerated avoidance of social situations. Understanding the root causes of anxiety-related problems is an essential step in the development of interventions and policies to reduce dysfunction.

we focus primarily on social anxiety

The long-term consequences of Russia’s war are less clear. But experts are concerned it may also lock in more future fossil fuel dependence as places like Europe search for replacements for Russian fuel.

two social drivers actively impair global efforts to achieve 1.5 C. Those are corporate responses and global consumption patterns

Most of them are, in general, moving in the right direction. They just aren’t aggressive enough yet to be consistent with the kind of transformative social change required to achieve the 1.5 C target.

PointsEarly forecasts suggest the El Nino climate phenomenon could return later this year, potentially paving the way for global temperatures to exceed the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold for the first time.

both evolution and learning must fit the same 00:10:33 formal regularities or so-called laws how does an organism know how to evolve okay so there must be some sort of process that requires that 00:10:46 it be unseen otherwise what you would have is the organism continuing to do what it does with its familiarness

what would it look like if we had a word that was talking about this gradual unseen coalescence 00:05:20 but it was pointing more toward vitality um than toward the danger of insidiousness now just to be very clear i i'm pretty sure that that that in my thinking here this afani 00:05:33 poesis word could um be a way to describe this

i'm really interested in this is because it's 00:09:02 for me coming to a question of really what where how do we make change like where is the change uh there's a lot of people out there doing diligent work trying desperately 00:09:15 in various ngos to create change in a world and you know we've been actually watching this for 50 years now and it's not actually changing anything so where is the change

trans contextual is a beautiful word that my father used to describe the ways in which living systems occupy multiple contexts simultaneously

insidious like racism

cancer can be insidious

around that same time i got a call from my daughter you know leave it to your kids and she said you know mom it's 00:03:48 just that all the problems we're dealing with in the world right now are insidious and um you know it came up last night siva was talking about the insidiousness 00:04:01 of the facebook problem and and this was an unlocker for me of what what does it mean for something to be insidious so i looked it up and i started to 00:04:14 explore and it turns out that insidious is defined and i think this is from the you know the oxford on the internet not the original but um that there's proceeding in a gradual 00:04:27 subtle way but with very harmful effects in other words there's something that's that's gathering combining in an unseen way that's leading to danger

what i am actually witnessing is a kind of deep shift of premises that 00:03:36 then shifts everything

i think that that kind of support is huge uh you can look specifically at charlottesville and see the reason that that march was so big 00:08:29 was because they saw themselves as fulfilling the promise of donald trump the reason why they were so public the reason why i we we can look at the manifestos of many 00:08:41 of the shoot mass shooters both in the united states and abroad over the last few years who named donald trump as part of their motivation and part of that is pr part of that is trying to get press 00:08:53 but part of it is real that if the presidency is held by somebody who holds a lot of the most extreme beliefs that they do it demonstrates to them that there is widespread mainstream support for those 00:09:05 beliefs and in the same way donald trump losing with those campaign platforms i expect will be a real blow to organizing far-right extremists and 00:09:16 anti-immigration groups and they'll still exist they will still keep organizing but it is going to be a lot less energy it is going to be more underground and it is going to wait until there's 00:09:28 another moment of political eruption when they'll come back again this has been the history for decades that this movement as i mentioned in the beginning goes back decades uh at least to the 1960s as a pretty 00:09:40 consistent movement with the same heroes and figures continuously over time and it has had moments where it went underground and has had moments where it was out in public with thousands of people 00:09:52 marching in the streets and whatever happens next it's still going to be there it's still going to be a concern it's still going to be recruiting people talking to people on the internet and in person and that's what we need to be watching 00:10:04 out for

so this was something that was in the air was that if they mainstreamed white supremacy correctly they could get 00:06:13 people to buy into it and not back away because they were afraid of being called racist

trying to figure out ways 00:06:38 that you could access people and make them feel like it's okay to lean into white nationalism that they don't have to be afraid of being branded with that label

