And there will be humans no more? A review-ish of Greg Graffin's "Population Wars"

Perhaps best known as the leader of Bad Religion, Greg Graffin is also an evolution scholar. His latest book, Population Wars, is out today. 

I was hooked by the description that this is a "paradigm-shifting" book about human behavior, particularly for readers of Dawkins, Diamond, and Wilson. I was surprised at how heavily autobiographical it is throughout. But memoirs do make a lot of sense, given the many fans who are bound to read it, and given how the argument takes shape by the end. 

Graffin is appealing to our inner humans, but without appealing to our inner saps. If I had to sum up the book in one phrase, I'd say it's the least sentimental argument for saving humankind from extinction that you'll ever read. 

That's meant to be entirely neutral, but I don't think I can convey this next thing neutrally: 

I wouldn't have finished reading my advance copy of Population Wars if the publisher hadn't offered me a Q&A with the rockstar.

It wasn't because of his voice. I was thrilled when the first few pages beat just like Bad Religion when the volume's right. 

It was because of the content. I'm not one to throw many punches, let alone at members of my own tribe of evolutionary scientists-slash-authors. But I share this awkward fact (that the only thing that kept me reading this book was my eventual interview with a rockstar) for two reasons: 

Graffin can handle it. And, my experience taught me an important lesson. Because I stuck it out and read through the many pages of cyanobacteria, and the many, many pages of Iroquois history, I was reminded of the importance of learning what we're not necessarily very interested in learning--ever, or at a given moment, or from a particular human's perspective, or whatever. 

Population Wars didn't just teach me new things about natural history,history, and environmentalism, it incidentally taught me something bigger that I think I lost my grip on. It reminded me why we read books.

**

Books. Neatly stacked and bound piles of paper. This is where so many humans pour our hearts and souls. Whatever one thinks of Graffin's book, it's his blood and guts expertly smeared into teeny tiny perfectly discernible shapes. And you can feel how he honestly believes that humans can figure out a way to prevent our future extinction. That's utterly beautiful even if you don't see things that way. It's there for readers if they stick it out, turn each of those pages, and make it to the end where they can meditate over this human's heart and soul at once. 

When we're finished reading even the best books, the books that light us up from head to toe, we merely shut them and shelve them. CDs of music too. 

We've been married for over seven years and just last week I hear Kevin's "Rockers Galore" for the very first time. It's like a dream mix-tape of The Clash with interviews and it's my new favorite album. It's got Joe Strummer explaining what he was trying to say in Rock the Casbah: "There's no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism." 

That fleck of gold was just crammed into a cabinet this whole fucking time? That one sentence that elevates an already great song into the outer dimensions of the rock'n'roll-sphere was hiding in plain sight inside my own fucking house? 

CDs. Books. Even when they're not earth-moving, they contain more human creative and emotional energy than we deserve. But the ones who write them believe that we deserve it, which makes them even more magical. When we leave CDs and books sitting there, unexplored, we're failing humanity.

Population Wars charges us to find the humanity within ourselves to collaborate, globally, as a species to clean up and preserve our planet. Graffin describes how someone can see all of history through an evolutionary lens. His aim is to spread this worldview because it's this perspective, over common ancestry and deep time, that literally unites us as a species, even if we are divided culturally. Unfortunately, saving the planet is too big a job for anything less than all of us. Graffin's book is one voice toward our unification in the face of all the fanaticism.  

**

This is the first but won’t be the last time I write about the dinner I had with an astronaut. One of the small group of us, one of us who hadn’t walked on the moon, seemed desperate to get an inspired nugget of Truth out of the one man who had. He certainly was a remarkable human, but he clearly wasn’t supernatural. His body language and his seamless diversions showed he was as skilled at avoiding sentimentality as he was oxygen depletion.

In the presence of astronauts and other rockstars people want to have their hearts melted or their minds blown. They want to transcend. To quote Twitter: they want all the feels. When they’re not preoccupied with selfies, they’re begging rockstars for God and they expect to get it. Even in someone’s kitchen, over a casserole and some beers.  Even when they’re hardly fans of Bad Religion and they read its leader’s evolution book? I hope not. I think no one who picks up Population Wars, especially Bad Religion fans, is going to expect kumbaya. Yet, tree-hugging is something for Grateful Dead shows, not punk ones.

Graffin's argument isn't to save the planet for our babies or the polar bears', it's to save the planet because we can. Let's make it our moonshot. Let's boldly go, together, globally, here on Earth. 

That thing that we don't have that could unite us while give us purpose as individuals? That thing that Eggers' protagonist desperately wants? That thing Jon Stewart always talked about? That thing that binds us together with a goal? That thing is saving the species by saving the planet.

And if you're going to save the planet, you've got to learn about things that might not rock you to your core, things that might require more stubbornness than anything to hold your attention. I didn't want to read about Graffin's cyanobacteria. I even got angry about it, but if we're to make a dent in saving the planet, we should be reading about such tedious things. 

Point blank: We humans should be reading as much as we can, whatever we can get our hands on, and without a carrot dangling at the end of the book, without the promise of an interview with a rockstar. 

Because sharing our unique human experiences with one another unites us as humans. 

And also because rockstars go on tour. When you're all done reading and you write to the publicist to say, This is an important book, thank you for sending it to me. I want to write about it. Please set up a Q&A and please send the music that accompanies the book... She is likely to respond with an apology (and without the music too).  

So lessons learned! I read Population Wars and all I got was one brilliant human's heart and soul, one human's bold and hopeful vision for our species.  

