How Not To Save The Planet

Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:

Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”

I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.

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This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.

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Urban Evolution

The water flea Daphnia magna — a freshwater crustacean up to a few millimeters in size — is one species busy evolving in cities in response to heat, pollution and even local predators. These zooplankton can prevent algal blooms that overload ponds with toxic cyanobacteria, so this adaptation may have a big effect on freshwater ecosystems, says Kristien Brans, an evolutionary ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, who studies the water fleas.

One basic challenge in such urban investigations is to distinguish between two modes of response to altered environments: evolution (genetic alterations that appear across generations) and phenotypic plasticity (the flexibility to alter physical and/or behavioral characteristics in an organism’s lifetime).

For water fleas, it turns out that both are at play. Fleas raised in lab experiments at temperatures matching urban ponds are smaller, and mature and reproduce more quickly, than fleas reared at rural pond temperatures that tend to be several degrees cooler. (That’s phenotypic plasticity — no genetic changes have occurred.) But over time, urban water fleas living generation after generation in warmer, urban pond waters have genetically changed to have those same kinds of alterations. (That’s evolution.)

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GLUE took white clover’s cyanide production as a model to study three questions. Do instances of urbanization in different cities lead to similar local environments? Do those similar environments lead the clover to evolve along the same lines — display parallel evolution — in a trait of interest (in this case, cyanide production)? And if so, what environmental factors are driving the pattern?

In a new Science paper, the collaborators showed that urban environments do indeed end up quite similar to each other, with less vegetation, more impervious surfaces and higher summer temperatures than their outlying rural areas. (In fact, downtowns of cities such as Beijing and Boston are more similar to each other in such factors than they are to their rural areas, Johnson comments.) Analyzing more than 110,000 clover plants from 160 cities in 26 countries, the GLUE investigators also demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and clover cyanide production. And after sequencing more than 2,000 clover genomes and analyzing the urban-rural differences, the researchers showed that natural selection truly is at work.

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Unfortunately, the genetic biodiversity that can fuel adaptation often dwindles in urban areas. A genetic survey by Chloé Schmidt working in Garroway’s lab, for example, found this to be the case, along with lower population sizes, for North American mammals living in more disturbed environments. That’s a concern during a period when so many populations of animals and plants are seeing their natural habitats degraded or simply destroyed.

Scientists don’t take urban environments as precise models for the impacts of climate change. But they say such studies will provide important clues to how creatures may respond to dwindling access to water and food, and exposure to pollution, heat, drought and other dangers.

“We’re in the Anthropocene, and we don’t understand how we’re changing the environment on every level, from greenhouse gas emissions to changing the evolution of life around us,” Johnson says. “People realize this research is part of the solution.”

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Aristotle & His “Not Even Wrong” Ideas

Unbelievable bullshit people like Aristotle made the shit up without any epistemic humility but the real issue, these folks are still respected. People like Norman Borlaug, Robert Trivers names nor their works are known to anyone. Well, god bless my species. 

In the 4th century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle had two theories about this. He postulated that they hibernated during the winter as other animals did. Swallows, for example, encased themselves in little balls of clay and sank out of sight to the bottom of swamps. His other idea was that the missing species transformed themselves into the birds that did stick around for the winter, and changed back when summer came.

The little old man in de Bergerac’s tale was an imagined Spanish soldier called Domingo Gonsales, and he was the hero of another story. In 1638, just a couple of decades before Cyrano’s “A Voyage to the Moon” became available, the English cleric Francis Godwin published “The Man in the Moone,” a fictional account of Gonsales’ lunar adventure. In the book, Gonsales trained 25 swans to pull an ‘engine’ he had made. One day, he took a jaunt in his swan carriage which happened to coincide with the time birds were accustomed to disappear, as it seemed, from Earth.

