Having just switched again to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the U.S., it’s a good opportunity for me to express my misgivings on the matter. I’m not going to delve into the history or motivations: that’s what Wikipedia is for. The main take-away will be what it says about—and does to—our perceived relationship to the world.
The parents of my friend from Puerto Rico nailed it. He had moved to Rhode Island for college, and called them every week at a certain time. A few months in, he warned them that next week he’d be calling an hour later than normal (as they would perceive it) due to the time change. “What kind of arbitrary shenanigan is that?! You can’t go around just changing the clocks! Balderdash!” I’m sure that’s the exact translation from Spanish. In any case, I’m in total agreement!
The Phenomenon
Noon is loosely defined as the middle of the day, when the sun is at its zenith—crossing the north–south meridian. This was the cardinal moment of the maritime day, when sextants marked the apex of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and hourglasses were reset accordingly: eight bells; change of watch (not wristwatch, in this case). By comparing local noon to an accurate chronometer (clock)—set to Greenwhich time, for instance—one could ascertain longitude on the planet, which transformed navigation and quelled many anxieties about being blown onto a lee shore in the dark of night.
For every degree of longitude one travels west, noon happens 4 minutes later. If each locality set its clocks in the nautical fashion, Philadelphia would be almost five minutes behind New York City. Every place would have its own time, which may be fine for isolated ships at sea but it’s no way to run modernity and schedule zoom calls!
Thus, we define time zones, nominally centered at integer multiples of 15° in longitude. This puts Philadelphia (75°W) right in the center of Eastern time, Memphis (90°W) at the center of Central, Denver (105°W) squarely in Mountain, and Fresno (120°W) sitting atop Pacific. Boundaries would then be 7.5°away from center, so that one is never more than 30 minutes out of whack compared to local noon (although the eccentric, tilted Earth throws in an additional quarter-hour periodic variation, as captured by the equation of time). The actual lines are politically-influenced to deviate, following state lines and the like. Chattanooga, where I grew up, sits at 85°W and by all rights should be in Central. But it’s magnetically drawn to the influential Eastern time zone. (Incidentally, I had a friend who lived just west of the city and whose house was bisected by the time zone line. It was the place to be at New Year’s! In an odd rejection of arbitrary convention, they observed Eastern time throughout the entire house!) The “erroneous” placement of Chattanooga in Eastern meant that local noon was nominally around 12:40 in standard time.
When Daylight Savings Time is invoked, a region essentially hops east by 15°—pretending to be somewhere it’s not. In Chattanooga, noon was now around 1:40 PM. How’s that for perversion: almost two hours off reality! Arizona sensibly abstains from the craziness, so that California hops in its lap for the summer months. Maybe all the snowbirds leaving the state make room for California? Maybe rates are better in the sweltering Arizona summer? Also Hawaii—being tropical and thus experiencing much smaller length-of-day variation throughout the year—sees no benefit to lurching. Therefore, the time difference between California and its neighbors to the east and west keeps yo-yo-ing twice a year. Make it stop!
In any case, as a California-based astronomer often having dealings with observatories in both Arizona and Hawaii, this hopping model really helped me keep the time differences straight as I lurched with respect to these stable beacons of reason. “Remember: it’s summer, so I’m pretending to be in Arizona now and thus farther from Hawaii than I really am.”
We’ll Have More Daylight!
Presumably, most people have heard—if not said—that once the time changes in spring, we’ll have an hour more daylight. Now, I hope most people who say this know full well that it is not literally true.
The day following a time change is not perceptibly longer than the one before: maybe a few minutes, but absolutely not an hour!. Yes: the length of day gradually grows as one approaches summer, ultimately resulting in markedly longer days than in winter (especially far from the equator). This would be true even without any labels on time. It was true 5 million years ago, before any humans walked the Earth, and it’s true today for plants and animals lacking clocks and watches. But that’s not what most people mean when they say we’ll suddenly have an extra hour of daylight. I’ll bet some really think it’s true, though, and what does this say?
Translation
My translation: the time of evening we now call 6 PM will tomorrow be called 7 PM. We’re just going to change the labeling. Nothing substantive changes about the day. If the birds, trees, raccoons, and newts notice anything, it’s that the day is maybe a few minutes longer as Earth’s tilted axis swings incrementally more toward the sun. The astute critter may notice humans suddenly beginning their activities an hour earlier than usual, inexplicably. What strange creatures!
