Population Wars: A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence
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Population Wars is a paradigm-shifting look at why humans behave the way they do and the ancient history that explains that behavior. In this eye-opening book, Greg Graffin points to where the mainstream view of evolutionary theory has led us astray. Through tales of mass extinctions, developing immune systems, human warfare, the American industrial heartland, and our degrading modern environment, Graffin demonstrates how that misunderstanding has allowed humans to justify war even when other solutions may be available. Along the way, he reveals a paradox: When we challenge conventional definitions of war, we are left with a new problem—how to define ourselves.
ISBN-13: 9781250105301
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication Date: 11-08-2016
Pages: 320
Product Dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.90(h) x 3.20(d)
GREG GRAFFIN is a singer, songwriter, lecturer, and solo artist. In addition to founding the band Bad Religion in 1980, he began a lifelong pursuit of evolution. He obtained his Ph.D. in zoology at Cornell and a master’s in geology at the University of California, Los Angeles. While lecturing at UCLA and at Cornell, he coauthored Anarchy Evolution (with Steve Olson). Greg received the Bryan Patterson Prize from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Rushdie Prize from the Harvard University Humanist Chaplaincy, the American Humanist Association Arts Award, and the Sapio Prize from the International League of Non-Religious and Atheists. He travels regularly between the cities he considers home: Ithaca, New York, and Los Angeles, California.
PERSISTENCE IN THE FACE OF EXTINCTION The single most valuable thing any of us can do intellectually is to understand how populations interact and affect one another. Populations have a tendency to persist. It's futile to believe otherwise. The populations you seek to exterminate will most likely continue, whether it's dandelions on your lawn or enemy armies vying for land you covet or religious fanatics whose ideology you despise. Since none of us had any control over the circumstances that brought us together, the only viable way forward is compromise. I'm asking you to take a coarse-grained approach to your interpretation of compromise in this book. We'll examine adaptation, and I will ask you to not see it as a "struggle for existence" but rather to acknowledge that populations become altered when they coexist, and eventually reach a state of relatively benign equilibrium. With humans, I will insist that rational communication — diplomatic compromise — has to take center stage in order to avoid violence and bloodshed. Through it all I hope you will be left with an appreciation for how persistent most population phenomena are, and how important history is in explaining coexistence today. As a starting point we will consider our own nation's history. It's depicted in a pretty straightforward manner in elementary textbooks, usually beginning with the Battle of Lexington, or the Boston Tea Party, or often the first Thanksgiving, where tales of overcoming adversity led to strong moral character and good citizenship. Nearly every American schoolchild has heard of such heroic figures as Captain John Smith, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. These are convenient tales, because they "leave out anything that might reflect badly on our national character." Since childhood we've been reminded: "You have a proud heritage, be all you can be, after all, look at what the United States has accomplished." Overly simplistic introductions to our nation's past might play a role in grade-school education, but America's history can be understood only as a complex saga of populations from disparate backgrounds. What's easily sold to youngsters as a straight-line evolutionary development of our citizenship, from wilderness settlers to urban captains of industry, is in actuality much more highly branched and complicated when we consider the various populations that came into contact historically. I'm not old yet, but I'm getting there, and one thing has become abundantly clear: I am more a result of previous circumstances than I am a fulfillment of youthful dreams and willpower. The idea that we are the end product of a historical unfolding of events rather than self-made entities who exercise total self-control over our own destiny is offensive to some people. Successful people tend to believe that they acquired their status and fortune through hard work and wise administration, period! Sometimes I hear "rich and famous" people hailing themselves as wizards, geniuses, or miracle workers without ever acknowledging or considering other people's roles in the equation. This attitude can be characterized as self-important. The more realistic among us are keenly aware of the people and past circumstances that aided in our own success. Have you ever considered that your station in life — not only your physical whereabouts but also your social, emotional, and economic well-being — is beyond your control? If you're like most people, this possibility sounds offensive, incomprehensible, and alien, simply because you are so confident that everything you have in life came from hard work and intelligence, and is therefore well-deserved. This book will perhaps help you see otherwise. When I consider my own journey, I think back to how I ended up living here, in a rural part of upstate New York. Sure, I came here for college, but I never thought I would stay. After all, my grade school was in Wisconsin and my high school in Los Angeles, both places I love that filled me with a sense of modern American identity. I went to college at UCLA, only a few miles from Malibu beach. Who would leave the social and climatological paradise of Los Angeles for the stark harshness of upstate New York? Since my professional career is centered in the entertainment industry, I've never fully left Los Angeles. It's the headquarters for my musical identity, and I still spend a great deal of time there each year. But the latest chapters of my domestic life have, for a quarter of a century now, taken place in a region within a region — the southern tier of New York State in Finger Lakes country. Most people would consider this area distinctly American. It is the land of cheddar cheese, apples, beer, hardwood lumber, forests, salmon fishing, deer hunting, baseball, NASCAR, organic farms, and wineries by the score. But three hundred years ago upstate New York was British territory. The English monarchs, governing from London, made all decisions about village politics, farming practices, and relations with native peoples in the New York territories during