Gonsales was about to find out the answer to the mystery. To his surprise, the swans flew upwards, until they reached what we would think of as orbit and became weightless. French scientist Blaise Pascal’s experiments demonstrating the lack of atmosphere in space had not yet filtered through to Godwin, as both birds and man breathed as usual. In 12 days they reached the Moon, where he found other migrating terrestrial birds, such as swallows, nightingales, and woodcocks. When the swans started to show signs of agitation, he divined that they were ready to return to Earth; and so he harnessed them again and sailed home in nine days, gravitational pull on his side.

This was a ripping yarn for sure, but some thought it was a plausible alternative to Aristotle’s theories, especially as there was a Biblical passage that seemed to allude to it. In the King James translation, it goes:

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming (Jeremiah 8:7).

Meta Value - 47

In unexpected moments in life, an insight, an epiphany, a beautiful question, or an answer pops out of nowhere. 

I have forgotten a lot of them because of the sheer arrogance of my ability to remember. 

Work in progress: I try to jot them down immediately since some of these can be life altering moments. 

On Steve Jobs

“Having been in Silicon Valley for 50 years, I’m an expert in assholes, okay?” says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s early developer evangelist. “And 99.9 percent of assholes are egocentric assholes. But Steve is one of the very rare mission-driven assholes. He was driven by a mission to make the greatest computer by the greatest company. And if you got in the way of that, he would run you over. He would run you over, back up, and run you over again.”

[——]

No executive, before or since, has incorporated comedy so memorably into product presentations. When, in 2002, Jobs wanted to cajole an auditorium full of software companies to rewrite their programs for Apple’s new Mac OS X operating system, he staged a full onstage funeral for the outgoing Mac OS 9, complete with a live organist, a eulogy he read himself, and a casket occupied by a four-foot–tall Mac OS 9 box.

[—]

If you encountered Jobs in only one context, you were like one of the blind men in the parable of the elephant. You’d have to have known him for years to see the whole man, and even then you might get a picture that felt fractured or incomplete.

“He was a man of contradictions,” Hertzfeld says. “Almost any adjective you could think of could apply to him at different times.”

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The Irony Of American Righteousness - Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.

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At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

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Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.

The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.

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Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power. 

What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”

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The Many Roots Of Our Suffering - Reflections )n Robert Trivers (1943–2026)

In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and the often-obscure political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But two weeks after the death of Robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin, not a single major news source has noticed his passing. This despite Trivers’s singular accomplishment of showing how the endlessly fascinating complexities of human relations are grounded in the wellsprings of complex life. And despite the fact that the man’s life was itself an object of fascination. Trivers was no ordinary academic. He was privileged in upbringing but louche in lifestyle, personally endearing but at times obstreperous and irresponsible, otherworldly brilliant but forehead-slappingly foolish. 

Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself. 

The fallout for science was vast. The fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology, and Darwinian social science are largely projects that test Trivers’s hypotheses. The ideas took pride of place in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976, and many other bestsellers in the next three decades such as Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal (1994) and my own How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002). In 2007 the ideas earned Trivers the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel for fields not recognised by Nobels.

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In another landmark, Trivers turned to relations among people who are not bound by blood. No one doubts that humans, more than any other species, make sacrifices for nonrelatives. But Trivers recoiled from the romantic notion that people are by nature indiscriminately communal and generous. It’s not true to life, nor is it expected: in evolution as in baseball, nice guys finish last. Instead, he noted, nature provides opportunities for a more discerning form of altruism in the positive-sum exchange of benefits. One animal can help another by grooming, feeding, protecting, or backing him, and is helped in turn when the needs reverse. Everybody wins. 

Trivers called it reciprocal altruism, and noted that it can evolve only in a narrow envelope of circumstances. That is because it is vulnerable to cheaters who accept favours without returning them. The altruistic parties must recognise each other, interact repeatedly, be in a position to confer a large benefit on others at a small cost to themselves, keep a memory for favours offered or denied, and be impelled to reciprocate accordingly. Reciprocal altruism can evolve because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes. They enjoy the gains of trading surpluses of food, pulling ticks out of one another’s hair, saving each other from drowning or starvation, and babysitting each other’s children. Reciprocators can also do better over the long run than the cheaters who take favours without returning them, because the reciprocators will come to recognise the cheaters and shun or punish them. 