i can use myself as an example here i i consider myself a pretty smart person i'm in grad school i tried to be really analytical my whole 00:03:56 life and yet i showed up at college when i was 19 years old believing that all the supposedly scientific stuff that white nationalists used to support the idea of race being predictive and segregation being 00:04:09 good and all this stupid stuff i totally believed i thought they were right and i thought everybody was just denying it and it took a community of people in college over years to condemn my beliefs to 00:04:22 show me uh kindness to show me real vitriol to be these in these private conversations where we could go over the facts and it took a long time for me thinking i was really smart and analytical to 00:04:35 accept that it was morally wrong that it was ethically wrong

they come from every socioeconomic status they're lawyers they have grad degrees they have college degrees and there's also people who come into it who only have a high school degree 00:01:53 but i think we really miss something if we believe that the white people in america and in other countries who are attracted to this movement come only from poverty or uneducated it's not accurate

i try to use the term white supremacy to talk about that history and white nationalism to talk about this 00:02:31 social movement and because it's a movement where people recognize each other they know uh their friends

derek black

Crises in energy, economics, medicine, education, and so forth can all be seen as “stuck” in patterns. Co-dependent systems require co-evolution. How can we shift these patterns?

To provide an indication of the projected timing of climate depar-ture under alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, we havedeveloped an index that determines the year when the values of agiven climatic variable exceed the bounds of historical variabilityfor a particular location (Fig. 1a).

The Cosmo-local Reader — Invitation to Participate

COSMOLOCALISM

The Cosmolocal Reader

A Global Knowledge Commons

what it means to be human and in our own humanness explore how do we fit into an every changing, evolving environment in a transforming world and universe. What does it mean to be human.  It appears to be forgotten in this world we live in. A quote from a recent article which I wrote "Recreating a  world of wonder" "But, somehow, we have lost our sense of wonder, buried our curiosity, and gravitated into a quagmire of deception, misbelief, and angry fear, fed to us by those who wish to control everything, as if that were even possible."

Toward integrating solutions: IF the whole spectrum of activist individuals and orgs, around the world - of ALL races, nationalities and religions - would communicate, cooperate, and coordinate to an unprecedented degree - the synergy of our collective effort - and perhaps nothing less - COULD counter-balance the disproportionate wealth, power & influence of the long coordinated super-rich less-than-1%."

I agree as I have heard from many young people that they aren't voting because they don't trust the politicians. They hear their promises and then when they get elected they don't deliver on those promises, so young people feel helpless to change the system.

Forty-one per cent of people globally see climate change as a ‘very serious threat’ to their country

The Lloyd's Register Foundation World Risk Poll

SUMMARY

Abstract

Open source decarbonization for a sustainable world

scrape any website using tab gbt

anadian professors’ views on establishing opensource endowed professorships

Abstract

Highlights

Towards open source patents: Semi-automated open hardware certification from MediaWiki websites

Executive Summary

Equitable Research Capacity Towards theSustainable Development Goals: The Case forOpen Science Hardware

How AI could become an extension of your mind

Abstract

windfall taxes on excess profits could help to fund low-carbon investment, as well as progressive taxation in countries, including developing countries, which often under-tax rich citizens and companies.

tackling global poverty will not overshoot global carbon budgets, as is often claimed. Failure to address the power and privilege of the polluter elite will. These are related because reducing carbon consumption at the top can free up carbon space to lift people out of poverty.

While cross-country emission inequalities remain sizeable, overall inequality in global emissions is now mostly explained by within-country inequalities by some indicators.

The World Inequality Lab is co-directed by the influential economist Thomas Piketty

people on low incomes within developed countries are contributing less to the climate crisis, while rich people in developing countries have much bigger carbon footprints than was previously acknowledged.

The difference between the carbon emissions of the rich and the poor within a country is now greater than the differences in emissions between countries

We conclude that meeting the1.5°C goal is not plausible, although it is not impos-sible. The future scope and pace of social transfor-mations toward climate action would be crucial forattaining the Paris Agreement temperature goals

In the first edition of the Hamburg Climate Fu-tures Outlook published in 2021

CLICCS Plausibility AssessmentFramework

Social Plausibility Assessment Framework

Lacking thefeasibility of a robust probabilistic assessment, wehave developed an alternative framework to assessthe plausibility of climate futures (Chapter 2).

we have onlyvery limited capabilities of predicting emissions fu-tures due to the inherent complexities and contin-gencies of social dynamic

based on present knowledge of social drivers andphysical processe

Hamburg Climate FuturesOutlook

Among the many possible climatic futures, not allare plausible.