Seasonal Allergies
I recently heard someone griping about having allergies in winter, when nothing was even in bloom. They went on to speculate that maybe there were enough plantings of southern-hemisphere species in the area to create the effect. It took me a moment of silent thought to apprehend the premise. It would seem the idea was that since our fall/winter is spring/summer in the southern hemisphere, plants from there would be in bloom during our cold seasons.
Kudos for that awareness, but think about the underlying presumption: that calendar labels matter most. A southern hemisphere plant knows to bloom in the (natively warm) month called December. By this thinking, bring it to the north and it continues to faithfully follow its programming and bloom when the calendar on the wall says December: damn the cold!
It seems obvious to me that a plant—carrying regulatory genes many millions of years old—has no notion of our recent artificial labels. But the plant knows weather and seasons. It knows moisture, temperature, the perils of freezing, insect schedules, fungal network operations, and a host of other factors we are not accustomed to considering.
This case stood out to me as another example of how our labels become the reality; the map becomes the territory; the theory becomes truth.
What It Says
To me, the phenomenon of saying that it will stay light later after switching to DST points to an overly-rigid, literal relationship with our artificial constructs. It favors theory over reality. We say the emperor has clothes, so he must, because: words.
I consider the DST reaction to be a relevant window into the wider phenomenon of modernity. We believe we make the world what it is from our meat-brains, when it should be clear that the world made our meat-brains instead. Students often would ask me who invented things like energy, or atoms, or any number of physical realities predating humans by billions of years. We create nations by drawing an imaginary line—sometimes across open water. We create money as a theoretical construct (a fiction), and allow it to determine most of the big decisions in our lives. We get up when the clock says 7:00:00 and angrily beeps at us—not when we’re rested and/or sense daylight. It’s a post-truth, post-factual world (post-modernist dreck): things are what we say they are, and even physics becomes a construct of privileged authority, rather than the bedrock upon which everything (even thought) is dependent. To me, it belies an underlying foundation of human supremacy.
Elimination Proposals
Chatter about eliminating Daylight Savings Time has increased of late. The disruptive Trump administration might actually do so. But it is completely unclear whether they would abolish DST or make it permanent! How much faith do I have that they’ll get it right, by my standards? Also, note that many health and safety organizations strongly advocate for standard time. Permanent DST would result in dangerous dark morning commutes to work and school. Where I live now, mid-winter sunrise would be pushed to after 9 AM, completely artificially and unnecessarily.
I’ll say this. If left to popular opinion, we would probably lock in DST (make it permanent), because people have a fondness for the “longer evenings.” What they’re really saying, without awareness, is: “I like summer better than winter.” They’re conflating natural seasonal change with clock changes. It’s back to the sort of sentiment: we make summer because we were clever enough to introduce DST, and now have created longer days. I guarantee you that if popular (ignorant) opinion prevailed and we locked in DST, the proponents would scream bloody murder when the first winter rolled along and it was still quite dark at 8:30! But they may not believe it until experiencing it first hand. I’m just saying: we’d see massive buyers’ remorse. No one could have seen it coming, though, right?
Just Shift Schedules!
To highlight the mental disconnect of adhering to the “theory” (labels) and wrongly internalizing that the day has actually changed, consider this proposal. Adopt seasonal schedules. We’ll use St. Louis, MO as an example—centrally-situated as it is. At winter solstice, St. Louis experiences 9.5 hours of daylight, from about 7:15 to 4:45 (solar noon sensibly at 11:59). At summer solstice, it gets almost 15 hours of daylight, from just after 5:30 AM in DST to just before 8:30 PM (noon happening at 1:02 PM). Without DST, sunrise would be a little after 4:30 and sunset just before 7:30 PM (noon at 12:02, where it should be). [I often us this great tool for such explorations.]
Let’s say you work an 8-hour day. Maybe set your work schedule from 8 AM to 4 PM in winter, providing about an hour of light on either side. If carrying the same, rigid 8–4 schedule into summer, DST results in 2.5 hours of daylight before work and 4.5 hours after. On standard time (and a rigid schedule), it would be a symmetric 3.5 hours before and after. It’s the longer after-work daylight that people notice and enjoy. 4.5 hours is more fun than 3.5.
