Faster, faster ... and even faster!

One of the ideas that I try to get through to students (and in social conversations too) is this: Science and technology are developing faster and faster at speeds that are beyond our human abilities to understand, adapt, and--more importantly--look into the future.  In my intro classes, I routinely tell students that the world as they experience 25 years from now will be wilder than their wildest imaginations.

One of my favorite ways of conveying this to them is for them to imagine a middle-aged human from 10th century being transported into the 15th century.  Not much of a change in the way society works. 

I then ask them to imagine transporting a middle-aged human from a hundred years ago to today.  Students begin to see where I am going; after all, when even their grandparents can't keep up with this world the grandparent of the grandparent will be metaphorical (and literal too?) roadkill in a nanosecond.

If only people listened to me!

If needed--so far nobody has ever asked me to defend my theses--I can easily direct them to this essay by an evolutionary biologist.  He provides a thought experiment that is along the ones that I suggest to students:

Imagine this thought experiment. An infant born on the Pleistocene savannah is switched at birth with another born in 21st-century America. Each would undoubtedly grow up to be a functional member of her society: hunting mastodons or gathering roots and berries in one case, and perhaps running a hedge fund or piloting jet aircraft in the other. Now, delay a few decades and switch these two individuals as adults; the results would be disastrous for both. The biological nature of these individuals will be comparable whereas cultural evolution will have produced qualitatively different circumstances in the two cases, such that individuals carrying only their shared biology into each situation would find themselves woefully unable to function in the other’s cultural milieu.

Yep. Woefully unable.

Our biological inability to keep up with the changes is also a reason why we have a problem even understanding the fact that in a mere 200 years we have heated up the atmosphere and oceans like never before.  It is almost as if our biology is still in the late 19th century, while the science and technology of day is rapidly leading us in a hyper speed into the future.

Insofar as the combustion of fossil fuels generates millions of tons of carbon dioxide, which, via the greenhouse effect, absorbs heat from the sun while preventing much of it from being radiated back into space, our technological hare has set the pace. This phenomenon is largely due to the industrial revolution, barely more than two centuries old, during which time our biological evolution has essentially remained unchanged. Rapid cultural evolution has bequeathed us 50 percent of the problem: the physical and chemical half. At the same time, slow moving biological evolution has left us both reluctant to acknowledge the problem and—even when that psychological roadblock is surmounted—often disinclined to do very much about it.

What's the connection with our biology?

Our biologically evolved selves are quite good at perceiving events that are prompt and threatening; those that are slow-moving, although equally threatening, not so much. A fire in a building and people run outside. A slow moving fire in the Earth’s thermal budget and people hardly notice. For nearly all of our evolutionary past, it was not adaptive to detect such slow-motion changes, and so our ability to do so is limited. 

As the author comments: "An enemy with an upraised club was one thing; a raised ambient temperature—no matter what its cause—would have been quite another."

No wonder the evolutionarily lagging trump and his toadies immediately react to the sight of a brown-skinned immigrant at the border, and point at snow as negation of global warming.  By the time the 63 million evolve to where the rest of us are, well, ...

Oh,  I forgot; most of the 63 million deny evolution too ;)