All this was quickly snapped up by game theorists, economists, and political scientists. But in a less-noticed passage, Trivers pointed out its implications for psychology. Reciprocal altruists must be equipped with cognitive faculties to recognise and remember individuals and what they have done. That helps explain why the most social species is also the smartest one; human intelligence evolved to deal with people, not just predators and tools. They also must be equipped with moral emotions that implement the tit-for-tat strategy necessary to stabilise cooperation. Sympathy and trust prompt people to extend the first favour. Gratitude and loyalty prompt them to repay favours. Guilt and shame deter them from hurting or failing to repay others. Anger and contempt prompt them to avoid or punish cheaters. 

And in a passage that even fewer readers noticed, Trivers anticipated a major phenomenon later studied in the guise of “partner choice.” Though it pays both sides in a reciprocal partnership to trade favours as long as each one gains more than he loses, people differ in how much advantage they’ll try to squeeze out of an exchange while leaving it just profitable enough for the partner that he won’t walk away. That’s why not everyone evolves into a rapacious scalper: potential partners can shun them, preferring to deal with someone who offers more generous terms.

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And since humans are language users—indeed, reciprocity may be a big reason language evolved—any tendency of an individual to reciprocate or cheat, lavish or stint, does not have to be witnessed firsthand but can be passed through the grapevine. This leads to an interest in the reputation of others, and a concern with one’s own reputation. 

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But Trivers rapidly spotted what everyone else missed, and still misses, together with the less biologically obvious concept of self-deception, so there must be another piece to the puzzle. During his junior year at Harvard, Trivers suffered two weeks of mania and then a breakdown that hospitalised him for two months. Bipolar disorder afflicted him throughout his life. I can’t help but wonder whether Trivers’s fecund period was driven by episodes of hypomania, when ideas surge and insights suddenly emerge through clouds of bafflement. Gamers sometimes “overclock” their computers, running the CPU at a higher speed than the rated limit, which boosts performance but risks instability and crashes. Did Trivers experience bursts of overclocking in the early 1970s? It would explain another fact about the man that was obvious to anyone who met him later: Trivers reeked of marijuana. His heavy use may have had a source other than his Jamaicaphilia. One wonders whether Trivers was self-medicating, with long-term costs to his clock speed. 

- Steven Pinker

Frank Lloyd Wright As A Mirror Of The American Condition

The fixation on Wright’s paradoxes obscures a deeper contradiction embedded in the culture that produced him. Namely, that the United States has always been ambivalent about the individual: we valorise self-reliance but distrust those who stand too far apart; we celebrate democratic ideals but are uneasy with idiosyncrasy; we admire originality while punishing the disorder it brings. Wright lived squarely inside that tension. He took seriously the idea that one could make a life and a world from first principles – an act of courage in the best light. Hubris in the worst.

Seen through that lens, Wright becomes less an outlier than a mirror. His contradictions, less personal failings than reflections of the American condition. Our yearning for freedom is matched by our fear of its consequences; our desire for order by our suspicion of conformity; our reverence for the natural world by our relentless reshaping of it. Wright’s work endures because it speaks to these tensions with a force that resists resolution. If we judge him only by his wounds or only by his wonders, we see only half the man – and half the nation that shaped him. The truth, harder and more interesting, is that both are inseparable. His greatness is entangled with his flaws, his vision inseparable from his unruly humanity. To reduce him to saint or sinner is to miss what is most alive in his work: a belief that the individual, in all their contradictions, is still worth building for.

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Meta Value - 46

Maybe 200 years from now, we will be laughed at for embracing moronic concentration of power by not lack of knowledge in neuroscience but unwillingness to connect the obvious dots between knowledge,  action and inability to change. 

Yes, there are regular "columns" about the foolishness of multi-tasking but yet we elect officials, presidents to multitask. We celebrate CEOs and so-called corporate leaders who multi-task. Even worse, we expect the same from doctors, nurses, cops, and fire fighters. 