So, just make your summer work hours 7 AM to 3 PM! The result is exactly the same, without changing clocks and all the associated confusion. But really: accommodate to the seasons! Most people accommodate their wardrobe seasonally. They change habits around opening windows, eating outside, and a host of other things. How hard would it be, really, to carry winter hours and summer hours? One could even apply a national standard to the shift, so that “winter hours” and “summer hours” would have universal interpretation for those who elected to go along. But the shift would be in routines, not in a perverted mislabeling of time. Noon would always be (approximately) mid-day, and after-work daylight is a function of when you work. No more hassles changing clocks in the car, the thermostat, the wall clock, etc.
The point is: nature is not rigid. Seasons happen. We might consider gracefully bending with the seasons, rather than pretending that the universe lurches to our capricious definition of time.
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Even better: get everyone to use GMT. Then it's totally obvious to everyone (except the British and others sharing the same longitude) that labels like noon are an artificial construct and not related to any local event the the sun being at its highest point in the sky.
Having said that, it might be worth learning from history. The French Republican calendar made much more sense than the Gregorian calendar, but Napoleon had to give up on it after 12 years. It turns out to be very hard to change a large number of people's habits simultaneously. I think we're stuck with what we've got.
I despise clock time, as I consider it another abstraction layer modernity has forced between us and the world. It makes us frantic, hurried, and harried to no great purpose save the human ideal of “efficiency.” My wife desires clocks on the wall, and so I let them remain, but their ticking is unpleasant. Quieter than the roar of engines, but just as representative of our separation and probable damnation.
To rise and sleep with the sun would break civilization. Good–let us do so, if we can.
Here in UK we change the clocks twice a year, once forward an hour, once back an hour. I despise it completely, and for the last few years I've not bothered changing my clocks, just do the maths instead if I need a time that other people are bothered about.
There was a recent survey in the EU where 76% of residents were opposed to changing the clocks. Am pretty sure no one would notice if this anachronism was abolished everywhere.
Write your congressional representative: Since all our clocks change automatically, instead of moving clocks ahead by one hour on Sunday morning, we could move forward by 40 seconds every day for 90 days. No one will miss 40 seconds of sleep.
Hello, Long time dissenter here. Through all of the years of wondering and realizing I have found the answer as far as I'm concerned. A year ago I wound up in Northern Maine. Five miles east on the old interstate is a good size Amish community that numbers in the hundreds. Five miles west on that same road is another distinct Amish community. Being aware of our cultures short sighted mode of operation and having gotten to know various members of their community over the past year has led me to one conclusion. Those men and women are doing it right. After all, they are human but they are conducting themselves the closest to right that I have ever seen. But alas, I have never, am not and will never be religious. So I am on the wrong side of that fence. Nevertheless, my wife and I have gained as much admiration and respect for the Amish in our local area as they have for us. We will continue to assist within the confines of our shared beliefs. We all find it in our best interest to invest in our common interests and not our differences.
Sorry for that aside. Your post made me think of our Amish neighbors who do not incorporate time changes, weather forecasts or taxes into their culture. It's incredible. A sane system operating within chaos. So no they didn't change their clocks. Their clock is the sun.
I think the Amish are doing it "better" more than "right".
They still work the soil and plant annual crops. That is ultimately unsustainable, whether you do it with a 250 horsepower diesel tractor or with a team of horses.
What is needed is a wholesale change to perennial polyculture. I don't know of any Amish who are into that.
Check out "Restoration Agriculture" by Mark Shepard. He has a chapter in which he compares the nutritional output of his polyculture farm to the name number of acres in soy or corn. Conventional agriculture doesn't fare so well.
Apologies for the late interjection into this one, but I'm only just reading your article now and thought this comment was interesting. I happen to agree with your position on perennial polyculture. However, any time I've seen it in action (and I haven't read Mark Shepard's work, despite being aware of him), it is presented as just another form of farming. Thus it is also a step better, toward being "right". For me, the problem isn't just the way we grow, but the specialisation of "farmer" itself. The specialisation that allows the rest of us to disconnect from our food and the nature that provides for us, in the pretence that civilisation has already solved for food, and I should build space rockets or whatever, whilst I ignore the immigrant harvesting my regenerative strawberries. The farmer, and his land, are a technology of our existing system, imbued with its requirements. I think, anyway. Obviously, I use the supermarket like everyone else.
