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evolution
Discovering Intelligence in Unexpected Places
If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Aug 27, 2024
From the largest to the smallest and the oldest to the youngest creatures on Earth—Antarctic blue whales and coastal redwood trees, minute bacteria and human beings—we are all enmeshed in layers of relationships. We need each other, though some more than others.
Plants evolved hundreds of millions of years before the first humans and transformed the Earth—through their creativity in surviving predators—into a livable environment for all animals, including humans. We needed plants for our evolution and need them now for our survival from climate disaster. They, however, did not need us for their existence and would survive without us.
Putting humans at the top of the evolution chain as the crown of intelligent life, a Western worldview, is—as some keenly grasp—mistaken. The baleful consequences of this simplistic hierarchy are everywhere: out-of-control climate change; accelerating rates of animal and plant extinction; dead zones in the oceans and mass mortality of coral reefs; the vast pollution of land, air, and water; and the mounting likelihood of human extinction with nuclear war. All caused by humans, humans with financial and political power much more egregiously than others.
Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
Certain scientists who study plants—from the simplest to the exotic—are stirring controversy with their “ Are plants intelligent?” Consider that we humans owe our lives to plants for their food, medicines, and critical balance of 21% oxygen in the air we breathe. If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?
Studies have found that elephants recognize themselves in a mirror, crows create tools, dolphins demonstrate empathy and playfulness, and cats exhibit similar styles of attachment as human toddlers. The given explanation is that they have brains with neurological capacity for consciousness and intelligence.
But plants do not have a central brain. Could their mode of learning to evade insect predators and maximize their growth come from a diverse form of intelligence, possibly be distributed across their roots, stems, and leaves? Could the whole plant, then, function as a brain? Recent studies of plants have stirred the possibility that they are conscious and intelligent. Take communication, something we humans claim as our domain through language and more recently acknowledge that animals also possess.
Botanists have found that not only do alder and willow trees alter their leaf chemistry to defend themselves against an invasion of tent caterpillars, but that leaves of faraway trees also change their chemical composition similarly. Warned, as they are, by airborne plant chemicals released from the original trees under attack. Goldenrods signal an attack by a predator through strong chemical communication sent to all other goldenrod neighbors, just as humans warn their neighbors about a nearby fire or flood or crime.
Without any recognizable ears, plants sense sounds. The vibration of a predator insect chewing on its leaves causes a plant to make its own defensive pesticide. Beach evening primrose responds to the sound of honeybees in flight by increasing the sweetness of its nectar to attract them for pollination. Tree roots grow toward the sound of running water, including in pipes, where the roots often burst through causing great difficulties for municipalities. How do the various plants hear these stimulating sounds?
Plants have memory, some anticipating from past experience when a pollinator will show up for the plants’ pollen. Plants express social intelligence: Members of the pea family form relationships with bacteria living in their roots to have the bacteria supply beneficial nitrogen for the plants’ growth. Several kinds of plants provide a home and food for compatible ants who then attack the plants’ ant pests. Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions. Why? Together—their combined beauty—attracts more pollinators.
In finishing, I express my immense respect for the Indigenous worldview where wind, rocks, air, and rain are our kin, together with plants and nonhuman animals. We, humans, the most recent beings, depend on all of these elder kin; and this awareness, this worldview of connectivity among all beings, is our path back to Earth well-being.
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Texas Officials Reject Textbooks Over Climate Science
"The same bad actors who are calling for racist, homophobic, and transphobic book bans are also calling for climate denial in science textbooks," said one critic.
Nov 17, 2023
Seven of 12 proposed science textbooks for Texas 8th graders were rejected Friday by the Republican-controlled state Board of Education because they propose solutions to the climate emergency or were published by a company with an environmental, social, and governance policy.
The Texas Tribune reported that the 15-member board, which for the first time was required to include climate education for 8th graders, approved five of 12 proposed science textbooks, but called on their publishers to remove content deemed false or presenting a negative portrayal of oil and gas in the nation's biggest fossil fuel producer.
"America's future generations don't need a leftist agenda brainwashing them in the classroom to hate oil and natural gas," said Republican state energy regulator Wayne Christian, who had urged the board to choose books that promote planet-heating fossil fuels.
Some board members also objected to textbooks that did not include alternatives to the theory of evolution. One textbook was approved only after the removal of images highlighting that human beings—taxonomically classified as great apes—share ancestry with monkeys.