**

Questions for Dr. Graffin

1. Is Population Wars punk rock?
2. Both perpetual mutation as well as genetic drift are fundamental to how I have come to understand natural selection as being much weaker than many still believe it to be. However, you have come to this seemingly same conclusion about natural selection without genetic drift and without much consideration of perpetual mutation. Can you help us understand how you did this? And can you explain why you left genetic drift out of your book?
3. I am drawn to discussions of free will, but it's hard for me to reconcile your argument that it does not exist with the goal of your book urging humankind to save the planet and ourselves. If there is no free will, how will your book's will be done?
4. What do you want readers to do after reading your book? I'm thinking specifically of the readers who cannot afford to emulate you by building an eco-friendly home and turning down big financial offers from natural gas companies. The book demonstrates your evolutionary worldview, but does not contain many directives. What can we do toward your goal of saving the planet and the species?
5. How do we join together as a species to accomplish anything together when there's such massive inequality?

Blogging isn't catastrophic, but the opposite could be.

Ken and I just had an article published in Evolutionary Anthropology:

Catastrophes in evolution: Is Cuvier's world extinct or extant?

It's open access, so no need for a subscription to read it.

It's the second one we've done (first one is here). The piece is largely the product of many discussions we've had, mainly over email, and these discussions were sparked by posts we had each written for the MT.

Beyond how satisfying it was to have these discussions with Ken and to write this paper with him, it was a great excuse to read Elizabeth Kolbert's articles in The New Yorker (here and here) as well as her wonderful book that accompanies them:

Although the subtitle's irksome if you're not keen on separating human behavior from nature, the book's incredibly insightful. And, it's captivating if you just love tales of exploration and discovery, and if you eat up details about kit, gear and extraordinary travel conditions. It was sometimes difficult to read through my jealousy, and I consider that reason alone to recommend this read, regardless of the compelling scientific history, the exciting albeit depressing cutting-edge knowledge, as well as the important political message that only peeks out, from under the enormous pile of scientific evidence, in her final paragraphs.

It's because of our ongoing discussions and writings and then also Kolbert's, that Ken and I got to thinking about whether and how extinction, background and mass extinctions, and especially Cuvier's pre-Darwinian notions of "catastrophism" are playing out in paleoanthropology right now. This is the overall theme of our piece linked above.

Kolbert deals briefly with Neanderthals near the end of her book. However, Ken and I weren't so much concerned with what happened to the Neanderthals as whether, for instance, we could fairly consider what happened to them to be "extinction" given what we know about their DNA living on inside, probably, billions of us today. And, because of those genetic circumstances, it naturally made us wonder whether anything we call "extinct" truly is and if it is, how could we know? This of course begs for a thoughtful consideration of species and adaptation and, seemingly, all the ol' evolutionary chestnuts that are terribly difficult to crack.

I don't think that what Ken and I contributed in Evolutionary Anthropology was far different from anything that could have occurred before blogs were invented, but blogging certainly did facilitate it. What's more, if I didn't have The Mermaid's Tale, if I wasn't routinely reading it and writing for it, I probably wouldn't be thinking this regularly and this deeply about many of these marvelous things in the first place, especially not with the unimaginably wonderful benefit of engaging with Anne and Ken.  What a catastrophe that would be.

You axolotl questions! So here are some answers....

Wonderful Mad magazine!  In decades past, when I was juvenile (and hence, mature enough to understand Mad's subtleties), there were many references to the perplexing 'potrzebie' and the evocative axolotl.  We at one time thought these were typical Mad made-up-words, but it turned out that the first is from Polish (don't believe it?  Google it!), and the second really does exist.

Axolotls (their Aztec name) are a species of Mexican salamander that doesn't go through complete metamorphosis the way their closely related species cousins do.  In essence, they are permanent teenagers who never quite grow up.  They must be horrid annoyances to their parents, but otherwise seem to be quite successful and have been around for a long time.  But they do mate often (come to think of it, so do teenagers these days), and they've been the stuff of both legends and aquariums. 

Well, sadly, it turns out that this serious item from 1960 Mad was prophetic.  The actual axolotl is in trouble.  As a story in the NYTimes describes, the axolotl is in danger of extinction, thanks to pollution in its limited Mexican habitats, and its consumption by the locals (I don't know if they peel them or not).

Extlinctlion:  who cares?
The Times story is a discussion of whether or how they should be saved from extinction.  But extinction is a normal part of life on earth, and is it more than just human sentimentality to let them go the true way of all flesh?  Tree-huggers will say that they may be valuable some day for medicine (or nutrition?), or they're cute and fun, or just that we humans ought to stop ravaging the world.  The only species that do well in our territory are chickens, cows, corn, soybeans, rice, and pigs.  They're thriving like nobody's business.  A useful menagerie, yes, but esthetically satisfying?

Is there a scientific or evolutionary question of importance here?  Or is it no different than arguing about what makes good art?  One fallback position of those who cry 'wolf!' about extinctions is that, in this case, axolotls eat a lot of other stuff, and if they went away what would happen?  Even the current story says that the environments seem to be surviving even as the axolotls disappear, but from an evolutionary point of view, if there's food around some species will start eating it.  Ecosystems have always come and gone and changed.

Ruing the devastation our species causes is largely esthetic or even political, perhaps as a warning-canary telling us we are endangering species and food-chains that we actually do depend on, or sources of medicines, and that kind of thing.  If we pollute ourselves into trouble, or our activities that destroy species are the same as those that will cause New York to sink under the sea like Atlantis, then the little harmless axolotl is such a canary and we should heed the message--not just for its sake, but for our own.

Of course, defending the persistence of our species is perhaps a kind of sentimentality with which the rest of the world (chickens, cows, and pigs notwithstanding) will have little sympathy.