LINKS - March 27th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
How Solarpunk Fiction Defies Dystopian Doomerism
By Annie Levin, Current Affairs
“Fortunately, we don’t need to invent a new literary genre to show us the way to a better tomorrow. Just as there is a left-wing climate movement demanding humanity break from fossil fuels to create a bright future for life on Earth, so is there a parallel climate fiction that allows us to imagine that better world. In steps solarpunk, left-wing literature’s answer to the dystopian novel. Solarpunk looks towards a post-capitalist future of renewable energy. It rejects climate ‘doomerism’ and shows what our collective future could look like if we heal our relationship with the natural world.”
The End of Species: Why it’s time for new ways of naming life
“One of the most prolific over-classifiers, they’ve discovered, was 19th-century biologist Louis Agassiz, who eagerly declared and named North American species based on little evidence, and even less scientific rigor.
“Viewing a single sample of fossilized teeth, Agassiz determined they defined not three different species but three completely new genera of fish. They’ve since been matched to teeth belonging to the fossil of a single individual fish, collapsing an entire branch of his imagined taxonomy. Hundreds of Agassiz’s species identifications have been abandoned on similar grounds.”
Societies of perpetual movement
By Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, aeon
“New research among hunter-gatherer societies is revealing that the social networks these populations create through mobility might be larger than ever expected. These networks, defined by movement, may also be responsible for the emergence of some characteristics thought to set humans apart from our closest nonhuman primate relatives. The movement of hunter-gatherers may explain the emergence of complex, cumulative culture and our ability to maintain high levels of genetic diversity, even when population sizes drop to very, very low numbers. Far from representing an obsolete mode of living, mobility may hold the key to the continuing survival of these populations, despite pressures to settle. These societies are not the remnants of an outdated, ancient way of life from the distant past. For many hunter-gatherers living in the 21st century, staying mobile is a deliberate choice because it enables large and complex societies – societies that look more like mobile constellations than villages or cities.”
A supervolcano erupted 74,000 years ago. Here’s how humans survived it.
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Washington Post
“The study also challenges a dominant idea about early human dispersal out of Africa: Experts have long thought that humans weren’t able to survive in extremely arid climates, and would have retreated to higher elevations and stayed in place rather than continuing to move through — and ultimately leave — the continent.”
Daniel Kahneman, Who Plumbed the Psychology of Economics, Dies at 90
By Robert D. Hershey Jr., The New York Times
“As opposed to traditional economics, which assumes that human beings generally act in fully rational ways and that any exceptions tend to disappear as the stakes are raised, the behavioral school is based on exposing hard-wired mental biases that can warp judgment, often with counterintuitive results.”