Copyright @ 2009
Morality is how we decide what is right and wrong. A moral philosophy is what the morality is trying to achieve. A moral philosophy could be that a person should be as happy as possible. The morality would be the strategy of how to achieve happiness. A moral philosophy would be about wealth or peace. The strategy would be how to achieve those. This is a moral philosophy about survival of the individual, society and humanity in the evolutionary sense. The morality is the learned survival strategies we use that are the mark of humans. It may seem obvious that moralities are about survival, but that is not always clear and must be here. Here, survival is considered to be what is right.
An examination of human ecology shows that it has already changed greatly and will continue to change in the future. To survive, humans must find and enter a new niche. To do that, they will have to adapt genetically and behaviorally. They will have to develop new survival strategies, that is new moralities. This section is to describe these strategies in the context not only of the environment, but in terms of where humans have come from, what humans are and what they can become, particularly in the context of artificial selection and recent trends.
This is a difficult topic. In ways it is a bit like predicting the future, something that is always problematic. Luckily there are powerful tools available to help solve this problem. This uses the patterns of Ecology to describe the needs of a specie. Humans can be described and the basis of their ecology, Energetics and Reproduction as well as other ecological features, can be described. Then various cahnges that are predictable can be considered and the description of the ecology can be made again. What it shows is fascinating.
In that this is about predicting the future, it will intentionally be quite restricted. The original time frame of this book was supposed to be 10,000 years. That was a wild guess I made about how long it would take for humans to use artificial selection to take advantage of existing human genetic variation and presumably enter the beginnings of a new ecology. It is quite a short period in terms of natural evolution. Seeing how things seem to naturally accelerate though, this could just as well be 1000 years or some other number, but the time frame used is related to genetic adaptation. This is good, because I can see that past that, the possibilities and potentials are clearly beyond prediction. The final chapter that includes consideration of the meaning of Gods does break this rule and speculates far beyond, but that is to follow thoughts that exist today. The rest of this morality section looks at things that are far closer and more familiar.
This book is based on science, but it must be far more. Science is about what is known. This is about possibilities within what is known so it is about the unknown and possibly about some of the unknowable. This asks what is good, what is bad and what is important. This must address the questions of Who Am I, Why Am I Here and What Can I Become. It is like a conversation where you come up with the perfect answer, but a minute too late. You have to know the right answer at the right time. We need to know where we have come from and what we are. Particularly we need to know what we can become before we have to get there. Without a destination, we will flounder and get lost. Known goals can be achieved, even if they are difficult. Reaching a new stable niche will be difficult. This part of the book talks about where we can go and the strategies we can use to get there. The potentials we can achieve though are astounding. We can achieve our greatest aspirations. The final part of the book discusses what those aspirations might be.
This is an important topic and I have approached it in the past, particularly in the Morality Monographs. At the time I knew its importance, but I also knew the difficulty so I just listed all the moral issues, the behaviors and decisions that make up survival, and examined them as well as I could. This is different. This is years later and written with much greater understanding. In ways this includes the topics in the Morality Monographs, but there is a quantitative difference. Instead of elements being listed, this is formed around the analysis patterns of ecology. It doesn't just ask questions and make observations. It offers answers.
There are other moral philosophies, such as ones based on happiness or material wealth. In terms of biology, these are less correct, because the pursuit of happiness or wealth can come at the cost of survival. In terms of biology, it is about survival. You can see how the self absorption of seeking personal happiness can conflict with the work, sacrifice and difficulty involved in raising a child. The love of wealth can conflict with the love of family. These are common enough stories that they are known as archetypes. Happiness and wealth have their importance, but you can also see their dangers and limitations.
Summary
This is broken into three sections:
Topics are considered in the usual terms of moral systems, but also in the context of artificial selection, particularly the topics where a balance must be maintained. Also, topics are considered in terms of some particularly human characteristics that usually don't exist in natural biological systems. Biological systems work by renewal. They don't have history as humans do. Also, biological systems work by diversity and variation. Humans tend to make giant singular systems with minimal variation to take advantage of the benefits of scale and efficiency. These factors must be considered in some of the topics.