the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth century. Upstate New York villages were laid out as old English hamlets were, a cluster of houses and shops surrounded by agricultural fields. Precolonial foundations still survive in the center of some villages. These stone foundations would have supported the millhouses that were powered by the waterways that served as the lifelines of the communities. Before the English claimed it as their own, France made serious attempts to settle upstate New York as part of their effort to create "New France." The French built numerous forts there, including Fort Niagara in 1678, and Fort Saint Frédéric in 1729. The decisions made by the kings of France during this time were geared toward establishing a permanent presence in the New World to facilitate three main goals: garnering the fur trade, planting Christian missions, and blocking English expansion in North America. Many Europeans came to America as workers on ships or builders of forts, and ended up settling near these remote American redoubts. The French and English are usually introduced to American schoolchildren as the vanquished (French) and the victorious forefathers (English), but if we go back even farther, we will see that the French had predecessors who claimed this area as their own. This land was settled by Native Americans of the Iroquois Confederacy. In fact, when Europeans first visited upstate New York, the Iroquois league of Five Nations (Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Oneida, and later a sixth, the Tuscarora) had well-established towns with buildings made of lumber, agricultural operations, trading enterprises, and fortifications. Though often on the move, and relatively sparse in population, the Iroquois people were the first people in New York to build houses, establish trails and roadways between towns, and clear fields for agriculture. They controlled the headwaters of all the most important water trade routes in the Northeast (the St. Lawrence, Delaware, Allegheny, Susquehanna, and Hudson Rivers). In short, they were a well-organized nation before European explorers made contact with them. The historical trajectory from what has been called Iroquoia to modern America was not a sequence of extinction and replacement. None of the preexisting populations of upstate New York were vanquished. Their descendants are still here today, their numbers continue to increase, and their story gets ever-more intriguing with each passing year. The cultural landscape today is in fact a complex mélange of past populations. Archaeologists continue to excavate Iroquois towns throughout the state. Many of today's major thoroughfares and state highways are paved over the ancient trails and trade routes of the Iroquois. Many modern agricultural fields in the region are still used for corn, as they were during the historical period of Iroquois life. This land of which I am now a resident is, therefore, a mosaic of past events that have come together to form inescapably the historical fabric of every community in the upstate region of New York. My adopted home contains the indelible stamp of previous populations that no longer predominate but yet still persist. In many ways this ad hoc unfolding of history is similar to my own story of wandering and settling down. I ended up here to pursue graduate studies, at least in part because of a family tradition that favored land-grant universities. Cornell is the New York version of those types of schools; publicly funded, a wide breadth of general studies to choose from, and a liberal spirit of education for every citizen, no matter the race, economic background, or creed. These were the values that my family taught. The congressional acts that allowed those opportunities to be put in motion, however, went far beyond my own family to circumstances that were set in motion long before I was born. In 1860 federal land grants were doled out to build universities all over the country; Ithaca was chosen as the site for the New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, which, with a grant from businessman Ezra Cornell, became Cornell University. Ithaca has been the premier college town in New York ever since that time. I moved here in 1990, and I've seen a lot of changes in the region. It now has all the trappings of modern consumerism — big-box retailers like Home Depot and Lowe's, Target and Walmart, retail malls, movie theaters, and excellent grocery stores, yet the entire town has only roughly thirty thousand people. When the schools are in session (Cornell University and Ithaca College), however, the city swells to double its population. Ithaca is surrounded by smaller hamlets that are connected to one another and the bigger cities by two-lane highways. Between the retail and college meccas such as Ithaca and Elmira, and larger cities like Rochester, Syracuse, or Buffalo, are scores of villages and towns with very few services or industries. In fact most people who visit here wonder what could be the reason for so many tiny settlements. Living here just doesn't seem to make sense to the average person. Doesn't there have to be some reason for people to exist in these tiny, out-of-the-way Podunk towns? But this brings us to one of the key points of this book: Most of life's phenomena depend on historical causes — people end up where they are, such as in small towns or out-of-the-way hamlets, because of historical factors that affected previous generations. Modern culture tends to judge "country people" for not taking advantage of the conveniences of city life. The only rural families that regularly make it on TV (usually reality TV) are portrayed as being almost laughably simpleminded and backward (though often with some kind of redeeming "heart of gold"). However, I've come to the conclusion that it's foolish to view rural residents in comparison with their urban counterparts in modern America. Rather, I see them as part of an unfolding of regional history that stretches back to the years in which these lands were settled. In fact I am a convert; I came to appreciate rural life after thirty years of living in various cities. I have been able to recapture a tradition that my grandparents enjoyed: living in small towns surrounded by rural landscapes. Today, thanks to modern technology, building materials, transportation, and the New York State electrical grid, my family and I can live deep in the heart of rural America with all the conveniences that modern life affords. Our house may be in the middle of an alfalfa field surrounded by thirty-five acres of hardwood forest, but we still have a fiberoptic Internet connection. Many of my friends back in the big city are jealous. They can't get fiberoptic in their own city dwellings because it's a newer technology that