Yeah, I've a lot of sympathy with sticking at solar time, more or less. However, at some latitudes it can cause problems, as you've noted (though it will be even worse further north). So having winter hours and summer hours? Yeah, that might work. But isn't that essentially the same as moving the hands on the clock, twice a year?
The suggestions so far cover quite the spectrum! In the spirit of paying *more* attention to local conditions, I'd not want to adopt GMT. I used it (UTC) heavily in an astronomical context, where the rationale was stronger. I'm much more sympathetic to ignoring clocks completely as a modernity-bolstering abstraction. As pointed out, the Amish don't need them. And, yes, the "summer hours" scheme does result in an identical work profile, which is sort-of the point: offering an equivalent to fans of the DST effect, but without the silliness of pretending time can change. To me, that's like claiming the sidewalk moves backwards instead of the bus moving forward—just because you happen to be on the bus. You can say it, but it won't make you many friends.
Hi Tom,
Love your suggestion! Having a different timetable for at least summer and winter time should be the norm. I live in Belgium and hate the fact that Ican't go for walks in the forest after work as it's already night, when I wouldnt mind if we shifted our starting time two hours in the past in order to be able to enjoy that… I am from the Western Coast of Galicia, Spain, and there we have to use GMT +1 in Winter and GMT+2 in summer, resulting on having atrociously late sunrises in the winter and abnormally "long" evenings in the summer. In the summer solstice sunset takes place around 22:15 and there still light until the early 23PM… Who would go to sleep "early" to start work at the usual time when you have been exposed to daylight until such hours? It doesn't make sense at all and has greatly shaped the myth of Spaniards "having late meal times"… Still I always get the same answer than you when questioning about such a topic, "I love long evenings because I can enjoy quality free time after work", as if changing our activity schedules was completely out of the menu and Earth tilt and rotation was something we hairless monkeys could change at our will…
Cheers and always grateful for your insights and that of many of those gravitating around your blog 🙂
Good morning, good evening or good-day, on whatever clock you are reading these lines written about 15:15 GMT. A couple of remarks if I may.
In my native Austria DST, or "Sommerzeit" (summer time), was re-introduced in 1980; I remember the selling point was the saving of energy expended for lighting, incandescent lighting then. If the "clock-base" is moved such that the majority of human activity falls within a time bracket with mostly natural light. The energy saving aspect is less important these days as LED lighting is mostly used. And as for making sure that human activity falls mostly into a time bracket of natural light, as you say Tom, one could leave the clock base constant and shift the schedule. This happens anyway in many services in the UK, e.g. park opening times.
My second thought: having grown up on a dairy farm, I do remember the hassle and the stress imposed on our cows when the "external clock" was all of a sudden imposed onto their natural rhythm. The milk collection service insisted to collect all milk every day at 7am, which then determines the time milking had to start; twice a year that changed. While one hour later only meant to cool the milk a bit longer for a transition period, one hour earlier was much more disruptive. On a wider scope it shows how we humans tend to impose our often arbitrary constructs onto a natural world rather than living with it.
"as a California-based astronomer often having dealings with observatories in both Arizona and Hawaii"
As an amateur astronomer — and amateur radio operator — I'd have thought that astronomy would be based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
Since sidereal events are unconnected to the rotation of the Earth, wouldn't this make more sense?
DST is awful and it drives me nuts that CA, OR and WA have all passed laws to eliminate it… But only if someone else does it first. 🤷♂️
In a perfect world, each state would just define noon as when the sun is highest in the state capitol on June 21st for synchronization purposes and stick with that standard time year-round.
Society would adjust accordingly, shifting schedules by season. Everyone would get better sleep, be more productive, be happier, and it'd probably result in lower energy usage overall.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI. In the 1960s, when I was in elementary school, Michigan did not go on Daylight Savings Time; instead it stayed on Eastern Standard Time. My father worked for a company in Dearborn that went on summer time, shifting work hours one hour earlier during the summer. I don't remember exactly when it started and ended, but it worked as you described. As a fellow DST hater, I am in total agreement with your proposal, and it worked fine for my family.
