I recall a recent genetics study[1] concluding that the homo sapiens (or direct ancestor) population bottle neck was ~1000 people for about 100,000 years.
My mind immediately wondered whether that length of time was long enough for some evolution to occur that reflected those conditions. Surely that world was insular for the people/hominids and extreme enough that survival was at the forefront of nearly all behaviours and social phenomena.
If any of that rubbed off on our genetics and all of human evolution and history since has not provided any sufficient forces to alter those traits, then it stands to reason our psychology is somewhat hard wired for catastrophic/post-apocalyptic in-group survival defensiveness/aggressiveness beyond even our animal/primate cousins.
All of that rests however on what time periods are required for evolutionary changes. My vague memory of studying a tiny bit of population genetics is that big changes can happen pretty quickly if there are factors capable of altering the size of the population substantially and that persist for a few generations.
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Otherwise, yea ... seems pretty obvious to me that our world (global society) and its complexity is very much a "reach exceeding grasp" scenario for our species.
Generally, I suspect greater stability and prosperity is rather possible but would require a drastic change in what we prioritise in our education and upbringing, where I would guess that we have a fundamental choice between what is compartmentalised or distributed in the way of social thinking, processing and decision making. It seems to me we've de-prioritised the average ability of the population to effectively participate and understand broad social and economic issues and decisions, and, are instead emphasising specialised/compartmentalised economic roles.
Naively, I would propose that investing in more distributed social/economic understanding would be better for society at large, which has arguably taken place with modern wealthy western civilisation. But, in line with my armchair anthropology above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if plugging more humans into the broad social issues of the day, however good attempts at their education etc have been, will naturally lead to tumult and division that is inevitably irrational and driven by inapt or misaligned psychological drives.
Going sci-fi on this ... it's curious to think about whether the "great filter" may simply be whether a species evolves intelligence etc by following only a narrow, and therefore unlikely, set of evolutionary paths or biological/geological histories that confer the required innate traits for being able to scale up to larger and well coordinated civilisations. Like, could the ice age dynamic of our planet have limited the possible evolutionary paths a species could take to those which make population scaling difficult and unproductive?
<armchair anthropology time>
I recall a recent genetics study[1] concluding that the homo sapiens (or direct ancestor) population bottle neck was ~1000 people for about 100,000 years.
My mind immediately wondered whether that length of time was long enough for some evolution to occur that reflected those conditions. Surely that world was insular for the people/hominids and extreme enough that survival was at the forefront of nearly all behaviours and social phenomena.
If any of that rubbed off on our genetics and all of human evolution and history since has not provided any sufficient forces to alter those traits, then it stands to reason our psychology is somewhat hard wired for catastrophic/post-apocalyptic in-group survival defensiveness/aggressiveness beyond even our animal/primate cousins.
All of that rests however on what time periods are required for evolutionary changes. My vague memory of studying a tiny bit of population genetics is that big changes can happen pretty quickly if there are factors capable of altering the size of the population substantially and that persist for a few generations.
</>
Otherwise, yea ... seems pretty obvious to me that our world (global society) and its complexity is very much a "reach exceeding grasp" scenario for our species.
Generally, I suspect greater stability and prosperity is rather possible but would require a drastic change in what we prioritise in our education and upbringing, where I would guess that we have a fundamental choice between what is compartmentalised or distributed in the way of social thinking, processing and decision making. It seems to me we've de-prioritised the average ability of the population to effectively participate and understand broad social and economic issues and decisions, and, are instead emphasising specialised/compartmentalised economic roles.
Naively, I would propose that investing in more distributed social/economic understanding would be better for society at large, which has arguably taken place with modern wealthy western civilisation. But, in line with my armchair anthropology above, I wouldn't be at all surprised if plugging more humans into the broad social issues of the day, however good attempts at their education etc have been, will naturally lead to tumult and division that is inevitably irrational and driven by inapt or misaligned psychological drives.
Going sci-fi on this ... it's curious to think about whether the "great filter" may simply be whether a species evolves intelligence etc by following only a narrow, and therefore unlikely, set of evolutionary paths or biological/geological histories that confer the required innate traits for being able to scale up to larger and well coordinated civilisations. Like, could the ice age dynamic of our planet have limited the possible evolutionary paths a species could take to those which make population scaling difficult and unproductive?
[1]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7487