Question

write an article of tolerances need of the our nature conservation

Answer 1

There is little dispute within the knowledgeable scientific community today about the global ecological situation and the resultant need for nature conservation (e.g., NAS 1993, UCS 1993). Now is a time of unprecedented, escalating, and well-documented environmental danger. There is general agreement among environmental scientists that the accelerating loss of biodiversity—populations (Hughes et al. 1997), species, and communities—should be a matter of great concern. They have concluded that nature must be conserved not just for its own sake but also for the sake of Homo sapiens, to which it supplies an indispensable array of ecosystem services (Daily 1997, Chapin et al. 2000) and products (Beattie and Ehrlich 2001). And for most of those scientists, and large numbers of environmentalists, conservation is a major ethical issue (Rolston 1988, Nash 1989). In addition, the scientific consensus is that the major driving forces of the destruction of humanity's natural capital are population growth, overconsumption, and the use of faulty technologies combined with inappropriate socio-political-economic arrangements to service that consumption (Holdren and Ehrlich 1974, Holdren 1991, NAS 1993, UCS 1993)—what might be called the three horsemen of IPAT (Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology; Ehrlich and Holdren 1971, Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1990).

But the seriousness of the environmental dimensions of the human predicament is still unknown to the vast majority of the general public and decisionmakers worldwide. Although scientists understand the general directions in which humanity should be moving to solve its environmental problems, the policy response of society remains pathetic. As a result the cutting edge of the environmental sciences is now moving from the ecological and physical sciences toward the behavioral sciences, which seem to have the potential to develop ways to improve that response.

The key is finding ways to alter the course of cultural evolution—change in the vast body of nongenetic information that humanity possesses and passes around between and within generations (Ehrlich and Holm 1963, Keesing 1974). Cultural evolution in this sense means more than what is usually called “history.” For example, the divergence of languages or the refinement of an aircraft's design is not ordinarily studied by historians, but these are part of cultural evolution. The critical importance of cultural evolution in understanding behavior has been reinforced by the discovery that there may be only some 26,000–38,000 genes in the human genome (Venter et al. 2001). It is now even more obvious that this “gene shortage” (Ehrlich 2000) is the final nail in the coffin of “evolutionary psychology” (Buss 1994, Ridley 1996, Hamer and Copeland 1998, Thornhill and Palmer 2000). That discipline has been long on psychology, but it's based on a distorted view of evolutionary theory (e.g., Ketelaar and Ellis 2000a, 2000b) that puts too much emphasis on inclusive fitness (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1978, Lloyd and Feldman 2001).

But beyond the weak evolutionary underpinnings of evolutionary psychology, gene shortage shows that we cannot look to our genes to either explain or modify most of our behavior. Not only are there too few genes to account for the vast complexity and flexibility of behavior, but given the enormous diversity of processes in which the genome must participate, it follows that many (if not most) genes must be involved in multiple tasks. This certainly greatly complicates the “programming” of all phenotypic characteristics and makes it rather difficult to change one such characteristic (such as a preference for a certain type of mate) without changing others, which may seriously affect fitness. The unitary, unchanging behavioral “human nature,” once thought invented by gods and later assumed to be a product of genetic evolution, is nonexistent. Our complex and flexible behavior is largely determined by our environments, and especially by the extragenetic information embodied in our cultures. Thus what is desperately needed now is much better understanding of the ways in which culture evolves and determines most interesting human behavior, including humanity's treatment of its life support systems. We need to comprehend how cultural evolution produces the vast diversity of human natures—different fundamental attitudes, beliefs, proclivities, preferences (in the economic sense), and behaviors (Ehrlich 2000). That should help us discover how to reconfigure social, political, and economic incentives and cut through barriers of ignorance and denial, allowing society to turn onto a path toward sustainability. Some of the most important products of human cultural evolution are ethical concerns, including concerns for nonhuman organisms and the environment in general. Cultures already have been evolving in the direction of broader environmental ethics (Ehrlich 2000), and that process needs to be accelerated.