Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, 2021a

D.6 Too Smart to Succeed? 409
Intelligence confers obvious advantages 61 to organisms, able to “outsmart”
competition to find resources, evade dangers, <strong>and</strong> adapt to new
situations. It also has some cost in terms of energy resources devoted to
a larger brain. But multiple organisms from across the animal kingdom
have taken advantage of the “smart” niche: octopuses, ravens, dolphins,
<strong>and</strong> apes to name a few. Experiments reveal the ability of these species
to solve novel, brainy puzzles in order to get at food, for instance.
61: Intelligence is not the only sort of advantage,
<strong>and</strong> can easily lose to tooth <strong>and</strong>
claw, or even mindless microscopic threats:
nature has devised many ways to “win.”
Like other attributes, intelligence would not be expected to arrive suddenly,
but would incrementally improve. <strong>Human</strong>s are justified in appraising
themselves as the most intelligent being yet on the planet.
So here’s the thing. The first species smart enough to exploit fossil
fuels will do so with reckless ab<strong>and</strong>on. Evolution did not skip steps
<strong>and</strong> create a wise being—despite the fact that the sapiens in our species
name 62 means wise. A wise being would recognize early on the damage
inherent in profligate use of fossil fuels 63 <strong>and</strong> would have refrained from
unfettered exploitation.
Put another way, the first species entertaining the notion that they are
able to outsmart nature is in for a surprise. Earth’s evolutionary web
of life is dumb: it has no intelligence at all. But it exists in this universe
on the strength of billions of years of tested success. All the r<strong>and</strong>om
experiments along the way that were unworkable got weeded out. The
vast majority of species around today have checked the box for long-term
viability.
62: . . . self-assigned flattery
63: Not only is climate change a problem,
but building an entire civilization dependent
on a finite energy resource <strong>and</strong> also enabling
a widespread degradation of natural
ecosystems seems like an amateur blunder.
Modern humans—those who have moved beyond hunter-gatherer
lifestyles, anyway—represent an exceedingly short-lived experiment in
evolutionary terms. This is especially true for the fossil fuel era of the
last few centuries. It would be premature to declare victory. The jury is
still out on whether civilization is compatible with nature <strong>and</strong> planetary
limits, as explored in Section D.5.
Evolution does not avoid mistakes. In fact, it is built upon <strong>and</strong> derives its
awesome power precisely because of those few mistakes that somehow
escape the more likely failed outcomes <strong>and</strong> find advantage in the
mistake. 64 Maybe humans are one of those more typical evolutionary
mistakes that will culminate in the usual failure, as so often happens.
The fact that we’re here <strong>and</strong> smart says nothing about our chances
for long-term success. Indeed, humankind’s demonstrated ability to
produce unintended global adverse consequences would suggest that
success is less than a safe bet.
It seems fairly clear that hunter-gatherer humans could have continued
essentially indefinitely on the planet. And the brains of hunter-gatherer
Homo sapiens are indistinguishable from those of modern humans. So
intelligence by itself is not enough to cross the line into existential peril,
if continuing to operate within <strong>and</strong> as a part of natural ecosystems. But
once that intelligence is applied toward creating artificial environments 65
that no longer adhere to the ways of nature—once we make our own rules
64: Since mutations are r<strong>and</strong>om mistakes,
<strong>and</strong> some actually, surprisingly, turn out
to be advantageous, one might say that life
is a giant pile of mistakes that failed to deliver
the expected bad outcomes, snatching
success from the jaws of failure.
65: . . . e.g., agriculture, cities
© 2021 T. W. Murphy, Jr.; Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Lic.;
Freely available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions.