Member-only story
Despite beliefs that we are images of gods, it’s hard to deny that we humans are animals. Of course, we are very special animals. We are able to create explanations of ourselves and our place in the universe, we have invented intricate and powerful tools, and we have come to dominate the Earth like no other large form of life.
Our success as a species has been due not so much to our individual characteristics as to the fact that we are social animals. We accomplish what we do through coordinated behavior mediated by language. We depend on each other for survival and happiness.
How we act depends on what we believe. Throughout human history people have invented many stories that provide ideas about the world that have motivated people’s behavior. Some stories have been more useful than others for our success. What made some old stories useful in a past of seemingly unlimited resources may no longer be helpful in our current situation of planetary saturation.
Like all animal species we depend on our physical, chemical, and biological environment for our continued existence, and limits of those environmental factors constrain our population size. If we exceed those limits for very long, our population size will decrease. That can happen in two ways, by an increase in our death rate or by a decline in our fertility rate, or both. The former…
