This life sucks, lets slash the seats

In the modern world many people (including me) feel that areas of their lives unfulfilling.

Why?

First, some principles:

• Evolution adapts organisms to a particular environment. If that environment changes, evolution starts adapting organisms to the new environment.
• The longer the environment remains stable, the more time evolution has to act, and hence the better adapted organisms become to that environment.
• Environmental change can occur much faster than evolution can act.
• After a period of rapid environmental change, initially organisms will still be adapted to their previous environment. Over time, evolution will act to adapt organisms to the new environment; however, this may take many orders of magnitude longer than the environmental change event.
• In such a system, directly after (or during) periods of major, rapid environmental change, organisms will likely be very poorly adapted (“mismatched”) to their new environment.
  • For an extreme example, imagine polar bear flying to Hawaii. It’s environmental change is almost instantaneous, and upon arriving, is very poorly adapted to its new environment. Eventually though, presuming the Hawaiian environment didn’t change too much for a few million years, the Polar Bear’s offspring would evolve to become more and more well adapted to living in Hawaii. Until then however, they would be mismatched to their environment, and probably quire hot and miserable.

Now, using those principles:

• As feelings of fulfillment are activated by biochemical processes, they are genetically controlled and subject to evolution.
• Therefore, evolution should result in tendency towards the amount of fulfilment gained from a task becoming proportional to its importance for survival and reproduction in that environment.
• So, after a prolonged period of environmental stability, we would expect an organism’s most fulfilling activities to be those which are the most important for its survival/reproduction (in that environment). Such a state was likely last achieved by humans after spending >5 million years living as stone age nomads.
• Introduction of technology and civilization over the last 3000 years represents a huge, rapid, ongoing (and exponentially increasing) environmental change event for the human species.
• Following the logic, humans are likely still predominantly adapted to their previous (stone age) environment, and very poorly adapted to their new environment*. This is encapsulated by the phrase “our modern skulls house a stone age mind”, one of the central tenets of evolutionary psychology.
• As humans are still adapted to their previous (stone age) environment, it follows that the activities humans will find most fulfilling are also those that are most important for survival and reproduction their previous (stone age) environment.

Phew. We got there. So what does all that mean?

Well it means that the things we most enjoy in life should be the things we would be doing if we were living a stone age life. Guess what – like the saying goes, they’re free. Hunting, fishing, cooking, building (tree)houses, dams, and making tools; teaching, communal singing and all things relating to small tribal societies – the list goes on. What It definitely doesn’t include, is sitting at a computer all day not really interacting with other people – which is what many people’s jobs and lives consist of in the modern world.

*The issue is muddied by the fact that in this instance the environmental change has actually been caused by humans themselves, and so, in some aspects at least, they are likely not to be as poorly adapted to their new environment as they would be otherwise.

All good things must come to an end

Martin Brasier, the Oxford paleontology professor, once shared his pet theory in a lecture (one of the ones I’d actually managed to get up for) about the cause of the 26 million year cyclicity in mass extinctions apparent in the fossil record. He suggested that it’s not that extreme events happen only every 26 million years, but instead they are fairly common – it just takes 26 million years for the biosphere to evolve to a level of complexity that is fatally susceptible to them.

With this idea in mind, looking back at the fossil record, and at the history of modern civilisation, it seems like this increase of complexity and subsequent collapse is a fairly unavoidable aspect of evolving complex systems. In fact you could argue that it is just the life/reproduction/death cycle played out on much larger scales. After all, a human, consisting of more than 100 trillion independent living entities (cells), is also an evolving complex system. It could be argued that human societies, and even the entire global biosphere, are in fact just huge organisms* that naturally develop, age and perish, just like humans do – they just have much longer life spans.

Taking that viewpoint, prevention of a global (human) catastrophe is probably best achieved not by attempting to prevent catastrophic events (as these will happen regardless) but instead by trying to decrease complexity and “tight coupling” within society. To explain that term, as with many things in evolution, there is a direct link to computer programming. “Tight coupling” is a programming term referring to when a number of programs are heavily dependent on one another: If one breaks, they all break; change something in one, and you have to change them all. Programmers have learnt through many costly mistakes that this is something to avoid, and instead aim for a collection of “loosely coupled” programs that work together, but function as independently as possible.

Loosely coupled systems have lots of redundancy, and redundancy is exactly what you need to survive a potentially major extinction event.

So, in terms of surviving a global catastrophe, this “loosely coupled” structure is undoubtedly the best option. Unfortunately, thoguh, the last time human society had such a structure was well before the industrial revolution, when it consisted primarily of small, self sufficient villages. So, we’re in trouble. And at the rate society is developing, I’d say we’re in really, really big trouble. But is it worth worrying about?

Probably not.

Societies collapse. Organisms grow old and die. Your brand new pc eventually gets so clogged up with software artifacts that windows packs up it’s toys and stops playing. If you’re unfortunate enough to be using Vista, it probably has already happened. Anyway, it’s an unavoidable consequence of complex evolving systems, and it’s been going on since the dawn of life. In fact, Richard Dawkins, in (I think) the Blind Watchmaker argues that complex system collapse (death) is a vital part of the evolutionary process – kind of like nature’s way of reformatting the hard drive and starting again from a clean slate.

So much so that we certainly wouldn’t be here without it.

*James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis both came to this conclusion independently from studying macroscopic and microscopic biology respectively, and collaborated to create Gaia theory.

Everything looks perfect from…

WayUpHigh. Assorted, semi-random (and often obscure) thoughts on the nature of the world. And yes, occasionally, sandwiches. You could say it’s something for everyone.

Evolution, snowboarding, symbiosis, gaia, photography, music production, society, technology, travelling, ethics, psycology, marketing, physics, snowboarding, fulfilment – and occasionally some accidental humour – all packed neatly into small brown cardboard boxes and helpfully indexed with one of those unreasonably confusing (and always incomplete) library card indexes which were once, presumably, helpful for finding books, but now are mostly helpful for setting on fire to ward off the next ice age. Which, if you were wondering, is just around the corner.