The conflict of timescales: Why civilization’s haste confronts the geological clock

“ We have made mighty advancement; never was the world so rich in material things, never did we possess so many devices for lightening human toil and tasks, and yet due likely to the speed at which we have to move, the high pressure at which we have to live, the complexity of the [260] social organism of which we form a part, it is a matter of fact that the man and the woman of to-day are getting more nervous and highly strung, less able to bear their burdens calmly and patiently. Worry, constant distraction, and disquietude are wearing out many people before their time. ”

“ Once—it is a thought which troubles us—once it was a simple enough matter to be a human being, but now it is deeply difficult; because life was once simple, but is now complex, confused, multifarious. Haste, anxiety, preoccupation, the need to specialize and make machines of ourselves, have transformed the once simple world, and we are apprised that it will not be without effort that we shall keep the broad human traits which have so far made the earth habitable. ”

“ It is that the series of living forms is distributed through extensive deposits of stratified rocks which the geologist says it has taken vast periods of time to make, and, as the course of life-changes has been coeval with the course of strata-deposition, if the geologist is right, evolution must have been slow. ”

“ Until geology had extended our conception of time, no such conclusions could be drawn. If organisms have existed but six or seven thousand years, and if in the last thousand years little or no change in organic life has occurred, the supposition that they could have originated by any such [121] process as natural selection is manifestly absurd. ”

“ I did not, at the time, fully appreciate the deep conviction which it displays of the slow manner in which geological changes have taken place, and the insignificance of thirty or forty centuries in the history of a species, and that, too, at a period when very narrow views were entertained of the extent of past time by most of the ablest geologists, and when great revolutions of the earth's crust, and its inhabitants, were generally attributed to sudden and violent catastrophes. ”

“ The accumulation of those gases is changing the composition of the atmosphere and is probably contributing to a gradual warming of the Earth’s climate—the characteristic weather conditions that prevail in various regions of the world. Scientists generally agree that continued population growth and economic development over the next century will result in substantially more greenhouse gas emissions and further warming unless measures are taken to constrain those emissions. ”

“ Some could be relatively minor and some severe in their impact: warming could raise sea levels; expand the potential range of tropical diseases; disrupt agriculture, forestry, and natural ecosystems; and increase the variability and extremes of regional weather. There is also some possibility of unexpected, abrupt shifts in climate. Actual outcomes will probably be somewhere in the middle of the range of possibilities, but the longer that emissions grow unchecked, the larger the effects are likely to be. ”

“ If the transformation of a temperate into an arctic climate occurred so rapidly that the species exposed to it had the alternative either of becoming white in ten or twenty generations or of being unable to exist, then the hasty intervention of a directive power could alone save them from extermination by causing hundreds of thousands of individuals to become similarly coloured with all speed. But it is quite different if the change of climate takes place only in the course of several thousand generations ”

“ Such abrupt changes in the conditions of life occur, however, but seldom in nature unless caused by man, and must therefore have very652 rarely happened in former epochs of the earth’s history. Even climatic changes, which we might at first regard as of this character, and which produce a modification in one fixed direction, occur always so gradually that the species has time either to adapt itself to the conditions in this or that direction, according to the variations possible to its physical nature, or else to emigrate. ”

“ It is a fact unquestionable that a species will change on its own grounds little by little with the lapse of time and the slow alteration of conditions of selection. Nations change, languages change, customs change, nothing is secure against the tooth of time. This is in general true, because with time alteration of environment takes place, events happen, there is an alteration of the stress of life and with this alteration all life may be modified. ”

“ In the reaction against the sweeping cataclysms, the sudden wipings out of whole creations and the sudden introductions of new worlds of life believed in by earlier geologists, the modern English school has come to look upon time and the slower modifications of the earth's surface, now observable, with the struggle for existence under easy conditions, as the chief factors in geological change and its accompanying variations in the forms of life. ”

“ It has already been insisted upon, as results immediately from the experiments, that temperature does not act on the physical constitution of the individual in the same manner as acid or alkali upon litmus paper, i.e., that one and the same individual does not produce this or that coloration and marking according as it is exposed to warmth or cold; but rather that climate, when it influences in a similar manner many succeeding generations, gradually produces such a change in105 the physical constitution of the species that this manifests itself by other colours and markings. ”

“ PRIMITIVE MAN. I. The primitive type of the human species must necessarily have been effaced, and have disappeared. The enforced migrations, and the actions of climate, must of themselves have produced this result. Man has passed through two geological epochs; perhaps his centre of appearance is no longer in existence; at any rate, the conditions are very different to those prevailing when humanity began its existence. When everything was changing round him, man could not avoid being changed also. Crossing, also, has certainly played its part in this transformation. ”

