Ep 114: How power explains the history of life. (with Geerat Vermeij)
If the tape of life were replayed, how recognizable would today’s species and biomes (environments?) be? How and why does power increase over evolutionary time? How have humans unleashed so much power, and what are the consequences of that power for life on Earth?
In this episode, we talk with Geerat Vermeij, a paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has published over 200 papers and five books. Our conversation focuses on his most recent book: “The Evolution of Power: A New Understanding of the History of Life.” In it, he asserts that power, the amount of energy an organism can take up or expend per unit time, has increased steadily during the history of life on Earth. On the episode, we discuss the idea of power, how species evolve more power, and how humans have unleashed more power than any other species (and whether we need to work on curbing this power).
Cover photo: Keating Shahmehri
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Art Woods 0:00
Hey, Big Biology listeners, we're moving into a more intensive period of fundraising over the next few months. So you'll notice a couple of changes to our show.
Cameron Ghalambor 0:08
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Cameron Ghalambor 0:28
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Cameron Ghalambor 0:54
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Art Woods 1:01
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Cameron Ghalambor 1:10
Now onto the intro for today's show.
Art Woods 1:19
From our human perspective, it can be hard to grasp the timescales over which life is diversified on our planet.
Cameron Ghalambor 1:26
Definitely. “4.5 billion years,” it's easy to say but how long is that really? For example, how long ago did dinosaurs go extinct compared to something like the Cambrian explosion or the origin of eukaryotes? We could put numbers on those things. It's really hard to hold the relative times in our minds.
Art Woods 1:45
When I used to teach intro bio in a very large stadium classroom at the University of Montana, I illustrated this problem with what we called “the rope of time,” an idea that I got from Eric Green. It was a rope cut to 45 meters in length meant to represent the time since the Earth formed.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:03
I make that out to be 100 million years per meter of rope.
Art Woods 2:07
You got it! I'd have student volunteers set up the rope so that it went from the upper seats on one side, down around the podium at the front, and back up the other side. Then I'd give the students a series of 10 to 15 printed cards naming major events in Earth's history. And they had to commit to placing them at specific locations on the road.
Cameron Ghalambor 2:27
I'm guessing things like the origin of life, great oxygenation events, the Cambrian explosion, origins of mammals, rise of dinosaurs, fall of dinosaurs, things like that?
Art Woods 2:38
That's it. And moving on to more recent events like the evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens and the start of World War One. What's great about this exercise is how many of the things that we think of is happening long ago, are crammed right up against the “now” end of the rope. For example, the KT boundary 66 million years ago, in which the dinosaurs largely disappeared, is just two thirds of a meter from the end, our species arises just two to three millimeters from the end and World War One started about a micron back.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:11
The lesson is that life has existed and diversified through periods of time that are inconceivably vast, which is not exactly the topic of our show today, but sets an important stage for it.
Art Woods 3:24
Today, we talk about some of the biggest, most important processes-
Cameron Ghalambor 3:28
besides long periods of time-
Art Woods 3:30
that have shaped the evolution and diversification of life.
Again, from our modern perspective, as evolutionary biologists observing plants and animals, it's easy to think we understand the basic evolutionary processes that generate diversity, and the patterns of relatedness described by phylogenetic trees.
Art Woods 3:47
But that facile view may not be the same as understanding, as there remain many open questions about the identities of the most important factors and processes that have shaped deep time evolution.
Cameron Ghalambor 3:58
For example, what's the role of contingency? If you could run the “Earth experiment” over again, starting several billion years ago, would the living world resemble ours at all today? Some writers think that contingency is so important that there's simply no way that it could.
Art Woods 4:14
Writers such as Stephen Jay Gould, who proposed his famous replaying the tape of life metaphor. Another is Sean Carroll, who we interviewed in Episode 51 about his book on contingency.
Cameron Ghalambor 4:25
Sean argues, for example, that the asteroid impact at the KT boundary was an extraordinarily unlikely event. And then if the asteroid had merely grazed the earth, or had struck even a few tens of minutes on either side of when it did, plunging in either into the Atlantic or the Pacific rather than into Central America, it would not have driven the dinosaurs so thoroughly extinct and wiped the table so clean for the rise of mammals.
