northernmonkey wrote: ↑11 Sep 2023, 16:40
UndercoverElephant wrote: ↑08 Sep 2023, 18:40
That is not evolution going backwards. That's an example of when forwards just happens to resemble backwards.
If a species evolves to a phenotype it had at an earlier period in its evolutionary history then the precise manner of its evolutionary journey from here to there becomes a matter of pointless semantics since it destination is the same place.
I disagree that this is pointless semantics. Yes, dolphins resemble icthyosaurs, but that doesn't mean that when the ancestor of either icthyosaurs or cetaceans returned to an aquatic way of life that this is evolution going backwards. To go backward they would have had to re-evolve gills, become cold-blooded and go back to laying eggs. Convergent evolution is not "evolution going backwards". At every stage in their evolutionary history, cetaceans outcompeted the competition.
I agree that ecological balance with the environment is the ultimate fate of humans, as it is with all of life. But, there are many ways to be in balance. Extinction is one of them, eco-civilization is another and a return to a pre-civilisational existence is another. Any of these three outcomes is possible. But, I am bound to say, the two you are presenting as the only possible ones seem, to me, to be the most extreme and, consequently, the least likely in the medium to long term. In the deep long term. of course, extinction awaits. But, I think this species has a way to run before then.
This is clearly where we part company. I am ruling out the possibility of humans returning to the social state that existed before civilisation, which was tribal hunter-gathering. You could possibly argue there was an intervening state between the neolithic revolution and the first cities, but I believe by that point it was absolutely inevitable that cities would be built. It was also inevitable that agriculture would be invented -- a claim supported by the fact that it was invented independently in at least three different locations (on what are now Iraq, China and Central America). This was the result of climate change after a long glaciation during which the "final touches" were put on human cognitive evolution between 100K and 60K years ago, in Africa. Jared Diamond has called this “the great leap forward” (see Guns, Germs and Steel from p39). Stone tools were joined by bone needles and fish-hooks, the first jewellery appeared, along with new weapons, including spear throwers and bows and arrows. We call the people who made this leap forwards the “Cro-Magnons”, and they arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago. Within a few thousand years they had completely displaced the Neanderthals who had been there for at least the previous 200,000 years. The neolithic revolution could not happen in Africa or Europe because the right selection of domesticable species were not available, and other conditions (to do with climate and geography) were not favourable. But when the climate changed so that conditions became right in Mesopotamia and the Yangtze/Yellow river basins, humans were ready to go. Once that had happened the first cities were inevitable, because the most efficient way to do agriculture in a fertile river valley is to use massive earthworks to irrigate the land, and you need large numbers of people to do it. Somebody has to organise all that, including providing security to stop outsiders, who didn't do the work, taking the food. And once you've got cities, then sooner or later somebody is going to invent primitive writing and maths in order to keep track of what is going on -- you need a bureaucracy. And once you've invented writing then sooner or later somebody will invent philosophy.
There's a whole sequence of events like this which run through human history. Homo sapiens is going through a fundamental evolutionary change, rather like when the first ants and termites went from solitary lives to massive colonies. The difference is that we are doing it mostly culturally rather than biologically, but that doesn't make reversible. The reason we cannot go backwards is that any group of humans who attempt to live a post-civilisation existence (as anarcho-primitivists dream of) will be overpowered by other groups of humans who are organised into some form of civilisation. Tribal hunter-gatherers cannot compete with civilised people, so what makes you think post-civilisation anarchists can compete with civilised people? The civilised people have massive advantages over the anarchists, even in an ecologically ruined world. In fact
even more so in such a world.
I am very happy to go into much more detail if you still aren't convinced. I have settled on the historical format for this book precisely because it is so important to understand that the fundamental process of human civilisation is irreversible. I believe the entire series of events can be traced back to the point where hominins started to depend on brainpower as their sole survival strategy and Homo erectus became an apex predator. I believe that from that moment onwards, it was inevitable that we'd end up in something like the predicament we find ourselves in now. And if you look at it like this, then the idea that we can somehow go back to a "pre-civilisational existence" is for the birds.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)
