Part 1.
Last Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend another one of the Origins Project presentations at Arizona State University’s Gammage theater.
‘Transcending Our Origins’ was a wonderful group presentation across many scientific fields of expertise, including astrophysics, political science, human evolutionary medicine, criminology, biological anthropology, business, and genomics. The presenters were Lawrence Krauss, Erica Chenoweth, Richard Dawkins, Esther Dyson, Eric Horvitz, Sarah Mathew, John Mueller, Randolph Nesse, Steven Pinker, George Poste, Adrian Raine, Kim Stanley Robinson, Craig Venter, and Richard Wrangham.
All presentations were fast, clear, and hard-hitting. They linked into what would be to many mainstream viewers a startlingly counterintuitive theme: Humans are getting less violent. Technology is opening up new paths, new advantages, new ways to see and interact with the universe. The future could still be a great place.
Sure, we see the results of war, coup, crime, religious strife, and poverty during most of every 24-hour news cycle. But on the whole, even counting for the violence of two World Wars and other actions, the twentieth century was far less violent than the preceding eras. And the twenty-first century may be even less violent, especially if we as a species learn to co-exist with each other and the planet’s changing ecosystems.
Like the others in this series, the ASU Origins lectures are available on YouTube. Overviews can be seen here at the Origins site: http://origins.asu.edu/
Part 2.
Let me return to the presentation’s title: Transcending Our Origins.
One of the biggest complaints leveled at scientists by anti-science proponents, often including those of fundamentalist religious bent, is that science merely gives us a cold uncaring universe and the hard lessons of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’.
Over and over again, I’ve watched pro-science presenters patiently explain that it’s really the opposite.
We humans have adaptations that give us the chance to become self-aware about our instinctive bad behaviors and change them. The ‘better angels of our nature’ are not literal guardian angels; they are our minds, our social consciousness, our learned and exercised traits toward curiosity, empathy, and co-operation. When the grinding needs of survival can be addressed without violence and xenophobia, humans seem to show a tendency to get better at all the social things.
We’re in a race now, one that many of us don’t know about or ignore. In the end it will be humans + technological advances versus climate change. Despite what Fox News, the petroleum industry, and conservative religious groups across the planet might like to believe, our world is heating up. We’re probably to blame for most of that shift; even if we aren’t, it falls on humanity to deal with it. This is going to have profound effects on geopolitical and social levels. It’s already been happening: stronger storms, longer droughts, rising sea levels, falling crop yields, the destruction of many oceanic food-chains, the advance of tropical diseases into previously cooler climates.
It may be too late to throttle back the worst changes, but the presenters of the latest Origins lecture proposed ways we could help ameliorate them.
Instead of tamely accepting Armageddon, we can turn it into Paradise. Or at least, a pretty decent future.