HUMAN HUBRIS, THE HOLIDAYS, AND THE COVID CRISIS
This holiday season of senseless lockdowns, I would like to remind humanity that it ain’t “all that,”
not by a long shot, in the hopes that it displays more humility and less hubris during the next pandemic.
For all of our technology, Homo sapiens, wise humans, are more like Homo non sapientem, not so
wise humans. In fact, one of the wisest of our species, Jared Diamond, wrote a book explaining why we
should consider ourselves nothing more than a third type of chimpanzee.
If unwilling to change our genus to Pan, we should at least change our species name to Homo
superbus, or arrogant humans. The only objectively intelligent thing humans ever did was to unleash
the selective power of markets. Even that, though, is a relatively recent phenomenon understood and
embraced by far too few members of the species.
I say the selective power of markets because when governments allow them to function freely markets
work akin to natural selection. Most types of living things possess genes that vary from individual to
individual and that produce variations in key attributes like size, color, resistance to disease, behaviors,
and myriad other characteristics. In a given set of environmental circumstances, some of those
variations help individual organisms to reproduce relatively more successfully than organisms of the
same species that do not possess the genes for the successful trait. Unless environmental conditions
change, over generations the species will increasingly be composed of individuals with the
advantageous trait.
Evolution by means of natural selection is not “just a theory,” it is a powerful way of understanding the
world that has been observed in numerous instances even on an historical timescale. Perhaps the
most famous example occurred in Britain, where industrialization darkened trees with soot, leading to
the selection of darker-colored individuals of a certain species of moth that birds found more difficult to
spot, catch, and eat than the lighter-colored moths. As Britain de-industrialized and tree barks became
less sooty and hence lighter in color, selection worked in the opposite direction as the darker-colored
moths became easier to spot and hence were more likely to be eaten before passing on their genes,
so the lighter-colored moths again proliferated. Changes in the prevalence of different colored moths,
like all selective processes, occurred automatically, without the need to invoke a deity or other type of central planner.
Human economies also work through a selection process, though one Homo superbus rarely
acknowledges. Producers make goods with various attributes. Consumers select some of those
goods, causing them to be (re)produced. Others they eschew, causing their discontinuance
(extinction). Instead of birds eating moths, the selective pressure comes from people deciding which
type of hat to buy, which brand of toothpaste to prefer, which restaurant to frequent, and so forth. (The
difference is the moths who get consumed by birds are the losers while the producer whose goods get
consumed are the winners.)
Producing the right good at the right time looks like business or inventive “genius” but we cannot reject
the hypothesis that it is due simply to dumb luck, just as it was for the moths born a color that
happened to match the trees. As is well known, most entrepreneurial endeavors fail within the first five
years and the most even highly-motivated angel investors and venture capitalists can do is to winnow
out the most likely losers. And selective pressures continue throughout firm existence. In a famous
1950 article in the Journal of Political Economy entitled “Uncertainty, Evolution and Economic
Theory,” American economist Armen A. Alchian argued that the firms that come closest to
maximizing profits, even if due simply to dumb luck, are the most likely to survive.
In short, no intelligent design or strategic management plan is necessary for organisms or firms to
become adapted to their economies or environments, both of which automatically select the most
adapted and weed out the least adapted.
But humans, a staunch defender of Homo sapiens might retort, domesticated many plant and animal
species, forcing them to work for us (e.g. horses), or make stuff we want (e.g. sheep), or even to
render our breakfast easier to fetch, and tastier too (e.g. egg-laying chickens and milk cows). In other
words, wise humans boot-strapped ourselves out of the Stone Age and into modernity. It took us 10,000
years but, clearly, humans rule!
Typical Homo superbus thinking I say. We think ourselves gods who can simply dominate nature and
bend economic reality to our will. While we can certainly influence the environment or the economy, we can
barely understand either, much less control them in any deep or lasting way. Moreover, the
domestication of wild species to produce cattle, cats, dogs, goats, horses, sheep, and other barnyard
critters shows not our dominance but just how little control we really have.
The traditional story of animal domestication, it turns out, is all wrong. Humans did not choose species
to domesticate, then bravely capture and tame wild varieties and selectively breed them to serve us. If
anything, domesticates banked on humans. Do not confuse that claim with the joke about cats having
domesticated humans rather than vice versa. (Anyone who has lived with a feline understands the
sentiment!) Rather, it is a claim about the process of domestication first laid out for a popular audience
by Stephen Budiansky in his 1992 book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose
Domestication. It shows that the individual animals that allied with humans were rewarded with higher
levels of reproduction than their wild progenitors, just as the darker-colored moths were rewarded when dark, satanic mills dominated Britain’s environment.
