Winter Solstice                                                                    Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

Still listening to the series of lectures, Big History.  There was a really striking concept in the most recent lecture, one in which Professor David Christian, considered the perennial question:  What makes humans unique?  There have been many answers from imago dei to tool-maker to bi-pedalism to our brain to bulk ratio.  Each of these has run into challenges over time.  Professor Christian offers an idea that was new to me.

His idea is that humans, unique among organisms on earth, perhaps even unique among organisms in our galaxy, have the capacity to adapt quickly and often to their environment.  He offers as evidence the escalating energy controlled by humans ever since the Paleolithic.  This was the time when the humans went of out of Africa and began the vast migrations that put our species in literally all parts of the known world.  Each time an organism enters a new environment it has to adapt to that environment in such a way that it can meet its energy needs.  The familiar finches from Darwin’s Galapagos journey developed beaks suited for the kind of nut or other form of food found in the particular new niche they inhabited.

As Christian points out, organisms usually develop one such trick and apply over and over until their run as a species ends in an extinction event of some kind.  We are unique in that we adapt within one generation to a new or changed environment.  We then pass on those tricks through symbolic language so each generation can build on the learnings of the past.  Christian calls this collective learning.  It is, he says, the truly unique facet of homo sapiens.

How it manifests itself is in our increasing control over energy sources.  We now consume up to 40% of all energy utilized by all organisms on earth.  This means that some species no longer have enough energy and die out.  We are an extinction event ourselves on the order of magnitude of other notables like the Chixilub meteor.

Here’s what really caught me with this idea.  Our unique ability to adapt early and often manifests itself in increasing energy and resource consumption, consumption that has grown remarkably since the migrations of the Paleolithic.  To me this means that those of us in the environmental community have placed ourselves over against the defining outcome of what it means to be human.  I’m not sure what this means quite yet, but I don’t think its good.