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22 2 From Adaptation to Innovation By the time Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa 100,000 years ago, nitrogen had been cycling through the biosphere for hundreds of millions of years. As with earlier migrations of fire-wielding hominids, such as Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus, the arrival of anatomically modern humans caused barely a ripple in the gentle flow of nitrogen from the soil into plants and back again. The bacteria that fixed, nitrified, and denitrified nitrogenous material continued on, unaffected by the occasional human foot that passed by.1 Homo sapiens proved to be even more highly skilled at adapting to new environments than their ancestors were. Indeed, they soon came to occupy every corner of the Earth. In particular, about 50,000 years ago, the population of Homo sapiens, after hovering for millennia at a few tens of thousands, steadily began to increase. Even in face of retreating temperatures, groups of Homo sapiens flourished, reaching a population of about 6 million by the end of the Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago. At the core of this expansion lay an explosive capacity to adapt to new environments and an ability to pass knowledge directly from person to person and from one generation to the next, independent of genetic material.2 Humans Learning by Variation and Selection Describing the ability of early humans to adapt as “explosive” is, of course, relative. Compared to industrial societies, early groups of humans rarely made changes to their practices. Indeed, too much change could be dangerous . Any group that deviated too far from what had proven to be successful in the past put the reproduction of its community at risk. Moreover, much of the knowledge that communities acquired came to be embedded in rituals FROM A DA PTAT ION TO INNOVAT ION 23 and stories. Altering those stories and rituals too quickly could result in the loss of valuable knowledge.3 Variations, though, were bound to occur. As groups told their stories, enforced their rules, and reproduced their practices, those stories, rules, and practices inevitably evolved through gradual processes of variation and selection. A major source of variation lay in the sheer number of different groups struggling to survive. Over tens of thousands of years, as groups of Homo sapiens spread across the Earth, some groups flourished while others disappeared. Groups that flourished often split to survive, disseminating their languages, stories, and practices. And when they split, their cultures gradually diverged, generating another layer of variation as each new group continued to accumulate knowledge that came to be embedded in practices, stories, rituals, laws, and ethics.4 This description of societal change as evolutionary, as being rooted in processes of variation and selection, is not unusual. Indeed, some scholars see the process of variation and selection as a general phenomenon that includes but is not limited to the natural selection of biological traits. Various terms denote this generalized process of variation and selection, including evolutionary epistemology, universal selection theory, multiprocess selection theory, and memetics.5 All of the theories behind these terms emphasize that anything subject to cycles of variation and selection evolves, whether it be ideas, behaviors, technologies, laws, ethics, or organisms. Note that these theories are not simply a rehash of older ideas involving social Darwinism, which were often used to suggest that the competition for survival in nature justified laissez faire capitalism. Humans, unlike the rest of nature, can make choices, including ethical choices that place boundaries on how individuals are allowed to treat each other or, for that matter, to interact with natural systems or make use of natural resources. The ethical boundaries that societies establish, whether on economic and social activity or on interactions with the environment, influence the direction in which societies evolve. The theorist who introduced the term evolutionary epistemology also introduced the powerful concept of nested variation and selection.6 This concept is important to any discussion of innovation and societal change, including an examination of how societies learned to fix nitrogen industrially (chapters 4–8) and how they are now slowly learning to manage their nitrogen-related interactions with the rest of nature in a more sophisticated way (chapters 9–12). In general, nested variation and selection occurs whenever a simpler and faster process of variation and selection guides a slower and more complex one by using knowledge acquired in the past. The process lies at the heart of what it means to learn. Nested...

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