Evolution

A woman stood up, sixtyish, black. Joan knew her. Evelyn Smith was one of the premier evolutionary biologists of her time. Smith said coldly, "Natural selection has not been operating on human populations for some tens of millennia. Claims that it has show a lack of understanding of the basic mechanism. We fend off the winnowing processes that drive selection: Our weapons have eliminated predators, agricultural development has beaten back starvation, and so on. But this will change if the imminent collapse occurs. In that case, selection will return. This is the subject of my paper in Session Three, incidentally."

There were some protests.

"…what ‘imminent collapse’?"

"…for all its surface brilliance, our society shows symptoms of decline: growing inequality, declining returns from economic expansion, collapsing educational standards and intellectual achievement."

"…yes, and spiritual death. Even we Americans pay only lip service to totems — the flag, the Constitution, democracy — while we surrender power over our lives to the corporations and comfort ourselves with mysticism and muddle. It’s happened before. The parallels with Rome especially are very clear…"

"…except that now we’re all joined up, all over the world. If we do collapse, there might be nothing much left to un-collapse out of."

"…absurdly pessimistic. We’re resilient — we achieved great things before…"

"We dug out all the easy ores and burnt all the easy oil and coal; if we did fall, we’d have nothing to build from…"

"My point," said Smith doggedly, "is that we may not have much time."

These words, softly spoken, briefly silenced everybody, and Joan saw her opportunity.

She said dryly, "So I guess that if we don’t want to go back to the bad old days of being just another animal in the ecology, we need to get a hold of this mess. But I think there’s a way we can do that." Absently stroking her belly, she smiled. "A new way. But a way we’ve known about all along. A primate way."

And she began to outline her vision.

Human culture, Joan said, had been an adaptation to help people live through the wild climate swings of the Pleistocene. Now, in a savage millennial irony, that culture was feeding back to cause still more drastic environmental damage. Culture, which had once been so profoundly adaptive, had become maladaptive, and would have to change.

"Life isn’t just about competition," she said. "It’s also about cooperation. Interdependence. It always has been. The first cells depended on the cooperation of simpler bacteria. So did the first ecologies, the stromatolites. Now, our lives are so interdependent that they must, in the future, develop with a common purpose."

"You’re just talking about globalization. What corporation is sponsoring you?"

"We’re back to Gaia and other Earth goddesses, aren’t we?"

Joan said, "Our global society is becoming so highly structured that it is becoming something akin to a holon: a single, composite entity. We have to learn to think of ourselves in that way. We have to build on the other half of our primate natures — the part that isn’t about competition and xenophobia. Primates cooperate a lot more than they compete. Chimps do; lemurs do; pithecines and erectus and Neandertals must have; we do. Human interdependence comes from our deepest history. Now, without anybody planning it, we have engulfed the biosphere, and we have to learn to manage it together."

Alison Scott stood again. "What exactly is it you want, Joan?"

"A manifesto. A statement. A cosigned letter to the UN, from all of us. We have to give a lead, start something new. We have to start showing the path to a sustainable future. Who else but us?"

"Hoorah, we can save the world…"

"She’s right. Gaia will be not our mother, but our daughter."

"What makes you think anybody with power will listen to a bunch of scientists? They never have before. This is pie in the sky…"

Evelyn Smith said, "They’ll listen if they are desperate enough."

Alyce Sigurdardottir stood up. "Confucius said, ‘Those who say it cannot be done need to get out of the way of the people who are doing it.’ " She raised her thin fist in a power salute. "We’re still primates — only more so. Right?"

Despite a few catcalls, Joan thought she saw a warmer response in the faces ranked before her. It’s going to work, she thought. It’s just a start, but it’s going to work. We can fix this. She stroked her belly.

In fact she was right; it might have worked.