As the human world succumbs to the grip of autocracy, we are never short of examples from the natural world where nature itself successfully revolted against power. Today I bring you another story of a failed coup: the failed domestication of the hyacinth. The dominant logic of plant breeding has always been to maximize the most monetizable quality … Continue reading Genomic Autocracies: How Hyacinths Resisted Human Domestication
My first job out of graduate school was also my first and only job offer. I jumped at the opportunity of becoming a manager at a fungal microbiology laboratory, specializing on indoor mold: people would bring me samples from their blackened shower wall, their carpet, or their basement, and I would analyze them. I would … Continue reading Biology Lessons In Degrowth: The Three Stages of Civilisation
The reason why there are thousands of times more small fish in the ocean compared to sharks is very simple: sharks eat a lot more, so they come at a very high resource cost to the ecosystem. Nature has designed sharks so that they have far fewer viable offspring than smaller fish, not only so … Continue reading The Real Reason Why Human Population Must, and Will, Crash
Today’s epidemic of authoritarianism is the consequence of a society that long ago embraced the values of necrocapitalist imperialism: ruthless profit, heartlessness, manipulation, and pure, unadulterated sadism toward the most vulnerable. In an increasingly remote-operated world, attributing responsibility is becoming near impossible: tyrants and oligarchs can safely hide behind layers of code, while the rest of … Continue reading How They Killed Reality
Contrary to what our impressive technological milestones suggest, we have never been in charge of our fate. Like any organism striving to maximize its chances of survival, our choices were blindly driven by expansion: economic growth, domination, population increase - whatever it took, whatever the cost to us or the planet. From our humble beginnings as monocellular life … Continue reading Designed For Extinction: Why Humans Developed the Wrong Type of Intelligence
As the climate slips further into uncharted territory, it is time climate science admitted that it is in uncharted territory itself. Climate science is quickly becoming an art of unreliable speculation: the models, theorems, assumptions and parameters it operates upon are based on a planet that no longer exists. Just as we were beginning to … Continue reading In The Age Of The Great Meteorological Uncertainty, We Need A New Type Of Climate Science
Humans would like to believe that they represent the forefront of evolution, but there are other forms of life on Earth, both natural and artificial, that supersede them. The most terrifying life form on the planet right now is our economic system: a logistical network originally developed by humans to serve humans, but which now … Continue reading Is This Where The Human Evolution Journey Ends?
Evolving Into One 3.8 billion years ago, life began to emerge on Earth. A single lonely cell, the ancestor we share with everything else that lives, began to diverge into individual species. At first, only a handful of life forms existed, barely distinguishable from each other. Fast forward a few million years and an incredible … Continue reading The False Narrative of Conflict
All power corrupts, brain power being no exception. As it enlarged over millions of years, the human brain eventually became big enough to constitute a formidable weapon of mass destruction. Humans became an existential threat to the planet, now that nothing could stand in their way. The tremendous competitive advantages of our large brain led … Continue reading A Brief History Of The Human Brain: How We Got It All Wrong
For a species that can calculate the speed of electrons, predict ballistic trajectories within accuracy of a centimetre, and estimate the distance to nearby stars, it is astounding that it stubbornly refuses to solve the simplest of math problems: overpopulation. You won’t hear the George Monbiots, Greenpeaces and Extinction Rebellions ever talk about overpopulation simply … Continue reading Why None of These People Will Ever Talk to You About Overpopulation.
George Tsakraklides 