Innovating our way through E.O. Wilson’s “Bottleneck”
Can humans “science” our way out of climate change?
Michael Jordan once said, “I never lose a game, I just run out of time”. His source may have been Vince Lombardi, who said something similar about the 1960’s Green Bay Packers. The idea is probably as old as language itself: “It was a great hunt, we just ran out of daylight…”
Many of the systems and institutions that make modern life possible are now in danger of running out of time, bumping up against a warming climate and other impacts of the technologies that make those same institutions possible. This dilemma, that the source of our problems will also likely deliver the solutions, is at the core of E. O. Wilson’s famous 2003 Scientific American essay, “The Bottleneck”. In it, he notes that our options for solutions grow narrower every day and describes the race between exploding technical impact, a finite planet, and wise human choices, as a squeeze, perhaps more like the eye of a needle than a bottleneck.
“Science and technology, combined with a lack of self-understanding and a Paleolithic obstinacy, brought us to where we are today. Now science and technology, combined with foresight and moral courage, must see us through the bottleneck and out.”
In other words, institutions and the humans who populate them require wise choices. Trust in “business as usual” is not recommended.
The bottleneck may be most pressing in the case of the environment, but it is well known and well described in many other fields. Surveying the landscape, from biology and genetics, to artificial intelligence, to human communications and relationships, education, government, international relations and justice, virtually every field of human endeavor requires not merely more and better systems and technology, but also the wisdom to put those technologies to good and sustainable use. And to define, to the best of our ability, what “good use” actually means.
Examples are thick on the ground. It is well documented that, in the 1980’s, the US Government and other international leaders came within a hair’s breadth of a unified effort to counteract global warming. In a “game of inches” moment, a few critical decisions burst the consensus and reversed momentum. The result was another four decades where a sustainable future was forced to compete against the status quo — with the thumbs of the establishment heavily on the scale. Similarly, our decades long love affair with social media is now an object lesson in the downsides of technology.
All technologies are agnostic about the ends for which they are used, for good or ill. The trains to Auschwitz cared not about their purpose.
Wilson’s evolutionary bottleneck is a useful, but not perfect, analogy. An evolutionary bottleneck is a constriction of a species down to a small but survivable population. Under these circumstances, evolutionary change can appear to speed up as unusual gene combinations survive in the small population and can become dominant.
Our situation is different. Unlike a population of puffins, we know roughly what’s coming, so we’re talking about social evolution, not survival of the fittest. Second, like the puffins, we don’t really know where the “right” adaptations will come from, so we have to embrace diversity. Third, it’s unwise to wait for global crisis to sort this out, so we have to make choices based on data. That may mean turning the machinery of commerce to the challenge of human flourishing. We can create the “toothbrush of the month” club, why can’t we do more?
While improving our current institutions is necessary, it may not be sufficient for ultimate human success. We can now see that the arc of science and technology can bend toward chaos just as easily as it can curve toward thriving. We cannot “science the shit” out of this dilemma. Humans have to do the bending.
That means working on ourselves and how we relate to each other — to understand those ineffable qualities that make us human and fan them like the glowing embers of the first fire. That, I believe, will be the harder problem (see: “Biology as Information Processing”) to solve.
