This is the sixth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode makes the point that humans were not inevitable as a culmination of evolution. We are not the purpose or goal of the Earth or universe.
As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.
Introduction
This is the usual short naming of the series, of myself, and the topic of this episode (we didn’t have to be here) as part of the process for putting modernity into context.
Here by Accident
None of this was planned. This universe we find ourselves in…this planet and the life upon it…this situation we find ourselves in…wasn’t planned. It happened because it could.
Think about rolling a six-sided dice 20 times and recording the sequence of numbers. After-the fact, it is clear that the result had a chance of materializing, even if its particular odds happened to be less than one in a quadrillion. Something had to happen.
Not everything that can happen will happen. Sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t. The path is a very unpredictable, twisted, braided, meandering set of interacting paths unfolding in parallel. It’s not a linear timeline of the sort we like to imagine. It’s many stories at once that interconnect and influence each other. We can’t draw such a thing in a textbook, so tend to simplify to a cleaner linear narrative.
Now, I personally don’t have cause or standing (authority) to deny determinism (spiced by quantum behaviors, of course), but even a fully deterministic system can be hopelessly unpredictable (see simple example). Therefore, we can’t possibly predict how the future will unfold in any detail. We can’t know where things are going, in detail.
Because of the unpredictability involved, we didn’t have to be here as a species—or as individuals, of course. You’ve likely heard stories about circumstances that easily would have prevented your mother from meeting your father. As one easy-to-conceive example at the species scale, the Chicxulub asteroid impact 66 million years ago killed off the dinosaurs and opened the door for mammals to become Earth’s megafauna. If that effectively random (unpredictable) event had not happened, it is hard to imagine that humans would have been around by now.
Tree of Life
One way to see the degree of convolution is in depictions of trees of life, as in the example below.
Eukaryotes (which includes plants and animals) are on the right-hand side. Every species alive today is one of many temporary twig-ends in this ever-growing tree of life. We are all here now, but in no way constitute a permanent set. Humans are one of about 10 million species (twig ends), and are not guaranteed to even have a successor species descended from us. That outcome does not always emerge.
The tree of life shows our ancestral connectedness, and the support provided by the trunk and branches (our entire heritage). But it does not depict the countless interactions and complex inter-dependencies between all the species, which would render the diagram an impenetrable mess—one we would not even know how to draw in its full complexity.
Lots of Dead Ends
I like this depiction from Evogeneao.
While it is not representative in terms of species numbers (over-emphasizes eukaryotes), it does depict the time-evolution a bit better (albeit non-linearly) as a set of concentric ellipses. We see the Cambrian Explosion of biodiversity among eukaryotes, followed by five mass extinctions. Looking closely, one can see many terminating twigs along the way, often ending at a mass extinction event (but not always so). Our dense shrub indeed looks more like this, having lots of terminal twigs deep within it.
The diagram puts us, artificially, at the far lower right at one extreme. This arbitrary and misleading choice implies some sort of privileged status as an extreme or superlative species. It’s better to consider all current twig ends as on more equal footing in terms of evolutionary heritage.
Evolution has Terrible Aim!
The main point I want to make from these diagrams is that we (humans) were not the purpose. Evolution was not aiming to make us. And if it was, for some reason, it sure had terrible aim! I mean, it made ten million other species at the same time! There was nothing purposeful about the trajectory that led to humans. The path to humans just could happen, and was simply one of ten million simultaneous, intertwined trajectories all manifesting at once.
We’re not the best species on the planet. We’re not the pinnacle. We’re not what Earth has been waiting for.
To be sure, humans have a number of incredible traits (though no monopoly!). But we also happen to be the species causing the most harm to other species, and appear to be initiating a sixth mass extinction. So, we need to be careful about labeling ourselves as “the best” in some way. The least controversial superlative is our brain-power, but it’s a superficial, flashy sort of power that might prove to be maladaptive, in ecological terms (the only ones that matter in the long term).
The Club of Life
I like to think in terms of the existence of a Club of Life. We’re relatively new members—only recently inducted into the club. Now, 99% of our dues have been paid by our ancestor species—a hefty portion from the microbes, in fact. That’s our biological heritage, as covered in Episodes 3 and 5. We only got here on the backs of all that tireless innovation and problem solving.
Our membership may be revoked at any time. No guarantees. Failure to work within the ecological context (Episode 4) is the most common transgression, and is not tolerated by the merciless arbiter of evolution.
We’re on notice, as we’re going around unilaterally terminating the memberships of many innocent species who did not themselves violate ecological norms, but proved to be incompatible with modernity. They did nothing wrong, but didn’t stand a chance. Modernity is to blame: that’s where the true incompatibility lies.
Like it or not, humans are not a keystone species upon which countless other members of ecological communities depend for their survival. We are not necessary for the whole thing to work—which it managed to do quite well for hundreds of millions of years (billions, really) without a human presence that only materialized over the last 3 million years. Earth was not suffering for all those eons before humans came along and eventually (just 10,000 years ago, wrongly) assumed ownership.
We are latecomers who are really just lucky to be in the club. My instinct is to respect the rules of this venerable club—rules that have allowed the club to work for so long, and which indeed allowed us to come into existence. We should try to find ways to become good citizens—indispensable members. Until now, all species basically played by the same rules in a co-evolving arrangement that tracked each others’ developments.
Unsustainable Trajectory
This next bit may seem like an unsubstantiated leap. It makes total sense to me, and if it doesn’t to you at present, then I hope it will by the end of this series when all the various perspectives have been covered (especially in Episode 13). For now, you can simply view this as exemplifying the perils of not playing by the club’s rules (which include the analog of gravity).