The Way We Were
Without going into Anthropology too far, it seems that humans lived in small highly social groups that used strategies of cooperation to hunt and scavenge meet as well as collect what vegetation they could. The most food came from plant sources. Some notable features were the wide variety of their diet, that they walked upright, were sight oriented and they had big brains, used for their social interactions and their tool use. Eventually fire was used for cooking and scaring away predators. They likely had camps that they occupied at different times of the year depending on the food availability. Transportation was by foot. Childhood was very long compared to other animals and demanding due to the requirements of essential learning. It is believed that though monogamous in the sense that the father contributed to the raising of the young, it seems that "marriage" commonly lasted about 7 years. Life was shorter then. Status was a foundation of the social system and started to replace the typical mammalian aggressive displays to determine access to females. It is believed that they liked to live near the shores of lakes or possibly the ocean, where food would be found.
Humans lived in a lot of different places and modern human variation suggests that there was a lot of variation back then. Humans existed and developed in an ecology like this for more than a million years. This is what they were most adapted to and arguably what we are still most adapted to. They were called hunter/gatherer/collectors, politely skipping the scavenger aspect. This is the world that they were adapted to and that they would have "liked". The question is what will we need to survive it the future and what would we like. If you made this same short overview of humans in the future, what would it say?
Then came the time of the cities. In terms of energetics, it would say that humans developed farming and domesticated animals. This made them, the farmers in particular, less nomadic and provided more food. They created cities and more sophisticated technologies. They developed mining that provided even more resources. They used their tools and new crops to adapt to new areas. Their mobility and higher population density made them more subject to mortality by disease, though their tools reduced mortality due to predatory animals. The size of their social groups grew and new organizational systems emerged including clans, politics, religions, nations and stratified societies where different groups lived together, but stayed separate as different occupational castes. Now class, caste, clan and status dictated access to females within a society. War became a huge factor during history as did slavery. Now migrations were by boat. Instead of living by lake shores, they tended to live near rivers that provided water for farming. Herding was done by more nomadic groups that took their flocks to where there was forage. Herding groups raided each others flocks and so learned the beginnings of war.
In ways, the most notable changes would have been related to the larger social groups, but looking closer, bigger changes related to ownership and farming. Ownership became more important. That made marriage more important as an economic mechanism. Humans became more monogamous in one sense, that the male provided resources to raise the children, but promoted the mammalian feature of multiple females for the most successful males because economics allowed them to broadly dominate resources again.
Occupational castes came into existence and developed that had never existed before except as individuals in tribes such as priests, builders, warriors and scribes. Most people though were still farmers or herders in societies dominated by warriors and a ruling class. New breeds of humans and animals developed.
In terms of resources, more complex houses were built and non-muscle energy sources were used now for lighting as well as heat. Animals were used for transport and farming. Minerals were extracted, metallurgy advanced and new uses were developed. Arts developed and writing was invented. Many new technologies developed during this millinias long time period. Changes occurred rapidly in biological terms and the demands of the environment pushed adaptation as fast as it could go. Fossil fuels like oil and coal became the biggest part of the human energy budget.
Another age came to the cities, the age of the machines. It was the age of coal, iron, steam and steel. It is the age we are still in, but now it is too close to see from a distance that shows it clearly. It is an age that is driven by the power of science. New engines were created and new machines to use them. Many of these were machines of transport or war. Science has become more dominant and has created an age of medicine and mass production. It offered a new energy source, nuclear. It also offered new dangers. Science promises new sources with less danger and toxic wastes. Just recently the age of computers was born. More recently the age of genetics has started. We see unprecedented changes in society and dangers we never imagined.