Not related to "summer time", but I've long been an advocate of thirteen 28-day months, with one or two "leap days" at the end of the year.
This would vastly simplify date math. The day of the week would always land on the same four numbers in the calendar, as would the phase of the moon (more or less!).
Ah—but any clean system you impose will be thwarted by astronomy, which keeps a random schedules. The fact that the year is 365.2422 days is non-negotiable (over relevant timescales), and moon phases—on average—are on a 29.530589 day cycle. Our notions of weeks, months, and days fitting nicely in a year are not part of the universe's plan.
The plan suggested was that each year is 52 weeks plus 1 or 2 extra days. Every year gets one extra day, and 24.22% of the years get two extra days. It would basically follow the same pattern as leap years.
But religion says that Sunday has to be every 7 days, so making it sometimes be 8 days between Sundays will never do. Some people would refuse that plan.
Also, if we want to make the day make sense, why not use a metric form of day? Instead of hours, minutes and seconds, we could go by centidays and millidays.
Regarding Daylight Savings Time another plan would be to have our computers automatically adjust the clocks every day so sunrise in a central city in your time zone always occurs at 6AM. Mornings always have the same amount of sunshine regardless of what time of year. The extra minutes (or millidays) that we get every day would occur in the evenings, where most people appreciate any extra minute of daylight.
[edited down by a factor of 3 or 4]
A bit of a contrarian viewpoint: in the past I as well was for abolishing DST, but in the last few years I have come around to it.
As a disclaimer, here in Germany the system is simpler due to not having to deal with multiple time zones for the whole country, or the politically influenced arbitrary border lines between them – and then having different states that do or do not follow DST on top of that!
Of course, all your arguments are valid, Tom. What I find interesting is that the situation really seems to irk you. A bit at least. I have to say, in the grand scheme of things this topic is really nothing that can rouse my emotions (much, anymore) – compared to the MUCH bigger issues and stupidities our human world is facing/performing.
What I find interesting is that some people seem to be particularly annoyed by the fact that DST moves the "natural" noon even farther away from the intended (?) 12 o'clock position..
While that is of course true, I'm not sure how high I would rank that on the list of civilizational practices that reduce our connection to nature. Since "railroad time" the local noon time is quite arbitrary anyway. So is one extra hour that bad? I would argue it does not matter much (more).
Maybe that is more an astronomy thing/pet peeve 😀
I hope it's clear that the DST topic would never make my top 10 list (or even top 100) of critical ills introduced by modernity. Perhaps I needn't have offered a work-around, because the main point I wanted to stress is that the practice is a window into our attitude, possibly even contributing by leading some to believe we actually *do* make the day longer because we decide to. It's a minor symptom, and I simply use this recent reminder as a way to better characterize the underlying disease. Layers run deeper than the superficial irksomeness.
This is a fun and interesting podcast on the history of time keeping.
People have always resented time being imposed on them by TPTB.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0wkD9ffGeG24pZlAe4ETWW?si=u1UwRiDMR1CRQ4jALDQb9Q
I'm still too groggy from the change to offer much sharp insight. But reading this did spur lots of thoughts about work and time for me, which seems at the root of a lot of the debate, as well as how modernity can just jerk us around with these arbitrary impositions. I have a pretty physical job and keep reminding myself during wintertime tired spells that we are animals and under different cultural circumstances we would be resting more. I'm not fan of the 40 hour work week any time of year, but in my case, it sure would be nice to shrink it during the cold and dark months – though it seems most people think the opposite, that they'd rather work less hours and play more during the summer, which also makes sense when you consider how far much of what we consider 'work' now is from what we evolved to do. It's definitely not aligned with much actual seasonality!
Excellent! I think you're right: since work is so disconnected from intrinsically (instinctively) meaningful activities, it's a curse and a chore to dispense as if wasting time. In "The Night Before Christmas" the opening lines speak of a long winter's nap. I have read that it was once common for people to sleep in two stints during long winter nights (16 hours is far too long to sleep). They might sleep 5 or so hours, wake up to do some chores or otherwise putter about, then return for more sleep before daybreak. The regimented cycles imposed by rigid work shifts in the modern era don't necessarily map well to our natural rhythms.
I wonder how many indigenous cultures actually have a word for "work"?
