I’ve been meditating of late on how human processes or customs don’t really seem to scale. First, I suppose I should define what I mean by scale. As a software engineer, a process is scalable if its functionality and performance is relatively insensitive to the amount of data it’s processing.
But this isn’t quite what I mean here. In today’s context, a human process or custom is scalable if it continues to display positive survival characteristics regardless of the context in which it is utilized. Now, there should be an equivalent to the word “relatively” in the first paragraph, but I’m not sure what that word might be. When one says insensitive to context, that means context can assume any value and the process continues to be valuable to humans as a survival mechanism, and I do understand that there are truly no behaviors which can be completely insensitive to context in the manner defined.
So let me clarify how I am considering context to change, and that is in terms of population density. Thus, in one fell statement, I’m trying to say that human customs that have good survival characteristics at low population densities begin to reverse that attribute at higher population densities.
One of the best examples of this lies in humanity’s custom of dividing into tribes for, paradoxically enough, survival reasons. At low population densities, when faced with competition from other tribes, whether these are based on geography (nationality) or religious reasons, it was a positive survival characteristic to reproduce quickly. Families of ten or more produced excess children which could work the fields, serve in the military, and secure other purposes critical to the group’s survival.
But this survival mechanism, pursued to the Nth degree, actually exacerbates the problem of scarce resources as population rises. Consider the problem known as the tragedy of the commons. Economists and libertarians will characterize the tragedy of the commons as a problem in which a resource does not, and most usually cannot, have a human owner that will manage it and, if possible, renew it, but as an unmanageable and important resource, all comers have a go at it without thought as to whether its harvesting will extend it beyond its capacity to renew. The most common example with which I’m familiar are fisheries.
But the pressure behind the tragedy of the commons is burgeoning population. Without a large and growing population, we would not be harvesting the fisheries with great abandon, or draining marshes for more living space, or opening mines in wilderness areas such as Minnesota’s own BWCA – or finding the existence of our civilization threatened by anthropogenic climate change.
And this is all pushed along by customs from bygone eras. Have children, keep the bloodline going, out-grow that other sect over there, grow grow grow! I don’t even need to give a name to the sect because it’s always true regardless of the sect; those that do not grow disappear. The Quakers tried not reproducing, as I recall, and disappeared in the dust of history.
Yet the logic of the low population era persists – how do you tell someone not to have ten children? It’s the problem of They got here first and therefore they win, so you’d better not have more than one kid – there’s no justice in the justification. Their group is threatened by the growth of other, potentially savage, groups, and unless they can convert outsiders to their cause like the Quakers did, they have to reproduce. And, absent a reasonable ladder to the stars, we see pressure continuing to build on our resources, on our environment, and on ourselves.
The resolution? I suspect it’ll be just like deer and wolves, with dramatic drops and climbs as the two revolve around a dynamic balance, which is so bloodless in that abstract way of writing, but implies the bloody deaths of fawns and pups, mothers and fathers. The analogs in the human world will be bloodier because we have bigger weapons and behaviors not strictly motivated by simple survival.
In a way, this is yet another blow to the Creationist argument, because God, if it actually does have an existence, has sure given us an awful set of tools for continuing our existence. Their existence and behaviors are far more congruent when assuming we come from an animal evolutionary tree, than when we think we’ve come from some omniscient being who has plans for everyone.
And what are our chances for finding better survival tools? Beats me. Science provides us a way to recognize the problem, but I doubt any controlled & peaceful manner of population reduction will really work, unless the approach that appears to have evolved in Japan, which seems to be a distaste for sex, spreads across the globe.
Seems unlikely.
Your Dark view of the future for today.