About the only thing we can say for sure is that the all important energy source of today, fossil fuels, will not last far into the future.
The question can be asked then. What do we think of the world as it looks now? Do we like it? From this point of view can we say what we would like? Looking at the possibilities, what would we choose, especially in the context of survival? What do trends suggest? All I was looking for was a relatively stable ecology. I can say something about that, but I found more. This is to give a systematic overview of what looks possible and what humans are likely to choose from. The potentials turned out to be more than I expected.
Questions I'd Love To See Answered
There are so many... After millennia of thought by the greatest thinkers, we have Democracy. "The worst political system, except for all the rest". We have elegant economic theories, but economic events still come as complete surprises. We have religions that worship teachers of the greatest moralities, yet priests seem so corruptible by power, wealth and failings of the flesh and judgment. What is identity? We will need a better understanding. What can we do? Artificial selection can solve many problems. Reason, understanding and wisdom will solve many more, but what does reality look like?
Biological systems operate by diversity and adaptation. Can human systems be made to emulate biological systems? Humans systems naturally seem to have problems related to too much history, too much size, centralized organization and a resultant lack diversity or adaptability.
1. A problem is history. No other species knows its history and very little lasts more than a generation or two. Humans rely on complicated learned knowledge though which is retained by institutions, multi-generational survival patterns. Institutions are created to serve a purpose, husbanding their behavior in the form of knowledge. That behavior is part of human survival and so is a moral strategy. The importance cannot be underestimated. One problem is that in the natural scheme of things, the institution's main purpose must become survival, competing with or replacing the primary mission of husbanding the behavior and knowledge. Perhaps that knowledge can be retained separately with books or electronic records. Another problem, perhaps a more important one, is the people that make up the institution. Knowledge is indifferent, but people have interests, particularly self interests that may also supersede the purpose of the institution. This may well be the reason democracy can work. Not just because it is representative or any other reason that is commonly offered, but because it rejuvenates itself by replacing the people. To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. For systems to work over time, they must be able to be reborn and renewed. If not, they will not focus on their original purpose or be able to adapt.
2. Another observation taken from biological systems is about size. Nations and business have grown in characteristic ways that favor size. Domination by size and by removing the competition have always been successful methods. In the West, since Sargon the Great replaced the Sumerian priestly ruling caste with a military caste, bigger and stronger has always been better. This has been true of other civil cultures as well. Survival and self interest has been about competition on a macro scale as natural selection has been on an individual level. That is not how most biological systems work and stifles both diversity and adaptation, particularly by exasperating the problem of history. Also, what makes the system stop growing? When does it run out of resources? It's just very unnatural. When does size no longer provide a benefit or aid in a purpose, even survival? It becomes difficult to organize the system even with the help of computers. Besides those inherent problems, size normally works against diversity and adaptation unless they are built into the system.
3. There is no super-organism in mammals. It makes for a particular vulnerability, like the queen in an ant nest. An entire ant nest can die if the queen dies and a replacement hasn't been readied. It is a problem of systems that work by too much centralization. Some nations and businesses are that way. The biggest problem with dictatorships is passing on the power when the dictator dies. Businesses can fail if they are too reliant on one person's leadership. Also that single leadership will almost always work against adaptation and diversity, but the system may well be taking advantage then of specialization.
There are a number of systematic problems to society like this. There may not be solutions to some problems. Luckily there are so many people with powerful moral instincts that will devote their lives and energy to making the world a better place. They will keep fixing problems and making new institutions to solve human needs. Maybe that is the most important factor of all. As long as it is a dynamic system, good people using their intelligence will be able to balance all the flaws and failings of what we are and what we have to work with. It just has to be designed so that the system is always dynamic and can be changed and adapt. That requires diversity.
The following chapters are more specific issues to be considered in terms of survival strategies.
Energetics - The basis of the ecology.
Reproduction - What is done with the Energetics.
Balance - Moral issues that will have to exist in a balance of belief and genetics.
