Complexity vs. Evolution

Evolution reached a crucial test when it got to humans. It designed a species which was plagued by the essence of its own creation, of its own ending, and in doing so it was asked, "Can this creature solve its most fundamental problems and live in harmony with you, Evolution, or will it destroy you entirely?" If you've read my essays before, you'll know by now that the human condition suffers from complexity. Our feeble brains are simply not well equipped to handle the amount of complexity in our modern world, and from that we observe tribalism, corruption, and wrath. We are animals in body and largely in mind but a piece of us insists upon rebelling. After reading Daniel Quinn's Ishmael a second time, I had some further thoughts on how humans came to be so afflicted and what we could do about it.

Early humans were hunter-gatherers and largely egalitarian societies. Possessed by the instinct for survival, they would do whatever they could to find food for their own. Sometimes they would go hungry. Other times they would feast. In most cases they were largely nomadic. When there simply was not enough food to go around, their numbers would diminish much in the same way that the lions and gazelles both diminish when a drought prevents plants from growing. To use an image of the cultural perception of hunter-gatherers by most people, myself included, in our modern society, we can think of it like a single man upon a ridge at dusk, adapted from a similar illustration in Ishmael.

This man is gasping for air. He runs and he runs to no end. He sees before him the prey he must catch before night falls, bidden by the gnawing hunger in his belly, and behind him are the howls of wolves and other predators racing towards him, encircling him. His spear, on the verge of breaking, defines his only weapon. Forever doomed to run on this treadmill between that which he needs to eat and that which needs to eat him, the man fears his reality. Night falls quickly.

A bit dramatic, but that little vignette comes to mind when I think of hunter-gatherer tribes. However, nothing could be further from the truth. As depicted not only in Ishmael, but in other books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, hunter-gatherer people these days, though sadly dwindling in number, are about he happiest people you can find. As it turns out, humans are not the first thing on any other species' menu. Even sharks will often take one bite to test us out but find us too bony for their appetite. We're also omnivores, meaning the scarcity of game does not threaten us, as we can eat plants, and vice versa. Our senses are attuned to check food for toxicity and freshness. As such, humans do not starve easily in the wilderness. Anthropologists interviewing hunter-gatherer tribes have found them to be among the most leisured people on the planet, given that they only need to work a few hours a day for their food. Some tribes will even practice a mix of agriculture and hunting/gathering, making their food almost perennially bountiful.

So if such a treasure-trove of leisure and fulfillment can be found from hunting and gathering, why did humans ever choose to do anything else? Well, Ishmael presents us with a solution, but I struggle to come to terms with it, as the answer may simply be a part of a larger puzzle.

According to Ishmael, the transition between hunting/gathering/herding and agriculture came when humans made a conscious decision to control their own destinies. No longer satisfied with dwindling along with the other animals when food sources were scarce, early humans decided that it was incumbent upon them to find a solution. They began a process which created what we would later know as the first civilizations. Ishmael believes that this decision directly thwarts the intentions of the gods. In a fantastic exchange between himself and his student towards the end of the book, Ishmael outlines the simple reality that the tree from which Adam and Eve ate to begin their Fall was a tree which outlined who should live and who should die; knowledge which should only nurture the gods. In the fallible hands of humankind, the knowledge was corrupted. Man simply thought he had the answers, and in acting upon that basis he determined that he knew best who should live and who should die; he determined that he was a god.

This human-centric view of the world can be seen in the subconscious reality of most humans. When we think about our relationship to the world as defined by our actions, it becomes clear that we believe the world is ours to subjugate. Sometimes we make this decision in conscious resignation, because how else would we live? I drive my car every day to work and back not with the intention of releasing harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, but due to a perceived necessity, a fabrication of necessity. We have built these systems of such great complexity around us, so contradictory to our nature, that we cannot help but feel resigned to be subjugated by it and in turn to partake in the subjugation of our planet.

To scale back from environmentalism for a moment and refocus to Ishmael's conclusions, I mentioned earlier that I struggle to come to terms with it. I find the aspect of consciousness to be the trouble. Did humans really rise up from the mud one day and find that they were living in squalor. Did they really look at the gods and thumb their noses at them in rapid succession over the course of a few thousand years? Ishmael's explanation, while emotional and impactful, likely does not tell the full story.

Another aspect of our transition to agriculture likely originates in the evolution of our psychology, and of the animal kingdom as a whole. In fact, evolution contradicts itself at several key junctions. As a system, it induces complexity by saying, "whatever can survive, shall." We see such an abundance of species upon this planet for this reason. They may not be ideal. In fact, they cannot all be ideal. If evolution strove to constant ideality, we would have seen just one species dominate the planet a long time ago. So evolution induces complexity, but unfortunately the species it produces are all bent on reducing complexity in order to survive. The gazelle in the African savannah must decide as swiftly as it can whether the ruffling in the grass is the wind or a predator on the hunt. I spoke about this more in my Fundamental Problem essay series.

Humans, as animals, are likewise seeking to reduce the complexity in our world. Agriculture may have arisen simply as an evolution of our psychology in handling the complex wilderness. We are one of the few beings actively aware of death. Not to toot our own horns too much, but we can ask ourselves about our own ultimate fate, our own place in the universe. Faced with such unrelenting self-awareness, humans may have wondered how best to overcome death, the ultimate complexity. Well, a good place to start happens to be planting your own food. Even today, supply chain shortages and rising grocery prices have no sway on the person who can plant and herd their own food. Barring total ecological collapse in an environmental calamity, controlling your food source all but ensures your survival.

Whether or not we have the conscious brain power to think of this transition as a hopeful reduction in complexity, I do not know. It seems more likely that we were drawn to this simple solution out of our own necessity. In any case, early agriculturalists must have felt pretty good about themselves. Now they had food surpluses for droughts, storms, and harsh winters. However, another problem arose when people decided to make little societies around these farms. Now we needed someone to till the soil, someone to take care of the crops, someone to harvest, someone to guard the fields, someone to divide out rations, someone to build, and we needed to reinvent the concept of money and trade to suit this new lifestyle. To top it off, another problem arose, which Ishmael also touches upon during the novel. With ample food supply, the land can support more people. As the population grows, so does the land requirement to grow more food. Soon, great swaths of land are being taken for agriculture. Side note - to see how this agricultural undertaking relates to the story of Cain and Abel, see my last post on Ishmael.

So growth has become unbounded, and as such complexity has now increased a hundredfold. What was once a simple society with a few dozen people living off of the yield from one little farm has ballooned into civilization: cities, empires, wars, armies, and all of the things we still associate with the modern world. In Ishmael's narrative, this unending growth represents a conscious denial of the gods' power. My own conclusion differs in that we stumbled into the growth by accident and are now unsure of how to escape our own existential misery.

Without lengthening this essay too much further, another dimension of the agricultural revolution may deal with our need to make safe our own tribalistic populations. Since the general population of humans in hunter-gatherer tribes was increasing across fertile regions of the earth, more and more inter-tribe violence was bound to happen. It may be that, at some critical point, a neolithic tribe of humans decided that enough was enough and they needed to grow to such an extent that they could wipe out any of their competitors with ease. A dark take, but likely a piece of this complicated puzzle.