Why are people so averse to bad bargains that they’ll turn one down even when—as here—turning it down leads to an even worse outcome? The answer favored by most evolutionary psychologists is that, during human evolution, getting a reputation as someone who would tolerate exploitation could lead to repeated exploitation, even to the point of diminishing your prospects for survival and procreation.
To stay strong, a society must adopt new technologies. In particular, it must reap the non-zero-sum fruits they offer. Yet new technologies often redistribute power within societies. (They often do this precisely because they raise non-zero-sumness—because they expand the number of people who profit from the system and so wield power within it.) And if there is one opinion common to ruling classes everywhere, it is that power is not in urgent need of redistributing.
Reklam
Cultural evolution long ago supplanted genetic evolution as our key adaptive mechanism, and it has now put us on the verge of taking control of our genetic evolution, replacing natural selection with artificial, test-tube selection. And we’ll increasingly be steering the evolution of other species, as well.
All in all, the shape of life on this planet is now moving so fast via cultural evolution that evolution by natural selection is, for practical purposes, standing still.
The historian Chester Starr once wrote, “Every so often civilization seems to work itself into a corner from which further progress is virtually impossible along the lines then apparent; yet if new ideas are to have a chance the old systems must be so severely shaken that they lose their dominance.”
What is in an organic entity’s “Darwinian interest,” remember, is what aids the transmission of its genetic information. So if a bunch of cells have exactly the same genetic information, their Darwinian interests are by definition identical. Suppose, for example, that two cells face starvation, but cell A can somehow save cell B by committing suicide. The net effect of cell A’s “sacrifice” is to raise the chances that its own genetic information will reach the next generation—since, after all, its own genetic information is being carried by cell B.
“Irresistible reproductive pressures,” writes Harris, have “led recurrently to the intensification of production,” which in turn puts stress on the environment, leading to an ecological crisis that only new forms of technology and social organization can solve. In short: Innovate or die! Population density, in this view, drives technological and social development not by creating opportunities, but by creating problems.
Reklam
Reklam