Individual Morality - Moral issues that just are. Was the Morality Monographs.
Human Questions, Human Aspirations, Religions and Gods
Population
There is one "elephant in the room". A big issue that no one wants to mention. That is over population. Previously it was said that this could only be written in the context of a short time period otherwise the analysis became to vast to even organize. Humans transitioning into a new ecology can only be discussed in the context of a stable population or it is not a description of a specie or an ecology. One thing is sure. That is that one way or another, human population will stop growing. Whether this occurs because of starvation, war, disease or conscious decision, population will stop growing. If humans are to be more than animals though, ultimately we will have to control our population by decision. Indications are that we can do that. Here are some of the indicators that humanity can intentionally control their population and factors to promote that control.
1. Self Interest. Humans will respond to what is necessary to survive. We are already adapting to a quality strategy from a traditionally quantity strategy of reproduction.
2. Using artificial selection to conserve the best genes of the parents should make them more comfortable with less children.
3. It has been shown that women given the ability to limit family size, generally will.
4. The Catholic Church has adjusted its teachings to not promote large families. This is an enormous factor and indicator. If they can do it, other groups can.
If over population continues to be a significant danger, there will probably be laws passed to limit family size. This will most likely be controversial, but just as we limit violence as a mode of competition in our society, it will be important to limit fecundity as a method of competition. Demographic competition will lead invariably to disaster. It is just selfish and will lead to a population with destructive instincts. It would be like allowing rape as a reproductive strategy. People have instincts to follow laws that are fair and that the importance of the law has been explained. Under the circumstances, any groups that clearly attempt demographic competition are likely to draw some stiff sanctions.
I expect worldwide human population to stabilize at between 1 and 10 billion. That is a pretty wild guess of a broad range, but it is meant to reflect a population number that doesn't imply some radical change in human nature that would make this analysis completely meaningless. Even a population size out of this range could still possibly exist in the following description of ecology and moral strategy, but it doesn't change anything beyond predictable ecological parameters.
In reality, what is going to limit what is now runaway population growth? Theory and history says that it will be disease. Remember, in the beginning of this book that was what I said was the reason we had to use artificial selection more than any other. We can't see it. It is in the future, but what if AIDS had been transmissible by air as was first feared? We have been fighting disease all our evolutionary history. Diseases have been evolving far longer and we know that they are evolving to adapt to antibiotics. There has never been a specie with such mobility and population density. It is a great environment for disease. The human race is likely to get hit over and over by diseases, some with high mortality rates. It might be centuries apart, but that is not so long in terms of survival. Theory says we will get hit hard occasionally, particularly under certain conditions such as over population. Really, it would probably be better if our population is limited by disease rather than by starvation or war. Otherwise the survivors will carry a huge moral debt.
Notice that that also implies that disease could easily wipe out most of the population of humans. Theoretically we could suddenly find the population of humans at one million or less. Suddenly moral strategy might include focusing on large families. In all cases, this is about an species of intelligent, self aware individuals making conscious decisions about the plans and strategies of the entire specie. It won't be long before we will have technological capability to make machine based natural or artificial intelligences that could potentially resurrect humans from frozen germ tissue after they had otherwise vanished due to a disease that they couldn't defeat. It's hard to say, but sometimes speculation becomes fact.
Climate Change
I like to look at possibilities and trends, particularly based on genes and moral choices that humans make. Unfortunately it seems there is a factor that almost no one had considered when I started this book decades ago. That is major climate change. In ways it doesn't change the analysis I have made. In other ways, it suggests it could be harder for humans to survive and transition to a new ecology. It may change the likelihoods of what particular ecologies we will exist in. Due to environmental degradation, it makes it more likely we would survive in artificial environments rather than in the relatively more open and natural one like we exist in now. It is another challenge. Perhaps a difficult challenge for humans to overcome to find a new niche to survive in, but we must and these survival patterns will still apply.