"Teaching creationism or any of its offshoots, such as intelligent design, in Texas' public schools is unlawful, because creationism is not based in fact," Chris Line, an attorney with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, said Friday. "Courts have routinely found that such teachings are religious, despite many new and imaginative labels given to the alternatives."
"Federal courts consistently reject creationism and its ilk, as well as attempts to suppress the teaching of evolution, in the public schools," Line added.
State standards approved by the board's conservative majority in 2021 do not include creationism as an alternative to evolution. The standards also acknowledge that human activities contribute to climate change.
Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity—primarily, the burning of fossil fuels—drives global heating, Republican board Secretary Patricia Hardy argued before the vote that such a stance amounts to "taking a position that all of that is settled science, and that our extreme weather is caused by climate change."
One textbook was rejected because its publisher has an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policy. ESG frameworks account for workplace diversity, the treatment of employees, and preparedness for the climate crisis.
Democratic board member Marisa Perez-Diaz said during debate on the textbooks that "my fear is that we will render ourselves irrelevant moving forward when it comes to what publishers want to work with us and will help us get proper materials in front of our young people, and for me that's heartbreaking."
The National Science Teaching Association—a group of 35,000 U.S. science educators—on Thursday implored the board to reject "misguided objections to evolution and climate change [that] impede the adoption of science textbooks in Texas."
As in other GOP-run states, Texas officials have pushed book bans and other restrictions in schools and libraries, even as they portray themselves as champions of freedom. According to freedom of expression defenders PEN America, only Florida banned more books in schools than Texas during the 2022-23 academic year.
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Restoring the Climate: War Is Not the Answer
Aug 26, 2016
Author and climate activist Bill McKibben has published a manifesto to "declare war" on climate change. While I agree about the urgency, I question the wisdom of invoking warfare. How well have our battles against vast, multifaceted problems worked out? (Think: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on poverty.) Equally important, the language of combat is wrong when addressing climate disruption. Rather, we must wage peace with nature to understand how natural systems regulate climate and ally with the processes that maintain those functions.
But we're running out of time.
"Increasingly, people are ready for a peace footing with nature."
Shifting to renewable energy--the core of McKibben's mobilization--is essential. But this alone won't avert climate disaster. Even if we stopped fossil fuel emissions this minute, bringing CO2 down to appropriate levels would take centuries. Plus, what remains unspoken: We could suck all the CO2 we want out of the atmosphere and still suffer the droughts, floods, heat waves, and wildfires we now associate with climate change. We're blind-sided by carbon, as if breaking our fossil fuel addiction was all that's needed to restore climate dynamics. Climate is too complex to be reduced to a single variable.
Many ecological processes that influence climate reflect the movement and phase change of water. While carbon dioxide traps heat, water vapor acts as conveyer of heat, retaining and releasing heat as it circulates. Consider transpiration, the upward movement of water through plants. This cooling mechanism transforms solar radiation into latent heat embodied in water vapor. According to Czech botanist Jan Pokorny, each liter of water transpired converts 0.7 kilowatt-hours of solar energy, an amount comparable to the capacity of, say, a large room air conditioner. A single tree can transpire over 100 liters of water daily. That's a lot of cooling power--not to mention the shade, the carbon drawdown, and everything else a tree does for us.
We may see a denuded landscape as a sign of climate change, but it's also a cause. When we strip away vegetation, we lose the temperature modulation those plants provide. Sunlight beaming down becomes sensible heat--heat you can feel--as opposed to being captured and transformed by plants. Peter Andrews, an Australian maverick farmer and author, emphasizes the extent to which plants direct and manage water. He adds: "Every time a plant manages water, it manages heat." He estimates that a quarter of the earth's land has lost plant cover.
The best tactic for reconciliation with nature is regenerating ecosystems. What's crucial is to know that it's possible: we've grown so accustomed to diminished landscapes we've lost sight of how lush they can be. In my reporting--from Mexico to Southern Africa and across the U.S.--I've found numerous examples of people restoring land to reduce poverty, support wildlife, store carbon, and hold moisture. The strategy depends on the setting but may entail building carbon-rich, living soil, slowing the flow of water, promoting the growth of trees, and managing grazing animals in a way that restores land. In grassland regions, many of which are desertifying, ruminants like cows and sheep are managed to serve as a proxy for the vast animal herds that helped create and maintain these environments.
"An astounding level of cognitive dissonance is built into our economic model as one is rewarded for extracting wealth from nature in a way that diminishes the natural systems upon which that wealth is built."
