ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2024
Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Phase synchronization between culture and climate forcing.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Agentic processes in cultural evolution: relevance to Anthropocene sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Towards understanding human-environment feedback loops: the Atacama Desert case.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Positive feedbacks in deep-time transitions of human populations.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Our fragile future under the cumulative cultural evolution of two technologies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We derive and analyse a model with unusual features characterizing human activities over the long-run. First, human population dynamics draw heavily on consumer-resource modelling in ecology in that humans must consume biological resources to produce new humans. Second, the model also draws heavily from economic growth theory in that humans do not simply consume biological resources; they also produce the resources they consume. Finally, humans use two types of technology. Consumption technology affects the rate at which humans can extract resources. Production technology controls how effectively humans convert labour into new resources. The dynamics of both types of technology are subject to cumulative cultural evolutionary processes that allow both technological progress and regress. The resulting model exhibits a wide range of dynamical regimes. That said, the system is routinely sensitive to initial conditions, with wildly different outcomes given the same parameter values. Moreover, the system exhibits a basic fragility in the sense that human activities often lead to the endogenous extinction of the human species. This can happen gently, or it can follow periods of explosive human activity with super-exponential growth that ends in collapse. This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.