Art Woods 4:52
Other scientists have proposed that other “major factors” are needed to explain the shape of life's history, including things like increases in complexity, the appearance of truly novel traits, systematic shifts in the kinds and intensities of ecological interactions, the processes of coevolution and the origins of sleeping-beauty traits, which we discussed with Andreas Wagner in Episode 104.
Cameron Ghalambor 5:15
Today's guest Gary Vermeij is a paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis. He's also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has published over 200 papers and five books.
Art Woods 5:30
Our chat with Gary focuses on his 2023 book called “The Evolution of Power: A New Understanding of the History of Life.”
Cameron Ghalambor 5:37
Gary proposes that increases in power are a defining feature of life, and that understanding how species acquire and use power eliminates both contemporary problems in biology and the evolutionary history of life on Earth.
Art Woods 5:52
For example, early groups of bacteria and archaea rose and fell based on the kinds of new metabolic machinery that they evolved for unlocking more power.
Cameron Ghalambor 6:01
And the symbiosis that gave us eukaryotes represented a vast increase in the power available to individual cells. Subsets of those cells obviously evolved into all the macro multicellular organisms that you see around us, which rely on the power their mitochondria provide.
Art Woods 6:18
On slightly more contemporary timescales, the relative success of different groups of vertebrates may in part stem from shifts in jaw structure, the morphology and physiology of muscles, and cardio-respiratory systems, all of which unlock more power.
Cameron Ghalambor 6:33
And on much more contemporary timescales, cultural evolution among humans has led to vast increases in power available to individuals and to societies in which we live.
Art Woods 6:44
We talk with Gary about the origins of the human capacity to use so much power and the consequences that it's having for other species and for our climate.
Cameron Ghalambor 6:52
I'm Cameron Ghalambor,
Art Woods 6:53
And I'm Art Woods,
Cameron Ghalambor 6:54
And you're listening to Big Biology.
Art Woods 7:08
Gary Vermeij, excellent to talk to you today on Big Biology.
Geerat Vermeij 7:11
I'm delighted to be here.
Art Woods 7:13
We're looking forward to talking to you, among other things about your newly published book called “The Evolution of Power: A New Understanding of the History of Life.” But before that, we wanted to rewind the tape a little bit. Cam had some questions about some of your earlier work.
Cameron Ghalambor 7:29
Yeah. So I'm extremely honored to be talking to you today. I read your autobiography as a graduate student and found it extremely inspiring. And I became familiar with your research as a graduate student in the 1990s. I read your book “Biogeography and Adaptation” and “Evolution and Escalation.” And the significance of those books for me and maybe for the field as a whole was that we could look at the fossil record, and not just come up with like a catalog of species and how they've changed over time. But we could also infer a lot about the ecological processes that were going on by looking at changes in distribution, and changes in morphology, and patterns of coexistence. And so I was just really wanted to get your opinion and hear a little bit about how you've seen the field of paleontology and paleobiology change over the course of your lifetime?
Geerat Vermeij 8:31
It's complicated.
Cameron Ghalambor 8:33
Okay.
Geerat Vermeij 8:34
I represent a part of paleontology and a part of evolutionary biology that emphasizes, if you will, natural history. What are organisms like? What did they do? How well do they do it? That turns out today, at least, to be a minority point of view. Because there's a whole school of thought about long-term patterns in, for example, diversity or disparity or any other global measure of how many species there are, and so on, without really taking account of interactions or have the properties of the organisms they're talking about.
Cameron Ghalambor 9:18
That seems so strange to me, as an evolutionary ecologist that studies birds and fish and insects. Why is it that you think that perspective has remained sort of a minority view?
Geerat Vermeij 9:33
I think paleontology had the reputation of stamp collecting, you know/ We're describing new species, for example, or discovering new sites. And it all seemed very particular. And it is certainly true that many paleontologists didn't think about the bigger questions. What I do, very much, is I am very much an observationist. But at the same time, I'm really interested in large principles, evolutionary principles and how things have changed over time. And I think it is important to bear both things in mind that you're not just doing it to describe, but you're trying to explain. And there is an interesting difference, I think, between description and explanation.
Art Woods 10:19
Maybe if you could say just a little more about what you mean by escalation, and how the interactions among these entities that you're studying in the past have led to, you know, sort of systematic changes in form and function.
