Human technology is part of nature

Humans are animals. Our tools are extensions of our bodies into the environment, like beavers and beaver ponds, coral and coral reefs, plants and oxygen. We’re unusual in the extent of our bodies’ impact on our environment, but plenty of other organism shape their environment to suit their needs. Technology is part of our extended phenotype, as much a part of us as our social groups. We’re part of nature, and so is everything we make and use.

Daniel Dennett has a nice phrase describing evolution in his book Darwin’s dangerous idea: threads of actuality in design space. The space in question is the set of all possible physical manifestations of life, and the threads of actuality are the bodies that have actually appeared. Dennett thinks that human artifacts and culture are a continuous branch of the same design space that includes our teeth, hair and fingers. I see a smooth continuity between the bagworm moth caterpillar’s use of sticks and the neanderthal’s.

The materials might be different, but I don’t see any fundamental conceptual difference between this drawing and any organism replicating itself:

All living things generate waste. Our problem is that we’re cranking out waste faster than the rest of our ecosystem can process it. Making a single cell phone motherboard generates two hundred twenty pounds of waste. America exports most of its nastiest e-waste, but as the planet shrinks, we won’t be able to avoid the byproducts of our lifestyle forever.

It would be easy at this point to get judgmental and say that our consumption-oriented ways are evil, and that if environmental catastrophe befalls us it’ll be just what we deserve. I don’t think those kinds of judgments are constructive. Nobody wants to destroy the earth. But we feel genuine competitive pressures within and among our social groups, and showing off our tools has been part of our sexual selection since the stone age. How do we balance our need to compete with each other with a more abstract but equally pressing need to restrain ourselves? I don’t have a good single answer, but I think that more reflection on the consequences of our actions is a necessary start.