Anita Engels, Jochem Marotzke, EduardoGonçalves Gresse, Andrés López-Rivera,Anna Pagnone, Jan Wilkens

Philosophy of education is particularly well placed to make sense of this and to push back against the dualistic assumptions – between mind and body, the rational and the emotional – that pedagogical thinking has often inherited from philosophy.

It’s possible only with the help of others.

the human being is a rational animal, whose powers of reason are brought to actuality only through education

For us, the question ‘How should we live?’ is not decided by our biology but can always meaningfully be posed whatever constraints – physical, biological, historical, cultural – we may happen to labour under.

the manner in which knowledge is acquired, communicated and shared is internal to the nature of knowledge itself, and that the metaphysics of personhood needs to countenance the formation of reason if we are to understand how rationality and animality are united in the human person.

education is not a merely contingent addition to the human life-form. Education is reason’s vehicle.

human beings do not have a nature in quite the way that nonhuman animals do

hence these practices are not governed by natural norms, deviation from which constitutes ‘defectiveness’.

Human practices of food production, preparation and consumption show enormous variation across time and place, and any attempt to characterise them will take us swiftly into the history of horticulture, agriculture and animal husbandry, and into the cultural norms that govern what is consumed and how.

Since we are animals, natural-historical description of the human being should be possible. But can we, for instance, give a natural-historical description of what ‘the human being’ eats?

why exactly education should matter to philosophy. The reason is that education makes us what we are. Human beings do not enter the world with their rational powers ‘up and running’. Those powers are actualised in the child in a process of formation, or education in the broadest sense

Humans are especially good at filling new ecological niches “because we have the capacity to learn how to survive in new environments,” Goldstein said. “Once your parents learn an adaptive skill, you’ll learn from them. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

Human infants need to acquire complex social skills, including language, empathy, morality and theory of mind, the researchers said. Successful development of these skills depends on information from adults: “Rather than requiring hard-wired, innate knowledge of social abilities, evolution has outsourced the necessary information to parents,”

“The evolutionary goal of altricial species is not to become highly competent as quickly as possible but rather to excel at learning over time.”

extended altriciality creates opportunities for sophisticated social learning within the parent-offspring system.

This prolonged period of immaturity and helplessness – or altriciality – in human babies and other species, long thought to be a drain on resources, is actually an evolutionary advantage

human babies, as well as the young of many other species of mammals and birds, require months or years of care before they reach full mobility and sensory function, let alone maturity.

Over 50% of people reported feeling powerless or helpless in the previously mentioned study.

The survey — the largest of its kind — asked 10,000 young people in 10 countries how they felt about climate change and government responses to it.The results, released in a preprint on 14 September1, found that most respondents were concerned about climate change, with nearly 60% saying they felt ‘very worried’ or ‘extremely worried’. Many associated negative emotions with climate change — the most commonly chosen were ‘sad’, ‘afraid’, ‘anxious’, ‘angry’ and ‘powerless’ (see ‘Climate anxiety’). Overall, 45% of participants said their feelings about climate change impacted their daily lives.

real-life situations can be much more complicated, the authors’ model allows for the exact 25 percent tipping point number to change based on circumstances. Memory length is a key variable, and relates to how entrenched a belief or behavior is.

“And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25 percent tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.

When a minority group pushing change was below 25 percent of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25 percent, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and quickly a majority of the population adopted the new norm.

06:06Weak Ties

25:13Complex Contagions

institutional capacity

he wiring up of a civilisation of billions of people, which is itself some steps into a major transition towards complex sociality, faces similar questions

somewhere, somehow, through evolutionary iteration, a bunch of individual, independent, single-celled organisms stumbled upon governance principles that made them fitter together. Such “fundamental organizational changes in the history of life”1, known as major evolutionary transitions, had happened before — the eukaryotes that became multicellular are themselves held to be the result of symbiosis, and that’s not even the beginning — and have happened since.