Budiansky shows that man’s best friend, the dog, was likely the first domesticate and the direct
descendant of Canis lupus, the wolf, humanity’s longtime foe and competitor as apex predator. Their
millennia long partnership seems bloody unlikely, yet it occurred and without the aid of a brave, genius
caveman. An example of spontaneous order one might call it.
First came toleration. Wolves and humans are both dangerous critters that hunt in packs. Better to live
and let live than to try to exterminate the other side. Inevitably, though, humans and wolves went after
the same prey at the same time and discovered that they had specialized, complementary skills. In
short, they learned that they could eat more critters by working together rather than apart. Wolves have
much keener senses of smell and hearing than humans, who are better at dispatching large,
dangerous prey animals at a safe distance with their arrows, javelins, spears, and stones.
(Rudimentary pieces of technology evolved from trial and error and selection as much as from innate
intelligence.)
Wolf packs and human hunters began to travel in tandem because it was mutually advantageous to do
so. (Caribou and humans still do the same, trading the salt in human urine for herd culling.) Naturally
less aggressive wolves were welcomed close by but aggressive wolves were obviously problematic
and hence driven off and perhaps even killed. Humans became the alphas, the leaders, of relatively
tame packs of wolves, some of the pups of which were genetically predisposed to see humans not as
threats but as lead wolves. They were subservient and hence valuable additions to camp and within
several generations were boon companions.
That’s right, your canine best friend doesn’t think it is human, it thinks you are a dog, an alpha dog. Your
dog is in essence a wolf, but one at first unconsciously infantilized by human beings and only in the last
few hundred years deliberately bred for specific traits.
That story of canine domestication is more than mere speculation as another type of wild canine,
Vulpes vulpes (the fox) was deliberately domesticated in the twentieth century in a Soviet experiment.
It took only five generations to go from Reynaud (the name that horse-riding fox hunters gave their wily
wild quarry) to essentially another breed of dog eager to lick your face and chase a ball.
Okay, but surely humans deliberately domesticated camels, cattle, goats, horses, llamas, sheep, and
such. In fact, according to some animal rights activists, we enslaved them for our own selfish benefit.
Not so much as it turns out. Many creatures benefit from interacting, even trading, with Homo
superbus and prefer to live in our midst to a greater or lesser degree. In sub-Saharan Africa the wild
Greater Honeyguide bird (Locator locator) calls to and directs humans to trees containing active
honeybee hives, allowing the dull bipeds to do the hard work in return for the yummy leftovers.
Similarly, ravens will lead humans to big game animals so that they can feast on the entrails and
carcass after the hunter does the hard work of harvesting and butchering the beast. A tribe in
Kamchatka even trades with mice, exchanging the carbohydrate-laden tubers the mice collect in winter
for bits of protein-rich fish. (The humans figured out that when they simply stole the tubers the mice
died.)
Many species, like raccoons (Procyon lotor), eat human trash and leave behind nothing but a mess.
Pests we call them. But some animals, like goats, offered up milk in return. While it seems “obvious”
that any creature with genes that predisposed it to allow humans to kill it would soon lose that trait or go
extinct, domesticates have done amazingly well in relative and absolute terms. They far outnumber
wild creatures and make up the bulk of the terrestrial world’s mammal biomass.
Think about it: humans destroy the habitat of wild creatures that offer them nothing in return but
preserve and even create habitat for critters that offer up something in exchange, be it a Yellowstone
photo op or a plate of yummy chislic. Again, conscious genius is not necessary to achieve the
outcome, just some genetic variation upon which selective pressures toward docility, fur production,
tastiness, and such could work.
The novel coronavirus, by contrast, has not placed much selective pressure on the human genome
because the vast bulk of its victims are well past prime reproductive and even child rearing age.
Humans may not be so lucky next time but likely will remain insufficiently wise and too arrogant to learn
from our many mistakes. We convince ourselves that we have developed wonderful technologies but it
might all be due to selective pressures on more-or-less random ideas. Humans did not even jumpstart
the Agricultural Revolution by deliberately domesticating animals, which it turns out evolved to live with
us because it benefited them. In short, we cannot outlaw a virus nor make the economy blossom by
diktat. All we can do is to improve our institutions to leverage the awesome power of the economic
selection process.
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