They just don't multi-task. Their role and responsibility is to tackle, understand, and solve the new problem, issue et al at a spur of the moment while still solving the issue at hand and yesterday's unsolved issue. Oh yeah, they also need to deal with family, celebrations, mundanity, issues and sickness. Watch news, tv, movies, and sports.

And they need to eat, poop, workout, and sleep.

All this in 24 hours of time. 

No living being can do this. Lions don't chase Zebra's 24 hours a day nor do crocodiles. No living organism does this. 

Humans cannot eat, read while doing pull ups. 

But yet, our entire civilization, economy, politics, is built around the fabric of few humans who are capable of doing pulls while popping, eating and reading. 

The real issue is the messed up dichotomy of mind and body. There is no dichotomy. The mind is not magic. It is an organic matter with limited capabilities. 

Plus we breed smaller humans to make life altering decisions at 18 with their underdeveloped prefrontal cortex.

It seems that the entire complexity of human civilization is built on Robert Trivers’ fragile ground of self-deception. 

The meta value here is - if one can not do any of the above, focus on few important things that matter in their limited time - one can not only thrive but have a wonderful and peaceful life. 

If by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Remembering Robert Trivers

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

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The next year in 1972, Trivers published his most cited paper, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Here he offered a unified explanation for something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin. Writing perhaps the most famous sentence in all of evolutionary biology—“What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring”—Trivers threw down the gauntlet and revealed a deceptively simple principle that reorganized the field. From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete more intensely for access to them.

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Each of these papers spawned entirely new research fields, and many have dedicated their careers to unpacking and testing the implications of his ideas. As Harvard biologist David Haig put it, “I don’t know of any comparable set of papers. Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them.” Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to David Buss and Steven Pinker.

To know Robert personally, however, was to confront a more uneven and less orderly organism— to use one of his favorite words—than the one revealed in his papers. The man who explained the hidden order in life often struggled to impose order in his own. “Genius” is one of the most overused words in the language, with “asshole” not far behind, and I have known few people who truly deserved either label. Robert deserved both. He could be genuinely funny, extraordinarily generous, and breathtakingly perceptive, but also moody, childish, and needlessly cruel.

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I used to joke that one reason he was so good at explaining behaviors the rest of us took for granted was that he was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits—why we invest in our children, why we are nice to our friends, why we lie to ourselves. He told me that conflict with his own father was part of the inspiration for parent-offspring conflict and one of the observations that led to his insight into parental investment came from watching male pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his apartment window in Cambridge.

Robert also had a respect for evidence and for correcting mistakes that I’ve rarely seen among academics, a group not known for their humility. He cared more about truth than about his reputation and retracted papers at great cost to himself and his career when he thought there were errors. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him. 

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He was a lifelong learner with a willingness to do hard things. After his astonishing early success, he could have done what many academics do: stay in his lane, guard his territory, and spend the rest of his career commenting on ideas he had already had. Instead, in the early 1990s he saw that genetics mattered and spent the next fifteen years trying to master it. The result was Genes in Conflict, the 2006 book he wrote with Austin Burt, which pushed his interest in conflict down to the level of selfish genetic elements. Few scientists, after making contributions as important as he had, would have had the curiosity, humility, and stamina to begin again in an entirely new area.

Trivers was a great teacher, though not always in the ways he intended. He often asked dumb questions—’What does cytosine bind to again?’ in the middle of a genetics seminar and made obvious observations—’Did you know that running the air-conditioner in the car uses gas?’ But as he liked to say, ‘I might be ignorant, but I ain’t gonna be for long.’ He could also be volatile and aggressive and there were many times when he threatened to kick my ass. I may have been the only graduate student who ever had to wonder whether he could take his advisor in a fight. Once, over lunch at Rutgers, I asked about a cut on his thumb after he had returned from one of his frequent trips to Jamaica. He matter-of-factly told me that he had just survived a home invasion in which two men armed with machetes held him hostage. He escaped by jumping from a second-story window, rolling downhill, and stabbing both men with the eight-inch knife he carried everywhere he went. He was 67 at the time.

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One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.” That seems just about right to me. His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him. I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.

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