We in modern society imagine ourselves as having transcended the mundane constraints of life on Earth. We have launched ourselves onto this new and exciting trajectory. However, the contraption we have launched for this fun and exhilarating thrill-ride is not built on principles of sustainable flight (principles of ecological sustainability). It will not somehow magically be able to hold a steady altitude, let alone keep climbing. For all our smarts, no one has even sketched out a credible plan for how modernity could continue indefinitely given its utter dependence on non-renewable material resources.
Granted, our current state of being momentarily airborne feels indistinguishable from flying—temporarily. It is indeed exhilarating.
But…this mode is not vetted on ecological or evolutionary grounds as being sustainable. It hasn’t demonstrated that it can play by the club’s rules and thus stay within the club. In fact, nothing indicates that it possibly would be ecologically sustainable, as we witness our initiation of what sure looks like a sixth mass extinction, which is extremely troubling. Mountains of evidence point to a grossly unsustainable mode of life, on almost every front.
Thus, I want to be very careful about our tendency toward hubris. Yes, we’re in mid-air right now and it’s really amazing and we can point to a lot of associated perks (for humans alone, in the short term, importantly). But, if it’s unsustainable then it is by definition going to fail. What evidence might possibly bolster the case that our current path is at all ecologically sustainable?
Closing & Do the Math
The next installment will chronicle the ecological nosedive resulting from our madcap trajectory as the consequence for violating Club rules.
As always, I encourage viewers to find the more polished, thoughtful, complete written version—which you have clearly already done!
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Tom – Thanks for all your work, and for your commitment to communicating frankly. I can't disprove your assumption of aimlessness, but here are postulates from an alternative viewpoint I've come across:
A/The Universe is here on purpose. As noted by Gustav Fechner, philosopher, physicist, and experimental psychologist: "Of all miracles, the greatest is that anything exists at all."
B/Human beings have, or could have, some connection with the purpose(s) intended by the Creative Forces of the Universe.
C/It is possible to improve one's ability to perceive, and to cooperate with, the cosmic purpose, at the time and place where one finds oneself.
As self-aware and mobile sentient beings, able to conceptualize past and future and think of a life span as a journey, we can pose these existential questions:
1/Where did we come from?
2/Why are we here?
3/Where are we going?
4/What's for lunch?
Questions 3 and 4 connect with Postulate C, clearly. See also a verse from Lewis Carroll's The Mad Gardener's Song:
He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.
'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be much for us!'
Allegorically speaking, it is not just the financiers controlling the governments, but the entire all-consuming modern techno-industrial complex – the whole hippopotamus – that will deprive "us" of the necessities of life. As the fictional King of Siam noted, " 'Tis a puzzlement."
Coming up with soothing and self-flattering postulates has a long tradition, but I don't happen to buy any of these three, for what that's worth. Sure, I will always be amazed and delighted that there is something rather than nothing, but I am not compelled to attribute any form of intent—and I am especially allergic to the hubristic notion of human-related purposefulness to the universe (staggering narcissism or ego or something, lacking justification). But I think I understand the deep psychological drivers for wanting to believe such things. My way is not for everyone, and I get that I'm weird.
Briefly – I disagree about a human connection to a cosmic purpose necessarily being narcissism or hubris. I see the question "How can sentient beings do what helps the Universe?" as being different from "How can the Universe do what helps the sentient beings?".
Thanks as always! I would like to add that the first diagram is also outdated. At the moment, it is known from phylogenetic studies that eukaryotes are only a small branch in the trunk of archaea (group of Asgardarchaea). Eukaryotes are a reflection of the interaction you are talking about (archaea entered into mutualism with an alphaproteobacterium that became a mitochondrion and later with a cyanobacterium that became a chloroplast), some data say that archaea also "swallowed" a giant bacteriophage that became a nucleus. Therefore, I once again emphasize the use of the word coevolution, which, in my opinion, more fully characterizes the process.
I think your story about evolution is still incomplete.
I am not referring to the design or purpose, but to the method and principles/mechanisms of the process of evolution, selection, increasing complexity, etc.
Why does biodiversity exist?
Why does the complexity of the system increase?
How did self-maintenance and self-adjustment, self-adaptation, autocatalysis, self-reproduction, reproduction, etc., occur so clearly without apparent failure?
That is, from the first time.
I will not hide a simple case.
Life on Earth is an accident.
But if this is the case, then it is so incredible, it is simply dumbfounded.
Certainly my understanding is incomplete and 8.5 minutes is only so much. My reactions to the "why" questions: because it can, so it does.
But we don't know enough about the early period and multitudinous failures (the vast majority of chemical interactions failed to result in self-replicating life, so the failure rate was truly staggering). We also have almost zero capability of imagining the hundreds of millions of years of slow failure before the rare successful strategies were locked in by their very success. Thus "apparent" hides a lot, here. Failures were the norm. We can't know their names, as a pure selection effect.
Not to minimize the awesomeness of it having come together. Hats off!
Thank you for such a detailed answer. I agree (it suits me) – "because it happened that way". But, but… If life originated spontaneously, then the mechanism must be very common in the universe. The conditions for the origin of life (on the planet) were different, in different corners of it, which would exclude direct descent from one progenitor, I do not rule out that viruses and other objects of the so-called RNA world could be another branch of evolution, which later again co-evolved into the present interdependent community. But here is what amazes me – we are the result of only one genetic line of the progenitor, all others have died out. It's so fragile…terrible..