How we got to be top dog

View Large Image | Download PowerPoint SlideHumans are indisputably the dominant animal: our activities cover the landscape, leaving nature, at best, only in fragments. To find unspoiled landscapes requires visits to icecaps, remote deserts and high mountains, where we might not dominate, but neither is there much life to dominate. Only remote tropical forests appear untouched, but they are going up in smoke at a rapid rate. The oceans might look better, but that is an illusion. We have even messed up the air. In The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, the Ehrlichs cover all of this, how we did it and what the future holds.Trends in Ecology and Evolution readers might ask: haven’t we heard all this before? Isn’t this just a book for Aunt Flo, who still likes her old gas guzzler and thinks that nice senator from Oklahoma must have a point when he says global warming is a ‘hoax’? Well, ‘no’ and ‘no.’ Buy this for your next seminar class and not just because it has as many chapters as weeks in a US semester. Or be inspired – and make an undergraduate course out of it.The Ehrlichs brilliantly weave many diverse and large literatures into a seamless story. As expected, the writing is lovely, and the refresher course in evolution that starts the book brings the reader quickly up to speed on key issues. Are we programmed to be good or bad? What is the role of culture, the roots of warfare? One gets from Kettlewell's moths to Goodall's murderous chimpanzees in 80 pages, with much to think about along the way.How we behave, and why, is crucial. Otherwise, we are left with the mea culpa, ‘of course, I over-consume, my genes made me do it!’ As the Ehrlichs put it, ‘Genes are not little beads with instructions like grow up gay engraved on them. …Our roughly 25 000 genes can’t possibly code for all our separate everyday behaviors into the human genome.’ This is not a rehash of the old ‘nature–nurture’ debate, but a focus on how we are so different and what that bodes for our futures and our need for consensus on how to tame our dominance.If there is one question that I would have had the authors address, it would have been an extension. For many, concerns about the environment have a strong religious origin. One might think that Christians, for example, with a common scripture, would easily find common cause on the environment (as they do on evolution, which most US citizens reject [1xThe Christian ethics of species conservation. Van Houtan, K.S. and Pimm, S.L. : 116–147See all References][1]). Yet Christian leaders produced bothFor humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity…to degrade the integrity of the Earth by causing changes in its climate, stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands…to contaminate the earth's waters, its land, its air, and its life with poisonous substances – these are sinsandThe generation that produced the environmental movement…is attempting to indoctrinate the next generation in its anti-technological and anti-progressive creed.(The first is Bartholomew I, head of the Orthodox Church, the second Gary Bauer, who ran for the US presidency in 1996 [1xThe Christian ethics of species conservation. Van Houtan, K.S. and Pimm, S.L. : 116–147See all References][1].) Simply, how and why we get to have such diametrically different views on the environment is not only interesting intellectually but also a topic that we must understand if we are to ever reach the consensus that our planet's future requires.The Dominant Animal continues with the global ecology and increasingly unnatural history of the planet, with examples that are fun, novel and surprising. The Ehrlichs summarize the outstanding work by marine ecologists Jeremy Jackson and Dan Pauly on our oceans with the former's quip about ‘the rise of slime’ and the latter admonishing his grandkids to ‘eat your jellyfish.’ These examples alone require substantial background reading for a class, as will the next page (on invasive species and the homogenization of the planet's biota) and the page after that on global pollutants.You might not need to follow up on why 35 000 British troops defeated 500 000 Italians in North Africa in 1940, which the Ehrlichs provide as an example of cultural paralysis on the part of the latter. Yes, one can have political leaders with great power and uncanny abilities to use it badly. But in this case, I’m certain, it was simply that the latter, used to some of the finest food in the world, were no match for troops fed on chip butties (white bread, margarine, tallow-fried potatoes and lots of salt) and warm beer.So, yes, you’ve read some of this before, but not all of it, and not told so well, or with such passion and humor. You’ll want The Dominant Animal for a class, so that you can keep a copy for yourself.