Oh to be able to “tune out and tune in”! Tune out of the madness of the modern world and tune back into the natural word from which we emerged and cannot exist separate from. Modern day humans are either control freaks or under the control of control freaks. The brains of vast numbers of people are almost now completely entrapped within the tech bro-created “Matrix”, which seems to be increasingly used to maintain and extend control.
That’s my paranoid rant for the day…
I live 15 degrees east of Greenwich and 61 degrees north of the equator. In the summer there is no need for day-light-saving-time since the sun stays up from early morning until late at night. As a matter of fact dusk goes directly to dawn at least two months every summer. However it gets mostly chilly in the evenings. Only between the first week of June until around August 20 it is unusual that the temperature goes below 0 degree C during the night.
In the 1960-es some companies changed the working hours one hour which gave the employees one hour to go for a swim or to have supper in the garden after work-hours while it was still warm enough. Later what here is called “summertime” was introduced which is appreciated by many people. Of course there are also people who complain.
Personally I very much like to have the time one hour earlier than the standard time here. Really it would be a good idea to have it that way all year around. Children the would then get an hour after the end of the school day to play outside before it is getting dark.
But day-light-saving time in e. g. the US is not needed. I lived for a few years in NC and there it was pretty dark both in the morning and in the evening both with and without day-light-saving time and the temperature was around 30 degrees C at bedtime and the whole night. So why having day-light-saving time there.
Living conditions differ a lot depending on where you live on the Earth. For me daylight for nearly 20 hours a day is summer even if the temperature goes below freezing
The part about children not getting another hour without DST is an artifact of binding ourselves to a rigid clock schedule: insisting that the day starts at 8:00, for instance, and not, for instance, an hour after sunrise. What are we, robots executing programs?
When the time for sunrise and sunset varies a lot between summer and winter the clocks it is not possible to use the sunrise to decide when the day starts but you can of course choose to have your own time as long as you remember to convert to the standard time when you have an appointment with e. g. the dentist. Sunrise is where I live from 2.25 in the summer to 9.14 in the winter while sunset is from 21.42 in the summer to 14.46 in the winter.
Since it during the winter is hard to get enough sunshine to get the needed amount of vitamin D an hour more of daylight especially for the children would make a difference.
Most of us live in a society where it for practical reasons is needed that our clocks show the same time as the rest of the people. Call it living as robots if you like.
In ancient Greece it is said that they had the same number of hours all the year but in the winter the hours were shorter to better fit the time between sunrise and sunset.
Part of the point is that during the winter, the duration of daylight for vitamin D is oblivious to our time conventions: same no matter what. If our rigid adherence to an abstract convention ends up depriving children of vitamin D, that's entirely our fault. The actual day is the same either way.
A modest proposal – GPS can make time can be completely continuous with longitude. Noon is noon wherever you are. You'll be able to claim, "I'm not late, you're East!", or to quote Buckaroo Bonzai, "No matter where you go, there you when."
Isn't adopting seasonal schedules kind of what we are already doing de facto with daylight savings time? Is there any physical difference between changing work hours form 08:00-16:00 to 07:00-15:00 and turning the clocks forward an hour? I agree that seasonal schedules would probably be more sensible in the long run than changing the clocks 2x per year.
Some other interesting facts: Even though one of the motivations for daylight savings time is saving energy, studies show it saves little if any energy (this may be a rebound effect or an example of Jevon's paradox). Also apparently the candy industry had a role in getting daylight savings time extended to the first week of November in the U.S.
P.S. National borders might exist because humans are tribal and territorial species . But "a tribe" where you share a territory with millions of complete strangers is a bad imitation of our ancestral environment.
The suggestion about switching schedules was made precisely because of its equivalency: if you (or your bosses) insist on binding yourself to a clock, then don't pretend that time changes; adopt a more flexible schedule. It's not that I think of flexible schedules as a magnificent solution (still executes a flawed premise), but it's less capricious than slapping the clocks around.
Tom.
Your articles are thought-provoking and inspiring. Can you write an article on the maximum power principle?
