I read this book several times. Each time I was surprised. The Dominant Animal begins by considering the ways in which humans influence the environment and the environment, modified by humans, shapes everything else. The book then parades through the delightful minds of Paul and Anne Ehrlich. In that parade one will see, more clearly presented than you will find anywhere else, the intertwined stories of human culture, evolution, and human actions toward and in the environment and how those have changed through time. In the parade one will find Darwin, Wallace, and the early history of evolution alongside traditional peoples living as hunter- gatherers in villages, sequoia trees and tangled banks.
The Ehrlichs' tone in the Dominant Animal is both friendly and approachable. Again and again the reader feels as though she has had something logical and intuitive revealed to her. Natural Selection, in the Ehrlichs' hands seems obvious, as does much else in the story of life and the human domination of it. It is easy to find oneself nodding again and again with what this book has to say. The surprise is what the clearly explained facts lead to; the train wreck of our current situation. Every time I read the book, I find myself forgetting what is coming and then there it is, in front of me, the other train.
It is clear early in the book that much is wrong in the world and that those problems have tremendous consequences. Yet this not a doomsday book. Most of the book is actually about the basics of ecology and evolution. There are chapters on evolution, culture, cultural evolution, the interactions between genes and the environment, and even how we perceive the world and how that perception influences our decisions. The book, in walking carefully through those basics all framed around the story of humans, would be very useful for an undergraduate biology course. Each chapter is, in and of itself, a kind of essay or perhaps more so a kind of Ehrlichian lecture; wide ranging, thought provoking and ultimately wound together into a strong thesis. The book binds these essays into a broader thesis about who we are and can be as humans. The Ehrlich's have looked further into the future than most scientists are willing to. They have at times been proven wrong, but more often they have just proven ahead of schedule. To read this book is to see what they are thinking now and, if history serves, to see what, for all of us, lays ahead.
After laying a clear foundation for understanding built on insights drawn from ecology, evolution, anthropology, economics and lifetimes spent talking with others of the ecological intelligentsia, the Ehrlichs turn to what remains before us. Natural selection favored beavers who built damns that improved their environments and improved their odds of surviving. Dammed ponds are, to beavers, a better environment than the one they found when they arrived. Humans, instead of dams, built cities and roads and global networks of communication and commerce. Instead of making our environment better for ourselves we have, in many ways, made it worse, less conducive to our own survival. Beavers dam ponds, but we've, in our way, damned ourselves. Reading this book will make clear the complex causes of this situation, why we've arrived at this point in history and where, if we are wise, we might go from here. This book is full of nuance and joy but also the ecological and evolutionary realities of our situation.
In reading this book I was reminded of another new book, The Superorganism by Burt Holldobler and Ed Wilson (I recently reviewed the book for Natural History Magazine). In The Superorganism, Holldobler and Wilson consider the simple rules that ultimately hold insect societies together. They are rules about communication and division of labor. They are rules that are reinforced because those colonies that do not work efficiently and effectively to produce new generations, fail to pass on their genes. The organization of The Dominant Animal is similar to The Superorganism. In both there are chapters about the evolution of societies, about the rise and fall of populations, and about how societies shape the environment around them. The difference between the stories of humans and those of insect societies is pointed out by Holldobler and Wilson who indicate that unlike ants, humans are conscious of what they are doing and make decisions about their fate. The Ehrlichs are perhaps less optimistic about humans ability to make the right decisions about their societies and the environments of which they are a part. Yet the last chapter of The Dominant Animal is, in part, a foundation for the kinds of rules and governance necessary to sustain human societies. If human societies really are more self-aware and self-determined than those of ants then the ideas laid out in the Ehrlichs' chapters "Saving our Natural Capital" and "Governance: Tackling Unanticipated Consequences" are what we should be paying attention to. Dysfunctional societies of ants are rare because those that were did not pass along their genes. Let's hope that we can choose to determine our fate rather than, like the ant colonies that didn't make it, letting selection decide.
Rob Dunn
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology, North Carolina State University
