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A review by lkedzie
The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction by Henry Gee
funny
informative
fast-paced
1.75
The Rise and Fall of the Human Race is about the end of humanity. Not in the sense of a catalog, or as a prediction, but in a statistical or ecological (in the formal sense of the word) sense. If we take what we know about extinction as a process, and direct that analysis towards humans, what do we come up with?
The discussion of extinction science is the highlight of the book. The key observation is that the usual methods of looking at the end is wrong. Someone talking about existential risk has a risk in mind, and usually solution at a reasonable cost, but extinction is not about an extinction event as much as it is being in a state of vulnerability to extinction. This puts humans with a small amount of time, geologically speaking, like 10K years.
The writing is delightful. I want to go drinking with the author. The endnotes are frequently hilarious. The book is an introduction to great concepts like extinction debt. This is a book where the brevity is a problem. I wanted more writing and more detail on more things, and there are plenty of places for the author to expand.
Well, maybe. This book is an expansion of an article that the author wrote. Most of the best parts are shared with that article; the rest is the book-lentgh version of the difference between science and the humanities, sometimes memed as the difference between a high INT stat and an high WIS stat.
The author's solution to preventing humanity's extinction is for humans to expand into space. The reason this is the solution is a tautology: humans should go into space because they should go into space. Humanity will outstrip the carrying capacity of the earth, and the way to fix that is to go into space, which will require vastly expanding the carrying capacity of the earth, based on what will be required to support people living in space. Gay Space Communism is unexplored.
This might be an idle problem. The book could pass as a polemic with a few more expletives and polemics grade on their own curve. I share with the author the view that Ehrlich deserves contempt, but less than he gets*. It becomes a real issue because of the various fragments of argumentation in the book that feel like no one is minding the till.
The author posits our future as a vegan matriarchy on the basis of efficiency (rather than a fetish comic), that animals products are an inefficient way of getting calories and that the potential of women's contributions to society are historically untapped and must be in order for humanity to survive. However, this comes up in the context of solving the problem of food via artificial photosynthesis, which okay, cool, but at that point, you might as well just posit a cheesburger tree.
Similarly, the need for action now is due to the demographic cliff and its knock-on effects on human ingenuity and resources: the most people provides us with the most chance of having people who can solve the problem, and having too few people presents a possibility where there aren't enough people to provide the surplus necessary to allow people to investigate those problems as opposed to toil in the fields. The cause of this is multi-variable, but one elaborated on is 'female emancipation.'
That sound you are hearing is a thousand conservative influencers readying their keyboards.
A blanket statement of women had no rights, and now they do, deserves scrutiny. Technically correct it becomes an oversimplification to the point of misleading. Similarly, the expression of the crucial role of women in solving the problem is so causally engaged and unsupported that it achieves vaulted technically correct status.
A lot of the statements about history deserves scrutiny. The author accepts the 'own goal' view of Rapa Nui, sending the critics to an endnote. The author presents both The Great Hunger and 1995 Chicago in purely environmental terms. Neither are. Both are more in line with the author's extinction thesis, where the catastrophic event is ancillary to the systemic failure. People died en mass because of policy, not because of reality.
To that end, the book's conceit operates in a sort of twilight zone around Edward Gibbon. Yeah, it is what he wrote, but devoid of context before or hence, either of what Gibbon was doing or the way that the idea of decline, its uses, abuses, and intellectual or ideological history. This is no huge complaint, but it does start to feel like horseshoe theory on the wooification of science.
Oh, and it plays fast and loose with the science. I am not going to violate the terms of the ARC by a full quotation, but in the discussion of the concept of an evolutionary bottleneck applying to humans, the author raises the idea, notes that it is currently disfavored, and then uses it anyway on the basis that it is true "poetically."
Poetically true science? Is this like Justice Roberts' court of public opinion as regards Korematsu?
I get the core of the author's point. Humans, particularly in their status as the water sprouts on the otherwise dead branch of homo, exist in a sort of genetic risk that does not apply to other species. So why not eugenics? You cannot say eugenics does not work. We've established that the poetic truth of science is the important bit. Every bit of the argument here works for eugenics. It works better in fact. No need to worry about radiation's effect on developing children if we just kill the diabetics and autistics. Sure, they did not do it right before, (though I am certain you could find some human biodiversity folks to claim that they actually did), but this time it will be different.
Did any science fiction author read this manuscript?
In closing, I return to the tautology problem. The only reason that I can see that space travel was chosen is because extra-planetary living is "in" with the existential risk crowd. The same people looking to sell timeshares on the Moon are the most vocal about the author's concerns (and usually trying to get you to use crypto). But as far as I am concerned, the author has as good an explanation for why space will not save us. If the bottlenecks from founder effects are bad on earth, think how much worse space will be.
I loved the writing, and I loved the science. I now have a whole new scientific sub-discipline that I am interested in learning about. But - unintentionally - the author has written a pitch sheet for Bond villains.
