This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book. It comes very near the beginning, because it is absolutely fundamental.
The biological growth imperative
A fundamental property of all known life forms is a drive to grow and expand – to increase in size, reproduce, occupy more space and/or consume more resources. This process is competitive, and it is the main driving force of both ecological and evolutionary processes. Its flipside is death and extinction – the only way it is possible for new organisms to flourish and new species to evolve is for others – the old, the weak and the losers in the grand competition of life – to die and go extinct. I will call this property “the biological growth imperative”.
Much more rarely in the history of life, something else happens: a new sort of co-operation is established between individual organisms to create a super-organism (relative to the individuals it is composed of). An early example of this “mutualism” was when the individual micro-organisms that were the ancestors of what we call cell organelles got together to produce the first eukaryotic cell (a cell with a nucleus and a variety of other internal structures, rather than just biological bag of genetic material). In order to do this, each of the organelles had to find a way to override the growth imperative: they had to “learn” how to stop growing and reproducing, unless instructed to do so by the nucleus when the whole cell is ready to divide.
It happened again when the first multicellular organisms appeared. Multicellular organisms are a colony of genetically identical cells, even though there are many different types of cell with a huge variety of purposes and physical forms. That this happened at all is an example of the mind-boggling power of evolution by natural selection – an extraordinary feat of biological engineering. Again, the biggest obstacle to assembling a viable super-organism from its component parts was the biological growth imperative. Every cell in a multi-cellular organism is the last in an unbroken series of cells stretching right back to the first single-celled ancestor, every one of which divided, and yet somehow it “knows” that it must specialise and (in most cases) stop dividing. The complexity of this process of overriding the biological growth imperative is revealed by the plethora of ways it can malfunction, whenever the cell “forgets” to stop dividing. We call this cancer.
The next major layer of complexity occurred in termites about 150 million years ago, and in the hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps) at least eight times since then [Ref 1]. Each cell in an insect is a collaboration of organelles. Each insect is a collaboration of genetically identical but morphologically diverse cells. A colony of eusocial insects is a collaboration of individuals which functions as a single super-organism. In order to achieve this, their genetics had to change such that each individual that labours for the colony does so on behalf of its own genes, even though the workers don’t get to reproduce. So again we have an example of an additional layer of co-operation, which was only made possible by most of the individual units that comprise the super-organism finding a way to over-ride the biological growth imperative.
Something similar has happened in social mammals, such as wolves. Wolf packs are led by a dominant pair, and usually they are the only ones who reproduce. Other members of the pack help to raise the young, who share at least some of their genes. The system would not work if all the adults followed the imperative, so most of them don’t have any right to reproduce. If they want to do that then they must establish a new pack in a new territory.
Now compare to humans. Civilisation is another example of individual organisms co-operating to form a super-organism, but in terms of evolutionary history it is both new and revolutionary. It appeared only very recently and is unlike anything that has previously happened (to any species, not just humans). Our previous state of social organisation was tribalism – which was more like the wolf pack, though with more complex reproductive arrangements, than it is to what has happened since. There were also loose collaborations between larger groups – a sort of proto-civilisation that had not yet run into the problems that emerge when you stop being nomadic hunter-gatherers. [footnote: see The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021).] In human tribal systems these internal relationships are regulated by social rules, the whole system having evolved relatively slowly as an integral part of human evolution more generally. Civilisation is on a completely different scale to this, and has developed much more rapidly. The neolithic revolution took several thousand years, but almost immediately after humans invented the form of social and physical organisation we call “cities”, they became home to tens of thousands of people. Bigger was better, right from the start. [Footnote: see appendix 1.]
These new super-organisms started out as temple/city states, then expanded into great empires, and now they are sovereign states. Unfortunately, this revolutionary evolutionary advance is still in the experimental stage and suffers from a major problem which has brought countless civilisations down in the past and now directly threatens our own: we are yet to find a satisfactory way to over-ride the biological growth imperative. We haven’t done so at the level of global civilisation and sovereign states – the history of human civilisation is the history of war between groups of humans, usually over territory and access to resources, though occasionally over important ideas, especially ideas about human social organisation. And we haven’t done so within sovereign states either – or at least we haven’t done so in the West; China’s one-child policy undeniably succeeded in overriding the imperative in its most direct form. However, that is still only one aspect of a much bigger problem and China is only one country. Elsewhere in the world, including the West, population control is unthinkable, or at least unspeakable.
In the temple/city state model, individual humans were encouraged to reproduce in order to provide military manpower, and the imperative was either satisfied by expansion at the expense of other humans, or counterbalanced by a death rate kept high by famine, disease and endless warfare. This system was perfected by the Romans, who invented the republic and pushed territorial expansion to its absolute limits. Something similar applied in feudalism too – feudal estates had to supply soldiers to their rulers, and if that didn’t keep the population under control then localised famine did (there was very little international trade, and feudal estates aimed at self-sufficiency).
In the modern Western world of science, capitalism and democracy, we do not even attempt to overcome the biological growth imperative. Instead we celebrate it and encourage it. We have constructed social, political and economic systems that depend on it. To question the desirability of growth, whether in terms of population or GDP, is to reject the constraints of present political reality. It’s sufficiently outside the Overton Window to ensure that you are talking about the philosophical context of contemporary politics rather than actually taking part in it.
Our economic and political system requires that each individual human is actively encouraged to consume more, even though many don’t have enough. Control of human numbers is strictly taboo – “progressive” people frequently denounce it as ecofascism. The way to control the population, we are told, is to raise living standards – something that would require very large numbers of people who are currently very poor consuming significantly more than they currently do. Or perhaps the problem will simply solve itself, even though this would be catastrophic for our economic system. We are willing to call for a reduction in the wealth and consumption of the very rich, but it is widely assumed that all humans – at current population levels or higher – should have the right to enough resources not just to survive but to reproduce to our hearts’ content. Not many of us would consent to compulsory restrictions on our own rights to behave in all sorts of unsustainable ways.
We suffer from a profound psychological, political and cultural unwillingness to admit the reality of this situation. The only way to make civilisation work – to make it ecologically sustainable and therefore a viable example of co-operative evolution rather than an inherently unstable structure which is doomed to collapse – is to find ways to comprehensively and reliably control the biological growth imperative in humans. This has to apply both individually and collectively. Unfortunately there is no way to achieve this that does not conflict with what Westerners consider to be inalienable individual human rights, such as our unrestricted and unqualified right to reproduce, consume whatever resources we can legally acquire, and expand our personal territory (i.e. buy/own property and land). There is no pleasant way to square this circle.
[ref Hughes, W. O. H.; Oldroyd, B. P.; Beekman, M.; Ratnieks, F. L. W. (2008). “Ancestral Monogamy Shows Kin Selection is Key to the Evolution of Eusociality”. Science. 320 (5880): 1213-1216. ]