Geerat Vermeij 10:33
So organisms, of course, live in a very difficult world of opportunities and challenges. And the argument about escalation is that much of the natural selection that organisms are exposed to, comes from their rivals, or their enemies, if you will, or their competitors. Competitors, predators, disease agents, and so on. It used to be thought that much selection could also come from your prey, from the things you eat. But there is an inherent asymmetry in the selective intensity, and I hold that the greater intensity comes from one's enemies. Of course, it can occasionally be true that prey can also be enemies, because they can harm an individual. But on the whole, there is this interesting asymmetry.
Art Woods 11:28
And just to follow up on that, so you know, if we're thinking about different kinds of escalation, so we're imagining the evolution say, of armor plating or thicker shells, or tougher shells in response to predators that are exerting this consistent selection on them?
Geerat Vermeij 11:45
So you can have escalation in any number of different directions. So of them, of course, the one that I probably spent the most time on, is indeed in passive armor, but you can also imagine escalation having to do with locomotion, you know. How fast are you? How maneuverable are you? And also in connection with, for example, communication, or being seen or not to be seen. So there are many dimensions along which escalation can proceed.
Art Woods 12:16
Got it.
Cameron Ghalambor 12:16
Yeah, interesting. So I can see the natural sort of progression from thinking about how predator-prey interactions can escalate evolutionary change to thinking about how ecological interactions can also lead to the evolution of power, which you write about in your recent book. So is that fair is that a natural progression in your thinking? And how you got to this place to write this book?
Geerat Vermeij 12:43
Yes, it's absolutely fair. And one might even ask why I didn't do that much earlier. But you know, better late than never, I suppose. And the idea is that power, which is, of course, how much energy you can take up and expend per unit time, exemplifies what organisms do when they interact with each other. So it's a direct measure, if you will, of interactions and their consequences. So yes, it's perfectly natural to have come from a general view of escalation to the more, if you will, powerful idea that power influences directions of evolution.
Art Woods 13:27
So you just defined power for us. So you know, amount of energy that you can apply per unit time
Geerat Vermeij 13:35
or take up per unit time,
Art Woods 13:37
Or take up, yeah. So that's sort of like an engineering or physics point of view that would invoke Watts.
Geerat Vermeij 13:42
Very much so. In fact, I have a little subheading in my book, “Watt is power?”
Art Woods 13:48
Love it. We're big fans of dumb jokes. So that's great. I just wanted to ask, though, is there another sense in which you mean power, like in the sense of having influence, so you know, some kind of broader ecological or political power?
Geerat Vermeij 14:07
Very much so. But I would also argue that power as influence is an expression of real engineering-type power. In other words, you're having a huge effect for any of a variety of reasons. But yes, I think those things are inextricably related to each other.
Cameron Ghalambor 14:27
But you know, as an evolutionary biologist, I'm also kind of curious about the focus on power as, as a currency, a general currency that you could use versus other types of currencies. Obviously, fitness would be one option or energy just in general.
Geerat Vermeij 14:47
So I consider energy as being the currency. Power, on the other hand, is how one uses or how one takes up energy. So I do want to make that distinction. And I should just add that fitness, I think is a measure of power, of reproductive power.
Cameron Ghalambor 15:05
Okay, yeah. So if I just, you know, summarize that we have energy as currency that can be applied and stored and used in the form of power. And power is then a correlate of fitness.
Geerat Vermeij 15:23
Fitness as part of it. So, one can also think of power as productivity in an ecosystem, for instance, because that's how much biomass is being produced per unit time. So that's exactly the units of power. And so there are many other ways of expressing power. The wonderful thing about power is it has many dimensions. And so you can lay out all the possibilities of what can be maximized, or what can be minimized. So as a competitor, you want to increase your power and to decrease the power of your rivals.
Cameron Ghalambor 15:56
And in the context of say, something very small, like a virus, which, looking at it, you know, as a human would seem to have very little power, and yet, at the same time, is able to hijack an organism's physiological machinery to its advantage that also seems like a type of power that could play out even though the organism is very small.
Geerat Vermeij 16:23
Well, yes, except that a single virus or a single bacterium can't possibly do it. So they need to do it in huge numbers. And number, of course, is another dimension of power. And so that's an important point of view, actually, because social existence, especially coordinated social life, or social interaction, is a very potent way of expressing and using power.
Cameron Ghalambor 16:51
Yeah, it's interesting, because yeah, Art and I were talking about that earlier about the relationship between power and cooperation and sociality, and how that can kind of unlock and unleash power that a single individual would not have access.
