| DOMINION Niles Eldredge New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8050-2982-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-8050-2982-6 | 190pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
At the beginning of history was The Word, and the word was Dominion. And The Word said, "You, Mankind, are a Special Creation. You shall not be part of nature, to prey or be preyed upon; but You shall be above nature, and it shall be as your footstool. Everything that is a part of nature shall be yours, to use as You desire."
And Mankind heard The Word, and saw that it was good. And Mankind did grow and prosper. And The Word spread, and spread, and spread. Then it spread some more. From continent to continent upon the Earth did The Word spread, and across the Seven Seas, even to the uttermost island. And it was all good; it was all very, very, very good.
For a while...
The author's thesis is that modern humans are a species unique in the history of life on this planet. We have added culture to our repertoire — simple tools, the control of fire, the cultivation of plants, the domestication of animals — and by doing that, we stepped around the barriers that had held back other species.
"Taking control over production of our own food supply, we became the first species in the 3.5-billion-year history of earth to live outside the confines of the local ecosystem. That's what took the lid off our modest population numbers, touching off a population explosion that is accelerating as we move into the twenty-first century." – Page xiv |
It is controller, is it not? And this controller, this amalgamation of neural tissue by which animals direct and coordinate their behavior, grows in size and complexity across the whole of vertebrate evolutionary history.
In our own relatives, the genus Homo, average brain volume rises from 850cc for H. erectus to 1,500cc for Neanderthal. (Our own averages 1,300 to 1,400cc.) It's true that greater brain size is no guarantee of higher human-style cognitive ability. But the data are certainly suggestive of a general trend in that direction.
And Mother Nature is no spendthrift; she insists that her changes pay back their energy cost in survival value. So, although I cannot support this view, I tend to believe that a march to greater intelligence is in the normal course of things.
But in doing so, we fell under the illusion that we were no longer bound by nature's rules. We spread across the planet, our numbers growing as we did so. We consumed whatever we found in our new territories: first game animals,1 lately "natural resources" like metal ores. Now our population numbers over 6 billion, and these numbers are straining both the resources of Earth and its ability to absorb waste products of civilization. The industrial revolution added carbon dioxide to the list of waste products that threaten the planet's ecological balance.2
The author maintains that unless we achieve a new mindset, our civilization is doomed — either by sociopolitical upheaval in the near term, or by evolutionary failure over the course of millennia. He proposes ways of arriving at that new mindset.
I fully agree with his premise that we need to change our ways. This book is valuable because he lays out that premise so clearly, and because of the supporting data he provides. He certainly knows the evolutionary history of genus Homo. However, I think he has a problem with tone: His words, while eminently sensible, do not ring. If we are to turn things around in time, we desperately need those ringing exhortations. This book is well done and worth reading, but there are better calls to action.
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