For whatever reason, I've never found the MPP to be super-compelling. It has the feel of homo economicus: an idealized one-dimensional being bent on maximizing personal gain. It also reminds me of our twisted take on evolution as survival of the fittest (rather than well-fitting), stressing competition and individualism over community and elaborate interrelationships. It has a ring of justifying our cultural death spiral (which is not demonstrably endemic to humans; just post-ag-culture). It's been dubbed the fourth law of thermodynamics, but one that oddly physicists don't know about (so it's really *not* a fourth law of thermodynamics). This throws up a red flag for me: a lofty overreach. I suspect that were one to dig in, it would not be hard to find loads of counter-examples in the living world. But, given my biases I am unlikely to invest time chasing a pseudo-law.
Darwin’s well-established theory of evolution, which explains how species adapt and evolve over time, is supported by a wealth of scientific evidence. This theory underscores the survival of the best-adapted organisms within their environments and emphasizes the importance of collective traits that enhance existence. All organisms, from the simplest bacteria to complex mammals, optimize their energy intake to thrive in their respective ecosystems. However, humans have progressed significantly beyond basic survival through the innovative use of technology. This advancement has led to profound consequences, shaping not only human society but also impacting the broader environment and other species, illustrating a unique and troubling intersection of biological evolution and technological development.
I don't question for a second the process of evolution. I just believe it to be more complex than "Bug get more energy." Many layers operate all at once in a complicated weave so that sacrifices by one organism may be adaptive in connection with the others with which it is entangled. Evolution has no choice but to work on the whole, all at once, involving all the interconnected relationships, rather than individual optimization. It may be simpler for our brains to isolate a stripped-down aspect, and surely those processes are important components. But I would again hesitate to form a law around optimization at a single species level. Seems like cramming an attractive cube into a hole that defies geometrical description. Sorry, but you did ask for thought-provoking…
In reality, everything grows and collapses. Our civilization is not immune from it. Stars burn hydrogen and then burn helium. Living organisms die. So this sense of hubris of human exceptionalism in today's industrial civilization could be our downfall.
Rather than a rule that organisms have to follow, I see MPP more as an emergent property of all organisms. I can't think of (but would like to know of) a reason why any organism would voluntarily limit its capabilities in accessing resources. The more resources it can access, the more likely it is to survive and reproduce.
I used the word "voluntarily" above but, in the absence of free will, there really is no such thing. Organisms do whatever their body (and neurons) have evolved for it to do, though various other factors play into what that body might develop to do, as Robert Sapolsky, and others, have described.
I am at fault for enabling this off-topic thread to persist, but will make a few final comments before closing it out.
1) It is par for the (meat-brain) course not to be able to think of stuff that nonetheless exists. We all suffer from it and it's part of why we're in the present predicament: narrow mental models failing to even acknowledge a richer unknown, simply because it can't occur to us.
2) Multi-level trophic stability requires biodiversity in complex interrelationship across a vast array of lifeforms, so that if a species were to actually *succeed* in MPP, the result would be trophic collapse. So, either evolution is incompetent (based on ineffectual, systematically failed/thwarted MPP), or MPP is not a central pillar of the full evolutionary expression in all its incomprehensible complexity. A simplistic example my meat-brain can handle (barely scratching the surface) is if a squirrel maximized its ability to remember 100% of its stored nuts, no new trees would sprout and in 100 years no more squirrels. Trees that succeeded in grabbing *all* the solar energy—leaving nothing for other life—would find themselves unsupported by the strangled ecology. Evolution only permits longevity in those that fail to maximize the grab. The system boundary is much broader than individual species: evolution works on all at once as an interconnected set, propagating only those that work well within that context.
Okay; killing it now…
Hi Tom. Long time lurker, though I've followed a similar path of discovery, doubt, and professional downshift as you over the past decade. Your blog and textbook have been comforting reassurance that I'm not alone in my observations, convictions, and direction.
Have you read "Technics and Civilization" by Lewis Mumford? In it, he places the mechanical clock as the central technology of modernity. While agriculture is generally regarded as our species' departure from ecologic integrity, the clock would seem to be our departure point from reality itself.
Having spent some days clock-free while remaining in civilization myself, the alternate reality of modernity becomes patently clear. From the outside, DST is simply absurd.
Another Doubting Thomas! I wrote down Mumford some time ago as someone I should check out, but have not yet. I like how you/he characterize clocks and agriculture. Sadly, I still allow a clock to tell me when to eat lunch and the like, but at least recognize the absurdity. When I go backpacking, it is easier to shed the chronometer (they're just too present otherwise).