Geerat Vermeij 17:09
That's correct. And this applies, in particular to ecosystems, because no matter what an organism can do, you cannot do it in the absence of a whole, circular, working ecosystem. And so I think it's also important to apply the notions of power to how ecosystems work.
Art Woods 17:27
I guess I wanted to turn now and use this idea of power that we've developed and just state what I view is one of the central theses of your book, which is that if you look at the evolutionary history of life on Earth, you can see a sort of long series of events that have involved innovations that have unleashed more power, that power was sort of provides a an organizing scaffold for understanding the diversification of life on Earth. First of all, do you agree with that summary? And second of all, can you just give us an example of one of these major events that's caused a change in how power is applied?
Geerat Vermeij 18:08
First of all, yes, I do agree. I would add that life and innovations are cumulative. So one innovation tends to be built up on another. And that's rather important. That's true in human economics. And it's true in the economics of life, other than human life, that is to say. So an example would be the evolution of flight. You know, there are, of course, insects, and there are pterosaurs, bats and birds. In the latter case, flight may have evolved more than once probably did. And in each case, that opened up a whole new opportunities, it also provided a lot more power. And organisms had to cope with that, you know. And so that's just one out of numerous examples. One could also say deep roots for plants, where they were able to gain access to minerals in rocks that other plants and fungi were unable to do by themselves. Symbiosis are another very good example of innovations, which of course, has evolved literally thousands Perhaps tens of thousands of times,
Art Woods 19:16
But among which the origins of eukaryotes seem particularly important.
Geerat Vermeij 19:22
Yes, but also say the partnerships between plants and fungi, or nitrogen fixing bacteria in legumes, for example.
Cameron Ghalambor 19:32
So if we think about the process of diversification, and these sort of cumulative changes that you were talking about, you know, I often think about that from the perspective of selection and adaptive evolution, driving speciation and diversity. But I was really interested on your perspective, because you kind of diverged from what I would think of as maybe in my mind, a more traditional view. Not only because of your focus on power, but also your invoking of agency as another attribute of life. I'm curious, can you define what you mean by agency and the distinction between power and agency?
Geerat Vermeij 20:17
Yeah, agency, to me, is doing something. And as I say, borrowing a term from JS Turner, it's making the future. So no matter whether you're a plant, or an animal, or a fungus, or a virus, living things can do things, they modify their own surroundings. And they often move in such a way that they enhance their own opportunities. So I think agency is a crucial aspect, perhaps the most crucial aspect of a living thing. And agency together with natural selection, I think accounts for all the evolution that we see. It isn't just natural selection, but it is truly also agency organisms have a hand in their own evolution.
Cameron Ghalambor 21:09
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think, you know, when we see the way living organisms interact with their environments, that seems very obvious. But I also struggle a little bit with agency because agency also seems a lot like an emergent property of organisms in that it’s also something that is itself a product of natural selection,
Geerat Vermeij 21:32
Perhaps, that depends a little bit on how one thinks about that. I do agree that agency is an emergent property of life. And that having agency and given that survival and reproduction are also emergent goals, if you like, of organisms, that necessarily leads to natural selection. So I consider natural selection also to be an emergent and fundamental property of life.
Art Woods 22:04
I was excited to read your thoughts about agency. I’ve been a sort of big fan of the idea. And I've really started to think about it in the last couple of years, and I come at it from a very sort of organismal perspective, an organismal physiology background. But when I talk to other biologists about agency, one thing that I often hear is, “Well, how is that different from what we already know about the way organisms behave or act in the world?” It's just, it's just another sort of jargon word that we don't need that doesn't invoke anything new. How do you respond to that?
Geerat Vermeij 22:39
I tend not to like jargon. But there are times when using a word coalesces an idea, and yes, I'm sure all behaviorists are totally aware of agency. But if you read that literature, they tend to talk about natural selection only, and not about how an organism's own actions influence that natural selection. And there are exceptions, you know, always there are people who have thought about these things. But on the whole, the mainstream does not.
Cameron Ghalambor 23:13
You know, a few weeks ago, we talked with Eric Svensson from Lund University. And, and and we talked about the interplay, and what he referred to as sort of the reciprocal causation between organisms and their environments, and how potentially agency and a lot of other kinds of interactions that involve feedback that are not the where, you know, populations or organisms aren't simply passive players in a kind of a linear interaction with the environment that they interact with their environment in ways that cause feedbacks. And I think, among, like, evolutionary ecologists, you see the term eco evolutionary dynamics trying to capture some of this type of feedback and reciprocal causation. Is that a way of describing it that resonates with you?