My thanks to the author, Henry Gee, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, for making the ARC available to me.
* - There is a sidebar here that I may return to via blog about the author's use of The Population Bomb in general.
The discussion of extinction science is the highlight of the book. The key observation is that the usual methods of looking at the end is wrong. Someone talking about existential risk has a risk in mind, and usually solution at a reasonable cost, but extinction is not about an extinction event as much as it is being in a state of vulnerability to extinction. This puts humans with a small amount of time, geologically speaking, like 10K years.
The writing is delightful. I want to go drinking with the author. The endnotes are frequently hilarious. The book is an introduction to great concepts like extinction debt. This is a book where the brevity is a problem. I wanted more writing and more detail on more things, and there are plenty of places for the author to expand.
Well, maybe. This book is an expansion of an article that the author wrote. Most of the best parts are shared with that article; the rest is the book-lentgh version of the difference between science and the humanities, sometimes memed as the difference between a high INT stat and an high WIS stat.
The author's solution to preventing humanity's extinction is for humans to expand into space. The reason this is the solution is a tautology: humans should go into space because they should go into space. Humanity will outstrip the carrying capacity of the earth, and the way to fix that is to go into space, which will require vastly expanding the carrying capacity of the earth, based on what will be required to support people living in space. Gay Space Communism is unexplored.
This might be an idle problem. The book could pass as a polemic with a few more expletives and polemics grade on their own curve. I share with the author the view that Ehrlich deserves contempt, but less than he gets*. It becomes a real issue because of the various fragments of argumentation in the book that feel like no one is minding the till.
The author posits our future as a vegan matriarchy on the basis of efficiency (rather than a fetish comic), that animals products are an inefficient way of getting calories and that the potential of women's contributions to society are historically untapped and must be in order for humanity to survive. However, this comes up in the context of solving the problem of food via artificial photosynthesis, which okay, cool, but at that point, you might as well just posit a cheesburger tree.
Similarly, the need for action now is due to the demographic cliff and its knock-on effects on human ingenuity and resources: the most people provides us with the most chance of having people who can solve the problem, and having too few people presents a possibility where there aren't enough people to provide the surplus necessary to allow people to investigate those problems as opposed to toil in the fields. The cause of this is multi-variable, but one elaborated on is 'female emancipation.'
That sound you are hearing is a thousand conservative influencers readying their keyboards.
A blanket statement of women had no rights, and now they do, deserves scrutiny. Technically correct it becomes an oversimplification to the point of misleading. Similarly, the expression of the crucial role of women in solving the problem is so causally engaged and unsupported that it achieves vaulted technically correct status.
A lot of the statements about history deserves scrutiny. The author accepts the 'own goal' view of Rapa Nui, sending the critics to an endnote. The author presents both The Great Hunger and 1995 Chicago in purely environmental terms. Neither are. Both are more in line with the author's extinction thesis, where the catastrophic event is ancillary to the systemic failure. People died en mass because of policy, not because of reality.
To that end, the book's conceit operates in a sort of twilight zone around Edward Gibbon. Yeah, it is what he wrote, but devoid of context before or hence, either of what Gibbon was doing or the way that the idea of decline, its uses, abuses, and intellectual or ideological history. This is no huge complaint, but it does start to feel like horseshoe theory on the wooification of science.
Oh, and it plays fast and loose with the science. I am not going to violate the terms of the ARC by a full quotation, but in the discussion of the concept of an evolutionary bottleneck applying to humans, the author raises the idea, notes that it is currently disfavored, and then uses it anyway on the basis that it is true "poetically."
Poetically true science? Is this like Justice Roberts' court of public opinion as regards Korematsu?
I get the core of the author's point. Humans, particularly in their status as the water sprouts on the otherwise dead branch of homo, exist in a sort of genetic risk that does not apply to other species. So why not eugenics? You cannot say eugenics does not work. We've established that the poetic truth of science is the important bit. Every bit of the argument here works for eugenics. It works better in fact. No need to worry about radiation's effect on developing children if we just kill the diabetics and autistics. Sure, they did not do it right before, (though I am certain you could find some human biodiversity folks to claim that they actually did), but this time it will be different.
Did any science fiction author read this manuscript?
In closing, I return to the tautology problem. The only reason that I can see that space travel was chosen is because extra-planetary living is "in" with the existential risk crowd. The same people looking to sell timeshares on the Moon are the most vocal about the author's concerns (and usually trying to get you to use crypto). But as far as I am concerned, the author has as good an explanation for why space will not save us. If the bottlenecks from founder effects are bad on earth, think how much worse space will be.
I loved the writing, and I loved the science. I now have a whole new scientific sub-discipline that I am interested in learning about. But - unintentionally - the author has written a pitch sheet for Bond villains.
My thanks to the author, Henry Gee, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, for making the ARC available to me.
* - There is a sidebar here that I may return to via blog about the author's use of The Population Bomb in general.