One barrier to our peace offensive is an economic system that treats nature as the spoils of war. Look at how we measure value. Per the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an intact forest is worth zero; its contribution to biodiversity, water regulation, area cooling, and human well-being is treated as irrelevant. If someone takes a chainsaw to it, the sale of wood goes in the plus column. This is "growth." An astounding level of cognitive dissonance is built into our economic model as one is rewarded for extracting wealth from nature in a way that diminishes the natural systems upon which that wealth is built.
At the very least, "externalized" costs--with our lumber sale, this includes soil erosion, lowered water quality, loss of recreation--should be on the balance sheet. Filmmaker and researcher John D. Liu believes our economic structure needs more fundamental change. In 1995 Liu filmed the rehabilitation of China's Loess Plateau, a chunk of degraded land the size of Belgium, for the World Bank. Upon documenting this and other areas brought back from the brink, he's become an advocate of valuing ecological function over products and services, which he calls "derivatives" of nature.
Increasingly, people are ready for a peace footing with nature. Restorative grazing is finally gaining mainstream acceptance and training "hubs" are being deployed worldwide. Regenerative agriculture is now a trend, so consumers can seek food--and even clothing--produced via practices that improve the land. We even see inklings on Capitol Hill: Congressman Jared Huffman (D-California) has introduced the Healthy Soils and Rangelands Solutions Act to promote capturing carbon on public lands.
The vocabulary of war pervades in part since it reflects how we see the world. We learn it's a dog-eat-dog world, a zero-sum game in which only the strongest survive--so it's imperative to "destroy" enemies and "vanquish" rivals. Darwin's take-home message has been that competition drives evolution. However, recent research suggests that symbiosis--shared beneficial relationships--is even more important in providing the opportunity and impetus to evolve.
The world we aspire to, with its verdant vistas and benevolent climate, is marked not by strife and struggle but interdependence, integration and cooperation. Nor is the route to climate equilibrium through technology alone--there are always unintended consequences--but in partnership with plants, animals, and microorganisms. It's time we shed the martial chatter and to start detonating some peace grenades. The sooner, the better.
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Human... and Kind
Fascinating new lines of research suggest that we are good people, tolerating bad things.
Oct 14, 2015
Do you find yourself thrashing against the tide of human indifference and selfishness? Are you oppressed by the sense that while you care, others don't? That because of humankind's callousness, civilization and the rest of life on earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not alone. But neither are you right.
A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1000 people they surveyed - 74% - identify more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority - 78% - believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people's minds.
"Humans [possess] an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and an ability to create moral norms that generalize and enforce these tendencies."
The revelation that humanity's dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioral and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.
A review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is "spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals". While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like the Homo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.
Humans, by contrast, are ultra-social: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.
Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months, children begin to help each other, for example, by handing over objects another child can't reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people's violation of moral norms.
A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note). The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people's welfare rather than by a desire to look good. And it seems to be baked in.
Why? How would the hard logic of evolution produce such outcomes? This is the subject of heated debate. One school of thought contends that altruism is a logical response to living in small groups of closely related people, and evolution has failed to catch up with the fact that we now live in large groups, mostly composed of strangers. Another argues that large groups containing high numbers of altruists will outcompete large groups that contain high numbers of selfish people. A third hypothesis insists that a tendency towards collaboration enhances your own survival, regardless of the group in which you might find yourself. Whatever the mechanism might be, the outcome should be a cause of celebration.
So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons. Philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau, Malthus to Schopenhauer, whose understanding of human evolution was limited to the Book of Genesis, produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of "the state of nature" (our innate, ancestral characteristics). Their speculations on this subject should long ago have been parked on a high shelf marked "historical curiosities". But somehow they still seem to exert a grip on our minds.
Another problem is that - almost by definition - many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.
"The consequences of an undue pessimism about human nature are momentous."
The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper's decision to open her home to refugees as proof that "noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence" (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). "It's all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing," he theorized before boasting that he doesn't "give a damn" about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.
The consequences of an undue pessimism about human nature are momentous. As the Common Cause Foundation's survey and interviews reveal, those who have the bleakest view of humanity are the least likely to vote. What's the point, they reason, if everyone else votes only in their own selfish interests? Interestingly, and alarmingly for people of my political persuasion, it also discovered that that liberals tend to possess a dimmer view of other people than conservatives do. Do you want to grow the electorate? Do you want progressive politics to flourish? Then spread the word that other people are broadly well-intentioned.
Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilized by the conviction that no one else cares.
You are not alone. The world is with you, even if it has not found its voice.
This article was first published on the Guardian.
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