I just happened across this cartoon early this morning, and it got me thinking.
When I start thinking, you know I have to write down what I’ve been able to distill, so I have produced this post, It starts out with twinkies and it ends with the eco-Apocalypse.
So with no further adieu.
The twinkie is a product that some consider a food source.
In some ways, I guess it is.
It’s certainly better for you to consume than, say, antifreeze.
But it’s not that much better.
It’s a food that has been produced since 1930 as a finger sponge cake, and it has the following (healthy) ingredients (according to Wikipedia):
“Enriched wheat flour, sugar, corn syrup, niacin, water, high fructose corn syrup, vegetable and/or animal shortening – containing one or more of partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed and canola oil…”
Highly nutritious!
This cake has been mass produced for decades using sophisticated food processing machines, and the crops used to produce its ingredients are raised in massive monocultures all over the country.
None of these things would have been possible had humans not been able to develop our too making prowess to such a high level.
We are the tool-making animal. If anything is fundamentally a human essence, it is our ability to make tools at such high levels of sophistication. It’s what has made our species so successful, even though we have the most ungainly mode of locomotion of all mammals and we’re not exactly the most physically imposing of species.
This tool building knowledge is transmitted through language, and it is through language that techniques for too manufacture are not lost through the generations. Knowledge is passed on through the tutelage of craftsmen, and then through the written word.
Tool making prowess and our ability to convey knowledge through language have allowed us to do amazing things. We’ve built civilizations, irrigated fields, and tamed the wild beasts.
We’ve also developed medicines that have made it possible for our species to double its average lifespan, and we’ve been able to leave this little planet and explore its only moon.
No other species has done what we’ve been able to do.
But at the same time, we’ve been able to develop weapons that allow us to kill virtually any animal that comes into plain sight. We’ve also developed weapons that be launched thousands of miles away or by sophisticated flying robots. We also developed weapons that could wipe out most of the life on earth in very short order.
Man likes to think that he’s come so far through his technological advances, but at some level, he’s really not much more than technologically advanced male chimp with anger and control issues.
Which brings us to the twinkie.
The twinke is a product of Hostess, a company that makes a several products of snack cakes.
The reason why the twinkie became a cause celebre for some is because our wonderful right wing media played up that the company was being destroyed by the unions.
In reality, it was actually being destroyed because it was the victim of private equity pirates.
But the story of the twinkie falling going down in flames created such a public outrage that I’m somewhat aghast at what it’s come to.
The love of twinkie is a very primal reaction. Our brains have evolved to love sweetness, because in the jungles in which primates evolved ripe fruit indicated its ripeness and nutritional value through detecting sweetness. It is because of this evolutionary heritage that we like sweet things.
But over time, man has figured out how to refine sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, and now we can consume as much sweetness as we like.
The toolmaker is now in the process of producing foods that will make him fat and diabetic and will probably result in shortening his life by a few decades.
Technology has increase the lifespan of man, but technology can also decrease it.
The fundamental paradox of our species is that we can bend and contrive so much that it ultimately winds up hurting us.
And we’ve not come up with ways of mitigating these issues.
Indeed, if anything our species could be known for doing well, it’s making other species extinct.
We’re so good at it that we don’t even have to try.
All we have to do is continue burning high carbon fossil fuels and fundamentally change the carbon-oxygen cycle, and we can see all sorts of extinctions that we never even thought were possible.
Is this what we want the legacy of species to be?
Do we want to known as the species that had the technology to do many great things but then squander it because we couldn’t figure out how to control our more primal impulses?
We are the only species that can actually think about having a legacy.
Maybe we ought to think more carefully about what that should be.
Are we going to be worked up over the extinction of a very unhealthy snack cake or over the extinction of entities of a real biological consequence?
Maybe its time we started using our tool-making prowess to mitigate some the problems we’ve been causing.
Maybe.
If we really are capable of thinking about our place in this world, then we need to consider the moral consequences of knowing that we can think about them.
Otherwise, the best you can say about us is that we are fundamentally immoral species, half crazed by epicurean ideals and blind rage.
And I know that is not us.
There is a good possibility that the things like tool making and ability for so many abstract thought processes that many humans think sets us apart from other animals as somehow special might not be that big an evolutionary advantage/success after all. Our legacy is looking more and more likely to be that we were the architects of a mass extinction event and we might take ourselves out with it.
I’m a little ray of doom laden sunshine!
Whatever we end up doing, the world will survive and a new ecosphere will evolve–but we probably won’t be there to see it.
Back in the 1980’s I was gifted with two coffee-table books in one of which the author speculated on what a post-human ecosphere might look like; and in the other on what our contemporary ecosphere might look like if the Chicxulub meteor had missed. They make some interesting speculative reading if you can find them:
After Man : A Zoology of the Future, by Dougal Dixon, 1981, St. Martin’s Press, NY, ISBN: 0-312-01163-6/ISBN: 0-312-01162-8 pbk
The New Dinosaurs : An Alternative Evolution, also by Dougal Dixon, 1988, Salem House Publishers, Topsfield, MA, ISBN: 0-88162-301-6
I borrow the following from the Wikipedia entry on the the first title:
“Rabbucks…fill in the void of deer, zebras, giraffes and antelope (since antelope became things like the gigantelopes) but descended, as the name suggests, from rabbits. They live in almost any environment, and they mostly feed on grass. Their anatomy resembles that of ungulates, though there are a few primitive hopping forms lurking around…
The Gigantelope take the niche in the future that was formerly held by elephants, giraffes, moose, musk oxen, rhinoceroses, and other large herbivores. Resembling the ancient sauropods or indricotheres, they are descended from antelope, and range in a wide variety of forms. One subbranch have evolved into the large, moose-like herbivores of the north, the Hornheads.
Predator Rats The major group of predators in the future. Like our modern carnivorans, they exist on almost every continent and fill almost every carnivorous niche. They evolved, as the name suggests, from rats, and range in forms resembling polar bears, wolves, wolverines, cats, and even aquatic walrus-like forms.
Carnivorans For the most part, Dixon assumes that Carnivorans have either gone extinct, or have been forced into peripheral niches like the Creodonts were in the Oligocene. A few still exist, the Shurrack, Pamthret, Striger, Ghole, Gurrath and Nightglider.”
Enjoy!
Oh yes, the world will keep turning without us should we hit an evolutionary dead end before we get the chance to evolve into future species of hominid.
Having had a look, I’m positive I borrowed both of those books from the library back in the 80s. I can definitely see rats and rabbits being an excellent source for filling evolutionary niches. For the same reasons, I could see domestic cats and dogs doing quite well for a couple of million years at least. All four are prolific breeders and generalists that can live almost anywhere. Hell, even machines may become technologically advanced and intelligent enough to reproduce themselves without our intervention and become some rather interesting beasties. It’s not like scientists are nor already working on that or anything. Once that particular robotic cat’s out of the bag, all bets are off.