On the edge of a grey world: Learnings from 'Sapiens' and 'The Sixth Extinction'

Part II

Taking the Plunge

Kolbert and Harari approach the concept of large scale extinction in different ways. In a far broader manner, as a student of biology would, Kolbert studies the 'Big Five' extinctions, examining the circumstances, possible causes, evidences and repercussions of these extinctions. With this background, she examines the actions of man that have triggered a Sixth Extinction. Harari, however, concerns himself, with human-caused extinction, and studies them in 'waves', that correspond to the evolving lifestyles of man. He attaches the First Wave Extinction with the spread of the hunter-gatherer man, the Second Wave, with the spread of the farmer, and the third wave, with the spread of industrial activity around the world. He cautions the reader against believing tales of harmony between the hunter-gatherer Homo Sapiens and the environment.  At the time of Cognitive Revolution (about 70,000 years ago), Harari offers, “about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms” trampled around the surface of the world. However, at the time of the Agricultural Revolution (about 12,000 years ago), only around a 100 remained. “Homo Sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools”. Which begs the question, is it the fate of all cognitively evolved lifeforms to obliterate the biodiversity of the species and to wreck their own destruction?  

Both writers study evolution in different ways too. While Kolbert studies evolution as it evolved as a concept of study in academic circles, she also briefly studies the evolution of different organisms, coral reefs, and ammonites among several others. She discusses different ideas attached with evolution as well. She examines the idea of how evolutionary adaptations in organisms could suddenly transform into their greatest weakness, because of a seemingly-insignificant change in their environments. As an example, Kolbert turns her gaze towards the dominance of megafauna on the earth's landscape (before the arrival of man). Megafauna emerged as evolutionary precautions-hunting immensely large animals became nearly impossible for smaller, more agile predators. This seemingly-advantageous adaptation of the megafauna, however, limited their speed of movement and their rates of reproduction, allowing the human race to hunt them, and to devour them into extinction. 

Harari contrasts this broader study of evolution with the study of evolution in the modern human race alone. The large societies of bees and ants are stable as nearly all the information that is needed to maintain these networks is coded into their genes. Cheating, for example, isn't allowed by the genetic makeup of bees, thereby rendering bee lawyers unemployed, he offers. Human societies, however, aren't held up by genetically coded information. Instead, they are held up by the inter-subjectivity of the imagined orders-the monetary order, the imperial (political) order, and the order of religions. While Kolbert offers a study of evolution as a biological concept and studies its implication from a strictly scientific perspective, Harari studies evolution in the lifestyle of the human race (through births of languages, the written word, and the imagined orders of the world that enslaved and oppressed people) with the flair of a fiction writer. 

Harari and Kolbert also discuss the impact of modern technology on the planet. In the Sixth Extinction we see the threat that speedy global transport networks have imposed on the biodiversity of the planet. Transport networks that connect even the remote corners of the world with each other, allow species-threatening microorganisms to hitchhike a ride, giving these microbes their license to go on a killing spree. This convenient transportation of species wasn't predicted by Darwin. He proposed that the rates of evolution and extinction were both far too slow for either to be observed in a human's lifetime. For instance, modern humans couldn't possibly hope to see an evolution of a certain type of Amazonian ant in their lifetimes. By that estimate, modern humans should ideally, also not be able to watch a species hurry towards extinction, in their lifetimes. However, in a span of little over a decade, the global population of amphibians and bats has fallen off a cliff so steeply that they went from being ubiquitous to being classified as ‘endangered’. Standard ecological rates that environmentalists have arrived at, after plodding through fossils, ravines and gorges, change dramatically when the human race is introduced into their estimates. For example, the Homo sapiens even jumped to the top of the food chain in a surprisingly short time, disallowing the gradual growth of ecological 'checks and balances' that limit a species' capacity to dominate the planet, as we discover, in Sapiens. This could, in hindsight, have seemed like a premonition of the chaos that the modern human race would inflict on the lives of their fellow earthlings and on geological timelines. 

 Kolbert remarks that it's 'amazing' that the human race is, without intending to, shutting down certain evolutionary pathways, and keeping a few open. No other creature has managed to do this, she remarks, calling this the human race's most enduring legacy. It is a mild echo of Harari's sentiment. He calls the species an ecological serial killer.  

 The human race was not inclined to benignity, even with members of a related race. Both books devote sizeable chunks to the study of the Neanderthal and the Denisovan. The Homo sapiens engaged in physical relations with the Neanderthal and the Denisovan (making modern Middle East and European humans anywhere between 1-4% Neanderthal), but wiped both races out anyway. The Sapiens-driven wiping out of the Neanderthal, allows Harari to call it “the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history”.  While Kolbert studies the disappearance of the Neanderthal on the merit of its extinction, Harari attempts to understand why the human race was driven to wipe the Neanderthal out. “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate”, he conjectures, chillingly. 

 Perhaps there is indeed a “madness gene”, as proposed by Svante Paabo, a Swedish biologist, a genetic answer to the Faustian restlessness of the human race which gives us the ideas of romanticism that tells us to engage in consumerism to maximise human potential, to be active participants of an inter-subjective, imagined, world order, to crave global dominance that no other species in the history of the planet has sought as desperately. 

 Kolbert briefly casts her eye on what the future might hold for the planet. She enlists the help of experts in her attempt. "When he contemplates the future, he's trying to imagine what will remain of the present once the contemporary world has been reduced to fragments", Kolbert says, of Jon Zalasiewicz, a stratigrapher from the University of Leicester. She also uses an interesting thought experiment to approximate the loss of biodiversity that the planet is likely to face. Her examination of the future, however, is quite different from how Harari looks at the future. He casts his net wide, banking on the tenacity of the human race to become interstellar explorers, to bend the limits of Science as we know it today, to ensure the survival of the race. His future is built on the ramparts of the scientific undertakings of man, artificial intelligence that could easily threaten the existence of man, and the rapidly deteriorating global climate.

 We aren't looking at a planet stripped of all life, Kolbert and Harari tell us, although they do warn us of its possibility.  We are, however, looking at a far, far bleaker and colourless one; a planet where diversity of life has been hounded into oblivion. There are several questions that rear their heads at his juncture. One is a question that Kolbert examines. If a species (like the golden frog of Panama) is driven to extinction in the wild because of the growth of a species-threatening agent in the air (or any other widely prevalent, unavoidable agent of nature), should it be preserved in tanks and zoos at all? A remark that Harari makes, strikes as deeply relevant here. “The evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness” He offers domesticated chickens and cattle as examples-they breed at an impressive rate, but their lives do not satisfy any of their needs (roaming free over vast swathes of land, staying close to their young/staying close to the mother as young ones) that have been hammered into their minds by evolution. 

 In an attempt to, what might perhaps be seen, as a call for action, both writers, in their different ways, seek to bring about awareness in terms of the number of species that have been driven to extniction by the human race. Harari says knowledge of the number of species that were wiped out in the First and Second Waves of Extinction would force people to be less nonchalant about the Third Wave of extinction. In contrast, Kolbert travels to conservatories around the world, and shares the stories of altruistic, deeply driven, passionate and hardworking conservationists and scientists, to kindle in the reader, a profound sense of guilt and a sudden, albeit directionless, urge to contribute towards saving the biodiversity of the planet. 

Concluded in Part III