Lecture 20: Threshold 6—What Makes Humans Different?
thousand chimps (and their numbers are dwindling rapidly). But there are
6 billion humans. More people and more energy help explain why modern
human society is so complex.Why does our species control such extraordinary amounts of energy? We
have seen that all living organisms explore their environments in the
search for the energy they need. But humans apparently do this peculiarly
successfully. Indeed, we seem to continually ¿ nd new ways of getting energy
and materials from our environment. Our adaptability was apparent even in
the Paleolithic era, the oldest era of human
history, as migrations took our ancestors
into many different environments and to all
continents except Antarctica, because each
new environment required new ways of
controlling energy.In summary, most species, like the Galapagos
¿ nches, develop a way of exploiting
their environment and survive only as long as their technique works. In
contrast, humans constantly develop new ways of extracting resources from
their environments.Our extraordinary ability to adapt, and to keep adapting, makes us very
powerful. Our astonishing control of the planet’s resources is now affecting
other species. According to some estimates, we may be controlling 25%–
40% of all the energy that enters the biosphere through photosynthesis. This
leaves less energy for other species, which may explain why other species are
dying out at a rate comparable to the ¿ ve or six greatest extinction episodes
of the last billion years. We may be strange even on cosmological scales. For
almost 50 years, astronomers have searched, without success, for evidence
of other organisms with a similar level of technological creativity. Perhaps
we are unique on galactic scales!Why are we so good at adapting? There is no universally accepted answer.
However, lines of argument in several disciplines, from psychology to
anthropology and archaeology, seem to be converging on some revealing
answers. What follows is based on some of this scholarship. I will argue thatIf chimps function
mostly like stand-alone
computers, modern
humans are networked.