requires a lot of infrastructural reconfiguration. In the country, however, there is plenty of space to put in new technology. In the crowded city it's not so simple. Most of the space is already encumbered by the cable wires of older technology. Because of this, fiberoptic hasn't yet pervaded every nook and cranny of the major cities — a good demonstration of historical constraints on "progress." My fascination with history also makes it exciting to live here. I step off the porch and walk to the forest edge just a few yards south of our house. Entering a trail, I observe a myriad of hardwoods, maple, oak, black walnut, cherry, and ash, among others. History is never far from my mind as I witness an occasional sassafras tree or yellow poplar, both southerly species making their way northward since the retreat of the glaciers left this region and it grew progressively warmer in the last ten thousand years. Farther on, down the trail, our property line ends at a rushing creek. Its erosive action began as the last glaciers melted away and retreated northward. The creek flows over bedrock that is ripple marked and laden with fossil marine invertebrates, signatures of a near-shore marine environment in a bygone era in Earth history, 380 million years ago (mya). With each passing storm the creek erodes more of the bank and reveals a slightly different topography, and new areas of ancient bedrock are exposed for examination of new fossils. How these ancient creatures — revealed as fossils — coexisted drives my curiosity, and drives me to search for parallels in the way the trees and forest creatures coexist today. But there's more history to discover in this region as well. The receding glaciers left us something else besides the forest species and carved-out bedrock. Slightly east of our house, and down a significant declivity, is a bog, full of black mud and sticky as molasses. This is the result of slowly percolating, oozing water, trickling from the hillside, bringing with it only the smallest particles of mud and clay. It is in these Pleistocene bogs that giants of the past have been trapped and preserved as fossils. The mastodon, Mammut sp., an elephant that stood nearly eight feet at the shoulders, made this land its home. In fact, only fifteen miles from our property a farmer discovered a complete skeleton on his property in a similar bog deposit. This region has become famous as a type-locality for the mastodon, which means that it contains numerous bog deposits that are favorable for the preservation of this grand elephant species of the past. I don't have the heart to bring in huge excavating machinery and dredge the bog on our property. I fear too much damage would occur to the forest and beautiful scenery outside our windows. But I always hope to find, on one of my almost daily hikes, some elephant tusk or leg bone eroding out at the edge of our bog. Because I am sure that whatever died down there in the last ten thousand years is still buried in the mud. The allure of adventure, driven by the surrounding natural history, leads me inexorably to a meditative contemplation about how this natural setting came to be, and the path I took to find it. The woods out my back door are a long way from my day job as a singer/songwriter in Bad Religion. But they serve as an escape and a recharge every time I come home from tour. Our band is still headquartered in Los Angeles, and thanks to modern airline travel I go back and forth between New York and California at the drop of a hat. Flight crews know me as a regular commuter. I'm on the road at least three months a year with the band. I'm in the studio, recording in LA, for a couple of months every two years. And I'm back in Ithaca teaching evolution at Cornell in the fall. It's a busy but highly rewarding schedule. I'm very fortunate and pleased at the way my life has turned out. But I can't honestly admit that any of this was predicted, or even predictable. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and within a couple of years settled in to our family house, still occupied by my dad today, in a quiet neighborhood of Racine, Wisconsin. Like most suburban areas, every square inch of the landscape around my childhood house had been shaped by human hands. The street where I grew up playing touch football and baseball is made of poured concrete underlain by a foot of crushed and sifted gravels. The curbs are smoothly shaped and molded by workers with tools that are now long obsolete. Each property is edged by a narrow strip of grass bordering a perfectly straight stretch of sidewalk dotted by ornamental trees, one for each house along the street. It can be hard to imagine that suburban Wisconsin was once virgin prairie. When the developers arrived in the 1940s they dug tens of thousands of pits into the native prairie soil. Each one eventually became a basement romper room like the one in which my brother and I spent countless hours playing Ping-Pong and pachinko, listening to pop music, and shooting darts. The basements were lined with cinder blocks and finished with a skim coat of cement mortar to form the foundations of tens of thousands of neat little houses, each with two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a small kitchen, and a one-car garage. Our house, like all those surrounding it, is a testament to the postwar era when young couples could affordably start a family and fill their home with American-made consumer products and agricultural goods. These landscapes might seem as American as apple pie, but they don't resemble anything that the American Indians would have recognized. The prairie today is plowed under or paved over. The lawns are landscaped with nonnative grasses, and the flower gardens filled with annual flowers from Europe, Africa, China, and the Western United States — all of which are aliens in this transformed ecosystem. Read an Excerpt
Population Wars
A New Perspective on Competition and Coexistence
By Greg Graffin St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2015 Greg Graffin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01762-8
CHAPTER 1
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Population Wars by Greg Graffin. Copyright © 2015 Greg Graffin. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Finding the Enemy
1. Persistence in the Face of Extinction
2. The Long History of Population Wars
3. The Meaning of Coexistence
4. The Context of Persistence, the Bacterial Dimension
5. The Symbiotic Dependency of Life, the Viral Dimension
6. Establishing a War Narrative for Populations, the Immune System
7. War Is Unwinnable
8. Competition Is Untenable
9. Know Thyself, Don’t Lie to Thyself
10. Evolution Management
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
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