Andrew Bourke’s Principles of Social Evolution opens on the story of a “scientifically curious protozoan” (protozoans are single-celled organisms) from half a billion years ago, living in a world of unicellular creatures some of which assemble at most into multicellular mats or threads with very limited structure.

is human evolution and our humans 00:41:49 a messed which we think they are

major competitive transitions

f we want to go from something like a prokaryotic cell to a pod of killer whales 00:16:32 there has to be sort of increases in physiological morphological and in many cases behavioral complexity and all of these require say more knowledge or a diversity of 00:16:45 information and this information has to be stored and it has to be accessible to the organism as well so we can put this information into 00:16:57 various levels and so what we have done is we've kind of taken the the previous work by blanca and uh just taken it or added a little bit to the levels in our 00:17:11 own way

I have now visited John Ssebunya in Bombo, Uganda five different times, filmed five different documentaries

feral children

cobalt mine in Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains,

Coosa County, Alabama, express similar concerns over plans to mine graphite,

northern Nevada, where his group has joined a lawsuit against a proposed open-pit lithium mine in Thacker Pass

Mine proponents say Thacker Pass lithium could support more than a million EVs annually and would add jobs and tax revenue.

Twin Metals Mine near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness as another example. Here the target is nickel, another important EV metal mined in only one U.S. location. In a political tug-of-war, the mine’s long-held leases were denied renewal by Obama, reinstated under Trump, and then canceled under Biden.

Lange says that’s certainly the case in Alaska, where copper and cobalt rest beneath rolling tundra in the Ambler district south of the Brooks Range. Accessing it would require a 200-mile road through traditional Alaska Native lands, caribou habitat and Gates of the Arctic National Park, with gravel quarries dug every 10 miles. It’s something state leaders support but state and national environmental groups and several Indigenous communities oppose.

likely raise environmental concerns.

70% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 40,000 children as young as 6 work in dangerous mines.

Tribes, landowners and communities find themselves wrestling with the not-so-green side of green energy.

The IEA says meeting the Paris Climate Accord goals for decarbonization will require even more — far more — minerals: as much as four to six times present amounts.

while EVs are cleaner than gas cars in the long run, they still carry environmental and human-rights baggage, especially associated with mining.

double global mineral demand over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency

manufacturing EVs requires about six times more minerals than traditional cars.

Sustainability is measured under two broad areas; bio-physical and socio-economic.

Socio-economic indicators

Bio-physical indicators

Conclusions

Fig. 4

Fig. 3

Seaweed farming might hold the key to massive improvements in carbon sequestration, biodiversity loss and food security

if seaweed was to take up just one tenth of everyone’s diet, 100 million hectares of on-land production could be avoided

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 percent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,”

This is particularly the case in low-income countries where small cities and their catchment areas are home to almost two thirds of their overall population.

InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs)

existing InVEST software suite

Urban InVEST

Without Arabic numerals, we don’t have long division.

NUMBER THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

‘unlimited associative learning’ – the ability to link events and outcomes, and change behaviours accordingly

According to Bloom, this splintering of truth into culture also manifested on an individual level, as people pursued studies based on their class, gender or race – not their common concern for what it meant to be wise.

They just don’t think that education matters as a subject of philosophical inquiry, and moreover, they take a rather dim view of those of us who do.

Bio-physical indicators

Socio-economic indicators

a couple of years later, I decided to sign up for cosmonaut training in Russia as a backup to Charles Simonyi, the creator of Microsoft Word and also, as it happens, a trustee of the Institute since 1997 (and now Chairman). I told my parents about it over dinner in a restaurant in New York.

In my opinion, both these responses are valid, but the second one goes more directly to the issue that divides us.

The competition is between the new species with a small population adapting fast to new conditions and the old species with a big population adapting slowly.

Remembering Freeman Dyson

The author would not have to choose among alternative organizations; the reader could do that, choosing among the author’s different organizations and perhaps adding his own

Trying to communicate ideas requires selection from this vast, ever-expanding net.

That religious experience, the moment of my hand in the water, is with me always.  Always I see the profusion of relationships, of connections, of ideas, of possibilities, as a great net across the world, across every subject, across everything.   All my philosophical thoughts since then derive from that insight in the rowboat,

And how, you might ask, do I remember those floating swirling thoughts over sixty years ago?  Because these are matters I have thought about ever since, in thousands of different ways

we often went to a wonderful Chinese restaurant.

