Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
EVOLUTION CAN BE RUTHLESS AT ELIMINATING THE UNFIT
. “R
ED
in tooth and claw,” as
Tennyson memorably described it, Nature routinely sacrifices billions of individual organisms
and sometimes entire species in the course of its adaptive progression.
We humans have been able to blunt Nature's fangs. We take care of individuals who would not
be able to survive on their own—the elderly, the sick, the wounded—and we've been doing so for
aboard the raft of socially ensured survival—though in ways that often have little to do with com-
passion: today even most hale and hearty individuals would be hard pressed to stay alive for more
than a few days or weeks if cut adrift from supermarkets, ATMs, and the rest of the infrastructure
of modern hyper-industrialism.
This strategy of expanding our collective fitness has (at least temporarily) paid off: the conse-
quent reduction in our death rate has resulted in a 700-percent expansion of human population in
just the past two centuries and a current population growth rate of about 80 million per year (births
in excess of deaths). Humans are everywhere taking carrying capacity away from most other organ-
isms, except ones that directly serve us such as maize and cattle. We have become expert at cooper-
atively avoiding nature's culling, and thus at partially (and, again, temporarily) defeating natural
selection—at least, in the way it applies to other species.
Some argue that “natural selection” is at work within human society whenever clever and hard-
working folks get ahead while lazy dullards lag behind. The philosophy of Social Darwinism holds
that this kind of competitive selection improves the species. But critics point out that individual
success within society can be maladaptive for society as a whole because if wealth becomes too un-
equally distributed, social stability is threatened. Such concerns have led most nations to artificially
limit competitive selection at the societal level: in the United States, these limits take the forms of
progressive income tax, Social Security, food stamps, disability payments, Medicaid, and Aid for
Dependent Children, among others. Even most self-described “conservatives” who think that gov-
ernment shouldn't prevent society's winners from taking all still think it's good for churches to give
to the needy.
While the last few decades of rapid economic growth and material abundance—enabled by
cheap fossil energy—led to a dramatic expansion of social safety nets in industrialized countries,
they also featured the emergence of an ostensibly benign global imperial system led by the United
