Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, another magnificent sign of humanity's recent disconnect from a grounding in the slower processes of nature.
We now understand the cosmos to have undergone a 13.7-billion-year evolutionary process, our planet to have undergone a 4.5-billion-year evolutionary process and life on our planet to have undergone a ~3.5-billion-year evolutionary process. We now understand that we humans share a common ancestor with all the other creatures on the planet — that we are all genetically related — with more complex traits emergent from less complex traits. We understand that humans appeared on the planet a mere 150,000 years ago. And we understand that the planet — as a whole — is an ecosystem composed of countless sub-ecosystems. Each sub-ecosystem is emergent from the relationships between its parts, where the parts — the organisms and their environmental contexts — are continuously in flux, continuously engaged in the evolutionary process of variation and natural selection.
Given these understandings, we have come to discard the simplistic notion that biological evolution entails "survival of the fittest," since there is no such thing as "the fittest". Rather, evolution involves a myriad ways of fitting in.
Creative adaptive strategies emerge with each new element of change and complexity in the system. With every change in climate, or in available energy resources, or in the kinds and numbers of other creatures, novel opportunities may be created and expected opportunities may fail to materialize. To fit in to an ecosystem is to be adapted to it, to anticipate its parameters, to live out a life in that context.
The obvious exception to these maxims is the human. We humans not only anticipate the parameters of natural systems; we also manipulate them.
We are "niche constructors" — the familiar prototype being the beaver who dams up streams and inhabits the resultant lake. We inhabit not only the planetary ecosystem but also the human-made language-based system we call culture, allowing us access to information accumulated from generation to generation. Therefore, whereas novel genetic ideas require millennia to become established, language-based ideas can be transmitted and evaluated in increasingly rapid timeframes.
As a result, human activity is no longer directly shaped by the global ecosystem, although it must ultimately harmonize with it, and our abilities to anticipate and manipulate have grown to the point where the evolutionary mandate of adaptive fit is far less evident than our spectacular ability to adapt the environment to fit our purposes. It is indeed this state of affairs that generates our sense that the name of the game is who is the fittest. The fittest humans are often understood be those who best manipulate their contexts to suit their purposes, and we have extrapolated this perception to declare that evolution is all about such dynamics of power.
This disconnect between our perception of how things work and how things actually work is generating countless planetary and existential crises. We have specialized and elaborated our rapid temporal framework and achieved unprecedented mastery over our immediate circumstances, in the process detaching our responses from groundings in the slower processes of nature. We have become the fastest-living creature on earth, producing more than the earth can absorb or sustain, changing entire ecosystems and environments faster than lifeforms can adjust, and straining our own capacity to deal with our ever more dense, eventful, experience-packed lives in which the dominant feeling is that we never have enough time.
Michael C. Kalton is a world-renowned expert on Korean Neo-Confucianism who teaches at the University of Washington Tacoma. He holds a joint Ph.D. in comparative religion and East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard University.
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