How humans came to dominate the Earth
Image by Greg Foley
Paul Ehrlich: First of all, genetically, we were a social animal that originally lived in trees, which gave us some of our most important characteristics, like eyes in the front of the head, binocular vision.
That’s Paul Ehrlich of Stanford, explaining his ideas on why we humans dominate Earth.
Paul Ehrlich: We used to snatch insects in bushes, so we have very dextrous fingers. It’s a good thing that we came down out of the trees, because you can’t build a civilization in the trees. And we became an increasingly smart, social animal and did a wonderful job of taking over our environment.
Our genetic evolution gave us things like dextrous fingers and binocular vision. But Ehrilich says what put us over the top was our cultural evolution – learning to farm, learning language that we could write down, learning to change and manipulate our world.
Paul Ehrlich: It’s our cultural evolution, hopefully responding to our changes in the environment, that may very well save us. A good example of cultural evolution would be determination by all people to move as rapidly as possible to, say, a solar-hydrogen economy, rather than burning fossil fuels.
Paul Ehrlich is professor of biology and population studies at Stanford. His recent book is called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.
Ehrlich said our ability to adapt is critical to meeting the challenges of a changing climate and degraded environment.
Paul Ehrlich: We’ve changed the entire environment, and our evolution is a response to our environment. Obviously, we are responding genetically. For instance, when some groups of human beings took up herding animals and drinking milk, the genetics of how we handle lactose changed.
How about inteligence and resoning. Man can make a many number of tools and man can quickly learn from mistakes (execpt congress).
hi guys —
just had to pipe up here. but i feel strongly!
there is a part of me that doubts whether we dominate earth . in many ways, i think that’s a real western conceit, and a scientific conclusion that rings of extreme anthro-bias.
do we abuse the earth, manipulate it, tranform it, overrun it? yes.
but to say “dominate”…it suggests we’ve gained advantage of something (maybe nature?) that exists outside of us.
when i think the truth is more like this: we’ve utilized to our fullest advantage something of which we are a (non-integral) part.
and, in consideration of the state Earth is in, it might be fair to say we’ve also used it to our fullest disadvantage.
thanks for the microphone!!!!
whaddaya think?
How did humans come to dominate the Earth? Mr Ehrlich is somewhat inaccurate in his speculations. The answer was written thousands of years ago by Moses. Genesis 1:26 says that God gave man dominion over “ all the Earth,”. One should also note that Mr Ehrlich refers to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It is interesting to note that the complete title of Darwin’s most referred to work is not just “ The Origin of The Species”, but “ On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection, Or The Preservation Of Favoured Races In The Struggle For Life.” Sounds somewhat racist, does it not?…. Happy Thanksgiving!
We(humanoids) or human beings can contest the existence of our creator.He is or he is not. Our intellect tells us that we have not created our intelligence, we think and claim and argue about our creator. This makes us the most intelligent creature on earth.Still we kill each other forgetting the fact that our creator took billions of years to make this universe habitable for we human beings. Are we happy to stay humanoids for ever or should we progress to be human beings? Ask war mongers.
I totally don’t agree. Humans were never monkeys. If we were how come there are still monkeys around?Wouldn’t they have all turned into humans? I think that: God made us humans to rule over the Earth, the plants and its animals. Not only to rule over but to take care of. —->Thats my opinion
well,i think its the world that dominate us as we can not even get out of the most simple problems. rachid from MOROCCO
Dear Perry Bolin, A. P. Garcia, Paul Ehrlich, Deborah and Friends,
Could many members of our culture be fixated on a fantasy: the patently unsustainable goal of limitless, unbridled economic growth? Are we suffering from a sort of illness, something like amnesia, that is resulting in our forgetfulness with regard to the necessity of the finite Earth and its frangible environs to the preservation of life as we know it, a functional global political economy and the human species? Alternatively, have we been mesmerized by a modern rendition of the ancient Tower of Babel? Or have all of the above, and more, somehow been occurring?
Perhaps we are forever forgetting about Earth and its environment because too many people, especially the economic powerbrokers, their bought-and-paid-for politicians and their minions in the mainstream media, are worshipping a “totem”. At least to me, there appear to be many too many people for whom the economy, in and of itself, is the primary object of their idolatry. This behavior is observable, obvious and flagrant. In many instances, these worshippers make what they evidently believe are rational arguments that suggest manmade financial and economic systems are somehow essential to, and an integral part of, God’s Creation; that indicate the growth of the global economy will occur from now on, even after the Creation is ravaged and its climate destabilized by unrestrained overproduction, unchecked overconsumption and unregulated overpopulation activities of the human species. Aside from the “Economic Colossus” nothing else seems to matter much to them.
Today, it appears that the financial system of the economic powerbrokers is collapsing like a “house of cards” and the real economy of the family of humanity is threatened. Experts in political economy are saying internally inconsistent and contradictory things as well as leaving the impression that they do not know what is happening. Communications about financials and the economy are generally confused and in disarray. Confidence and trust in the operating systems of finance and the global economy have been undermined by the duplicitous invention of dodgy financial instruments and fraudulent business models as well as by the promulgation of con games and Ponzi schemes. Transparency, accountability and honesty in business activities have been largely vanquished. A great economic system is being undone by con artists, gamblers and cheats. In such circumstances, does the manmade colossus we call the global political economy remind you in some ways of a modern Tower of Babel?
Sincerely,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176