The human species could risk self-extinction: a phenomenon that would prove unique in the history of living species, reducing us to a simple evolutionary experiment. This is the provocative result of a new study published in the scientific journal Biological Theory by Paolo Rognini of the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Pisa.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves him
The human species could risk self-extinction: a phenomenon that would prove unique in the history of living species, reducing us to a simple evolutionary experiment. This is the provocative result of a new study published in the scientific journal Biological Theory by Paolo Rognini of the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Pisa.
Basically, our skulls house brains that still give ancestral responses, not adaptive to the era in which we live. In practice, some of our behaviors are residues of archaic responses, which they will lead us to destroy the planet and, consequently, ourselves, thus creating a completely new version of evolution: the self-extinction of a species.
Our problems? L'excessive rapacity towards resources and the impulse to expand.
That is what in the Paleolithic has guaranteed us survival. And that today, instead, thanks to technical progress, they would lead tol overexploitation of resources and overpopulation, thus threatening to bring the planet Earth towards the final collapse.
Vestigial Drifting Drives, "archaic drifting drives"
The new model - called Vestigial Drifting Drives (VDD), literally "archaic drifting drives" - refers to the idea that behaviors, like other characters of a species, undergo transformations that sometimes escape the logic of survival of the fittest, that is, they can "go adrift".
"Already Konrad Lorenz in the 70s of the last century - explains Paolo Rognini - hypothesized that some human behaviors, apparently not functional, were residues of modules that had been adaptive in a more or less remote past, including, for example, fears irrationals of childhood or the phobia of snakes and spiders ".
Self-extinction has already occurred in the past
History shows that sometimes human groups - due to the overexploitation of resources - can implode, self-extinguishing: this has happened, for example, to Anasazi of North America, to the inhabitants ofEaster island, to the Norwegians of Greenland. Today, this could happen on a large scale given the global dimensions that the ecological crisis has assumed.
But why do humans take more than necessary until a certain resource is exhausted? Between 2 million and 50.000 years ago we were an integral part of the ecosystem and, even if super predators, we remained subject to the control of the environment like all other animals. Then, the rules of the game changed: from transformed, Homo became environment transformer and of matter becoming a super extractor. The quality and quantity of this super-extraction has therefore led to an unbridled exploitation of resources, from which the "consume and escape" typical of "technologically advanced societies" is responsible for the so-called "vampirization of the planet".
"Human beings are repositories of some organic and behavioral elements that do not seem to have changed since the Pleistocene era - adds Rognini - in this sense the Vestigial Drifting Drives could be a sort of" biocultural software "unsuitable for the current environment". If not we will update the software of ours false beliefs such as "the inexhaustible resources", "The unlimited expansion of the species" or the "voracious hoarding of resources" - concludes Rognini - the human species could risk self-extinction: a phenomenon that would prove to be unique in the history of living species, reducing us to a simple evolutionary experiment ".
Roberta Ragni
Read also:
The human species? On Earth it is only 0,01%, but it has destroyed 83% of mammals