A proper parallel hypertext in a possible opening view.  The reader is able to read the full build (right), corresponding to this assembled book, or separate narratives and threads.  Visible beams of transclusion show identical content among separate pages (stories, threads, and full build).

while I was listening to all of you and to our wonderful scientists 00:57:28 I thought of something that the distinguished physicist Freeman Dyson wrote shortly before he died he said he believed that 00:57:40 the speed of cultural Evolution the speed of cultural evolution is now faster than the speed of biological evolution so 00:57:53 what does that mean to me it's something very simple it means that we now hold our destiny in our hands and that's what you're all talking about

1.5 degrees Celsius is the safe boundary this aligns with the intergovernmental panel on climate change with one difference we emphasize that this is a physical limit push it beyond that point 00:05:23 and we risk permanent damage on societies and the world economy

Our double task is now to preserve and foster both biological evolution as Nature designed it and cultural evolution as we invented it, trying to achieve the benefits of both, and exercising a wise restraint to limit the damage when they come into conflict. With biological evolution, we should continue playing the risky game that nature taught us to play. With cultural evolution, we should use our unique gifts of language and art and science to understand each other, and finally achieve a human society that is manageable if not always peaceful, with wildlife that is endlessly creative if not always permanent.

In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

Our species faces two great tasks in the next few centuries. Our first task is to make human brotherhood effective and permanent. Our second task is to preserve and enhance the rich diversity of Nature in the world around us. Our new understanding of biological and cultural evolution may help us to see more clearly what we have to do.

The discoveries of Svante Pääbo show that as early as fifty thousand years ago the transition from biological to cultural evolution was already far advanced. Biological evolution, as demonstrated by Kimura and Goodenough, accelerated the birth of new species by favoring the genetic isolation of small populations. Cultural evolution had the opposite effect, erasing differences between related species and bringing them together. Cultural evolution happens when cousins learn each other's languages and share stories around the cave-fire. As a consequence of cultural evolution, biological differences become less important and cousins learn to live together in peace. Sharing of memes brings species together and sharing of genes is the unintended consequence.

In the long-range history of life, the transition from biological to cultural evolution was an event of transcendent importance. We became aware of its importance only recently, as a result of the discoveries of Svante Pääbo and his colleagues. The transition caused a reversal of the direction of evolution from diversification to unification, from the proliferation of diverging species to the union of species into a brotherhood of man. We see a small-scale example of this transition in the recent history of racism. Until recently, racism was a force of nature favoring the diversification of species. Humans traditionally hated and despised people of a different skin color. The natural evolutionary consequence would have been the division of our species into three new species, one pink, one black and one yellow. Only in the last few centuries, a strong reaction against racism has emerged, inter-racial marriage has become respectable, and the cultural unification of our species has pushed us toward biological unification. This is a small step in the long history of the transition of human societies from incessant warfare to brotherhood.

developed the technology for sequencing ancient DNA degraded and contaminated with modern DNA. They have succeeded in sequencing accurately the genomes of our Neanderthal cousins who lived in Europe about fifty thousand years ago. They also sequenced genomes of our own species who lived in Europe around the same time, and genomes of a third species, called Denisovans because they were found in Denisova cave in Siberia. He published the story of the sequencing and the surprising results in his book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, in 2014.

In the final chapter of his book, Dawkins turns his attention away from biological evolution to cultural evolution and introduces another innovation to our thinking about human behavior. The new idea is the meme, the cultural analog to the gene. A meme is a unit of cultural behavior, just as a gene is a unit of biological behavior. Examples of memes are ideas, customs, slogans, fashions in dress or in hair-style, skills, tools, laws, religious beliefs and political institutions. Memes spread through human populations by social contact far more rapidly than genes spread by sexual contact. Just as our behavior at the individual level is controlled by selfish genes, our behavior at the social level is controlled by selfish memes.

the cultural evolution of creative new societies requires more elbow-room than a single planet can provide. Creative new societies need room to take risks and make mistakes, far enough away to be effectively isolated from their neighbors. Life must spread far afield to continue the processes of genetic drift and diversification of species that drove evolution in the past. The restless wandering that pulled our species out of Africa to explore the Earth will continue to pull us beyond the Earth, as far as our technology can reach.