“ The original human type has probably presented, for an indefinite time, its original characters in the tribes which remained fixed to the centre of appearance for our species. When the glacial epoch began, which, according to all appearance, made the earliest country of man uninhabitable, these tribes were forced to emigrate in their turn. Since that time the earth has no longer had autochthones, but has only been peopled by colonists. At the same time the modifying action of the conditions of life was felt by these last comers, who themselves were also transformed. ”

“ The immense antiquity which on the lowest possible estimate can be assigned for the proved existence of man, carries us back to a period when geological, geographical, and climatic conditions were so entirely different, that all inferences from those of the present period are useless. ”

“ And as man clearly existed in the pre-glacial period, and was already widely spread and in considerable numbers in the early glacial, 250,000 years may be taken as an approximation to the minimum duration of the existence of the human race on the earth. To this must be added an indefinitely long period beyond, unless we are prepared to disprove the apparently excessively strong evidence for its existence in the Pliocene and even in the Miocene periods; evidence which has been rapidly accumulating of late years ”

“ Man moves readily from place to place, from climate to climate. His food, drink, habits, occupations; to some extent his physical and mental characteristics, change in consequence. Inheritance, intermarriage, environment, opportunities, soil and many other factors enter in to determine what changes individual man and the race as a whole shall undergo. Time is a very important element in the final result, for in time a gradual adaptation to new conditions takes place. ”

“ The cycle of human life is the generation, a time unit of somewhat indefinite length and varying in phase from family to family, but holding a place, nevertheless, in human chronology.
Still less definite is the rhythm of hereditary rulership, progressing from vigor through luxury to degeneracy, and closing its cycle in usurpation; yet it makes an epoch in the life of a nation or empire, and so the dynasty is one "of the units of the historian.
The generation and the dynasty are of waning importance in human chronology, and they can claim no connection with the problem of geologic time ”

“ All this makes for an alteration in the character and quality of symmetrical development. When adult age is reached, these conditions are merely exaggerated. The rush and hurry of competition still interferes with the acquirement of full organic vigor, which demands for its fruition, adequate time and leisure, so that cellular stability may be safely secured. To those of comfortable means, who can from time to time withdraw from the agitating circumstances of city life and enjoy periods of rest and quietude elsewhere, there is less left to be desired. ”

“ The moral of all this is that there was abundant time before the rise of Neolithic culture (which may be called the beginning of civilisation) for the complete adaptation of mankind everywhere, by natural selection, to the life of hunters; and that, since then, there has not been time for the biological adaptation of any race to the civilised state. ”

“ What, then, are those changes in the environment to which, by direct or indirect equilibration, the human organism has been adjusting itself, is adjusting itself now, and will continue to [526] adjust itself? And how do they necessitate a higher evolution of the organism?
Civilization, everywhere having for its antecedent the increase of population, and everywhere having for one of its consequences a decrease of certain race-destroying forces, has for a further consequence an increase of certain other race-destroying forces. ”

“ The slowness of evolution, of human cultural progress, testifies to the effectiveness of that brake—material inertia—which so efficiently operates to retard dangerous velocities of progress. Thus does time itself cushion and distribute the otherwise lethal results of premature escape from the next-encompassing barriers to human action. ”

“ As income and wealth grow and technology improves, the studies say, future generations are likely to find it easier to adapt to the effects of a changing climate and to gradually impose increasingly strict restraints on emissions to avoid further alteration. ”

“ Nevertheless, assessments of the potential costs and benefits of a warming climate typically conclude that the continued growth of emissions could ultimately cause extensive physical and economic damage. Many studies indicate significant benefits from undertaking research to better understand the processes and economic effects of climate change and to discover and develop new and better technologies to reduce or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. ”

“ A single date from a single sample in only one locality is not too trustworthy. The hazards are obvious, yet nevertheless we have a fairly large body of facts. From these, a general impression of the great extinction is beginning to take shape. As anticipated, man and climate are involved in the disappearance of the animals.
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As for climate, a period of much warmer temperatures followed the end of the last glaciation. This lasted from about 10,000 to 2,600 years ago. Antevs isolates the time of highest heat—the Altithermal—as about 7,000 to 4,000 years ago. ”

“ Time is essential to all types of human adjustment—physical, social, or economic. Only moral and spiritual adjustments can be made on the spur of the moment, and even these require the passing of time for the full outworking of their material and social repercussions. The ideals of the race are the chief support and assurance during the critical times when civilization is in transit from one level to another. ”