Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects
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Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects Andra Meneganzin1 · Telmo Pievani1 · Stefano Caserini2 Received: 25 July 2019 / Accepted: 18 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenicallydriven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity. Keywords Anthropocene · Climate change · Cognitive bias · Human evolution · Niche construction · Sixth mass extinction * Andra Meneganzin [email protected] Telmo Pievani [email protected] Stefano Caserini [email protected] 1
Department of Biology, Evolutionary Biology Research Unit, University of Padua, Via U. Bassi 58/B, Padova, Italy
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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20131 Milano, Italy
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A. Meneganzin et al.
Human evolution and climate change An increasing amount of evidence is showing today how our evolutionary history has been strongly connected to the drastic fluctuations that characterized past climate on Earth (Potts 2012, 2013; Maslin et al. 2014; Grove 2014; Owen et al. 2018). The Pleistocene, the geological epoch spanning between 2.5 million years ago and 11,700 years ago, is known as a period of great climatic instability, during which a series of glacial and interglacial climatic cycles occurred, with swings between moist and dry phases. More specifically, fundamental shifts in African climate have been identified near 2.8 Mya, 1.8 Mya and 1.0 Mya, datings that today draw on a new set of fossil and paleoclimatic data and that correspond to key junctures in early hominin evolution, including the emergence of genus Homo (de Menocal 1995; National Research Council 2010; Shultz and Maslin 201
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