In each case, a small population produced a star-burst of pioneers who permanently changed our way of thinking. Genius erupted in groups as well as in individuals. It seems likely that these bursts of creative change were driven by a combination of cultural with biological evolution. Cultural evolution was constantly spreading ideas and skills from one community to another, stirring up conservative societies with imported novelties. At the same time, biological evolution acting on small genetically isolated populations was causing genetic drift, so that the average intellectual endowment of isolated communities was rising and falling by random chance. Over the last few thousand years, genetic drift caused occasional star-bursts to occur, when small populations rose to outstandingly high levels of average ability. The combination of imported new ideas with peaks of genetic drift would enable local communities to change the world.

The contribution of genetic drift to cultural evolution remains a speculative hypothesis.

As a result of cultural evolution, a single species now dominates the ecology of our planet, and cultural evolution will dominate the future of life so long as any species with a living culture survives. When we look ahead to imagine possible futures for our descendants, cultural evolution must be our dominant concern. But biological evolution has not stopped and will not stop. As cultural evolution races ahead like a hare, biological evolution will continue its slow tortoise crawl to shape our destiny.

Wells's biggest work is Outline of History, published in 1920, a picture of cultural evolution as the main theme of history since the emergence of our species.

Cultural evolution had its beginnings as soon as animals with brains evolved, using their brains to store information and using patterns of behavior to share information with their offspring. Social species of insects and mammals were molded by cultural as well as biological evolution. But cultural evolution only became dominant when a single species invented spoken language. Spoken language is incomparably nimbler than the language of the genes.

Wells saw that we happen to live soon after a massive shift in the history of the planet, caused by the emergence of our own species. The shift was completed about ten thousand years ago, when we invented agriculture and started to domesticate animals. Before the shift, evolution was mostly biological. After the shift, evolution was mostly cultural. Biological evolution is usually slow, when big populations endure for thousands or millions of generations before changes become noticeable. Cultural evolution can be a thousand times faster, with major changes occurring in two or three generations. It has taken about two hundred thousand years for our species to evolve biologically from its or

Motoo Kimura, author of the book, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, published in 1983, more than a hundred years after Darwin's masterpiece.

Nature is forcing genetic drift to move faster in mating systems than in other bodily functions. If this is generally true, as Goodenough observes, it means that genetic drift in mating systems must have a special importance as a driving force of evolution. She proposes a general theory to explain the facts. In the big picture of life evolving over billions of years, established species with large populations evolve slowly and have a mainly conservative effect on the balance of Nature. The big jumps in evolution occur when established species become extinct and new species with small populations diversify. The big jumps, made by new species, are driven by genetic drift of small populations. For small populations to form new species, they must become genetically isolated. Rapid change of mating systems is a quick road to genetic isolation. Goodenough concludes that the rapid mutation of mating-system genes is Nature's way of achieving big jumps in large-scale evolution. Rapidly evolving mating systems gave us the diversity of species that astonished Darwin.

Nature knows that, in the long run, established species are expendable and new species are essential. That is why Nature is ruthless to the individual parent and generous to the emerging species. Risk-taking is the key to long-term survival and is also the mother of diversity.

The picture of Nature revealed by Kimura and Goodenough is new and striking. Nature loves to gamble. Nature thrives by taking risks. She scrambles mating-system genes so as to increase the risk that individual parents will fail to find mates.

Kimura's theory explains the diversity paradox that puzzled Darwin. Why are we surrounded by such an astonishing diversity of birds and insects and microbes? From the point of view of Darwin, a small number of dominant species would have been sufficient. Kimura explains the mystery by invoking the power of genetic drift, which becomes suddenly rapid and effective just when it is needed, when small populations can vary fast enough to become genetically isolated and form new species.

After the discovery of the structure of DNA molecules by Crick and Watson in 1953, Kimura knew that genes are molecules, carrying genetic information in a simple code. His theory applied only to evolution driven by the statistical inheritance of molecules. He called it the Neutral Theory because it introduced Genetic Drift as a driving force of evolution independent of natural selection.

Sewall Wright, then 98 years old but still in full possession of his wits. He gave me a first-hand account of how he read Mendel's paper and decided to devote his life to understanding the consequences of Mendel's ideas. Wright understood that the inheritance of genes would cause a fundamental randomness in all evolutionary processes. The phenomenon of randomness in evolution was called Genetic Drift. Kimura came to Wisconsin to learn about Genetic Drift, and then returned to Japan. He built Genetic Drift into a mathematical theory which he called the Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution.

Darwin knew nothing of genes. He was unaware of the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who worked in his monastery garden and did experiments on the inheritance of pod-color in peas. Mendel discovered that heritable traits such as pod-color are inherited in discrete packages which he called genes. Any act of sexual reproduction of two parents with different genes results in offspring with a random distribution of the parental genes. Heredity in any population is a random process, resulting in a redistribution of genes between parents and offspring. The numbers of genes of various types are maintained on the average from generation to generation, but the numbers in each individual offspring are random. Mendel made this discovery and published it in the journal of the Brünn Natural History Society, only seven years after Darwin published The Origin of Species. Mendel had read Darwin's book, but Darwin never read Mendel's paper. In 1866, the year when Mendel's paper was published, Darwin did a very similar experiment, using snap-dragons instead of peas, and testing the inheritance of flower-shape instead of pod-color. Like Mendel, he bred three generations of plants, and observed the ratio of normal-shaped to star-shaped flowers in the third generation. Unlike Mendel, he had no understanding of the mathematics of statistical variations. He used only 125 third-generation plants and obtained a value of 2.4 for the ratio of normal to star-shaped offspring. This result did not suggest any clear picture of the way flower-shapes are inherited. He stopped the experiment and explored the question no further. Darwin did not understand that he would need a much larger sample to obtain a statistically significant result. Mendel understood statistics. His sample was sixty-four times larger than Darwin's, so that his statistical uncertainty was eight times smaller. He used 8023 plants. Mendel's essential insight was to see that sexual reproduction is a system for introducing randomness into inheritance. In peas as in humans, inheritance is carried by genes that are handed down from parents to offspring. His simple theory of inheritance carried by genes predicted a ratio of three between green and yellow pods in the third generation. He found a ratio of 3.01 with the big sample. This gave him confidence that the theory was correct. His experiment required immense patience, continuing for eight years with meticulous attention to detail. Every plant was carefully isolated to prevent any intruding bee from causing an unintended fertilization. A monastery garden was an ideal place for such experiments. Unfortunately, his experiments ended when his monastic order promoted him to the rank of abbot. Obedient to his vows, he ceased to be an explorer and became an administrator. His life-work lay hidden in an obscure German-language journal in Brünn, the city that later became Brno and is now in the Czech Republic.

. Naively, we should expect Darwinian evolution to result in a world with a much smaller number of species, each selected by superior fitness to be a winner in the game of survival. All through his life, Darwin was puzzled by the abundance of weird and wonderful species that look like losers but still survive. I call this abundance the diversity paradox.   If only the fittest survive, we should expect to find a few hundred superbly fit species adapted to live in various habitats. Darwin looked at the real world and found an extravagant display of species, with a great diversity of superficial differences. He saw elaborate structures that are expensive to maintain. The theory of evolution by natural selection should tend to keep creatures plain and simple, but nature appears to prefer structures that are elegant and complicated.

In the Pirandello play, "Six Characters in Search of an Author", the six characters come on stage, one after another, each of them pushing the story in a different unexpected direction. I use Pirandello's title as a metaphor for the pioneers in our understanding of the concept of evolution over the last two centuries. Here are my six characters with their six themes. 1. Charles Darwin (1809-1882): The Diversity Paradox. 2. Motoo Kimura (1924-1994): Smaller Populations Evolve Faster. 3. Ursula Goodenough (1943- ): Nature Plays a High-Risk Game. 4. Herbert Wells (1866-1946): Varieties of Human Experience. 5. Richard Dawkins (1941- ): Genes and Memes. 6. Svante Pääbo (1955- ): Cousins in the Cave. The story that they are telling is of a grand transition that occurred about fifty thousand years ago, when the driving force of evolution changed from biology to culture, and the direction changed from diversification to unification of species. The understanding of this story can perhaps help us to deal more wisely with our responsibilities as stewards of our planet.

In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

Biological and Cultural Evolution Six Characters in Search of an Author