Geerat Vermeij 24:11
It's too jargony for my tastes.
Cameron Ghalambor 24:13
Oh, no.
Art Woods 24:16
Speaking of anti jargon.
Geerat Vermeij 24:17
Right. So I tend to think I just talk about feedback periods. And I think one of the legacies we have from the Enlightenment is that we tend to think about cause and effect. Whereas I think for the whole realm of life, what we really should be talking about is feedbacks. So it isn't just one cause causing an effect that the effect has an effect, if you will, on the cause. It's a feedback. And to me that is absolutely fundamental to how we should think about interactions. Literally interaction means action between things which implies a feedback
Art Woods 25:08
Well, I want to now ask about you have several chapters in the middle of your book that lay out the different ways that lineages can evolve greater power. And you sort of put some meat on those bones and
Geerat Vermeij 25:23
Or shells, perhaps right?
Art Woods 25:26
Yeah sorry. Sorry to invoke bones. And that those three ways are greater size, faster movements and greater violence. And those, I think, make a lot of sense to me, if you had to sort of say, you know, which of those is most important? Or how do they go together? What would you say to that?
Geerat Vermeij 25:48
I think anything that is more active is more important. So I do start with size, which is the most passive response. But if you think about locomotion, by which I don't mean just speed, but also agility and so on, and especially the evolution of force or violence. Of course, there's force involved in locomotion as well. I think that is perhaps the most important part of the story.
Art Woods 26:15
So greater violence. I mean, I guess we could conceive of that as the evolution of strategies or tools for applying lots of power, right, to a particular point.
Geerat Vermeij 26:29
Yeah, so I talk about venom. I talk about, obviously, teeth and claws. And, of course, in the end, I'd have a few things to say about guns. And plants have not been inactive in this respect at all. And one other thing that I think is really important to emphasize here is that when it comes to mate selection, it may not always be violence, sometimes it is, but very often, it does entail the extraordinary use of power in order to attract or to keep one's mates. And I think that's actually a very important part of many animals and plant lives.
Cameron Ghalambor 27:06
Yeah, I agree. And, I think we often make this distinction between natural selection and sexual selection.
Geerat Vermeij 27:14
Yeah, I don't.
Cameron Ghalambor 27:16
And I could see that as I was reading, that those ideas were sort of merged together. And I was wondering if that was, yeah, on purpose. Or if when you take this sort of more power perspective, the distinction kind of goes away?
Geerat Vermeij 27:32
To me, it goes away. And I would argue that, in fact, sexual selection, or let's call it mate related selection it cannot be separated, really, from natural selection, because you're often emphasizing the same kinds of advantages.
Cameron Ghalambor 27:53
Yeah. So if I think about, for example, size, in the context of two competitors, versus size differences among males, in the same species competing for females, would that be an example where the mechanism may not matter? But what we're moving towards in both cases is, is the evolution of greater power and the ability to exert your will?
Geerat Vermeij 28:23
Yeah, so that's what I would argue, I say, somewhere in the book, I don't remember where that some of the extraordinary displays, behavioral and other displays, which require a huge amount of power, might actually benefit the organism in its competition for other resources as well. And many people have thought about it in the reverse direction. But I think that sexual selection may actually be one agency that makes natural selection even more powerful.
Cameron Ghalambor 28:56
Yeah, as I was reading, I was envisioning elephant seals that were, you know, big males fighting with each other and battling over females and then an elephant seal running into a much smaller, you know, seal and, you know, treating it very poorly and exerting violence upon it.
Geerat Vermeij 29:18
Yeah, my notion came from crabs, where crab claws are both used in display, and in fighting with other crabs, but also as weapons for feeding.
Cameron Ghalambor 29:30
Yeah, yeah.
Geerat Vermeij 29:31
There's one other thing I should say. And that is that, of course, power depends a lot on how the environment affects power. And so there’s always going to be limitations on power, due to things like low temperatures or low productivity and so on. So it isn't unlimited power, except perhaps in the human case.
Art Woods 29:53
Yeah. Well, that's a great segue to the next section that we wanted to discuss with you. So Cam and I are obviously fans of your ideas about power. But we also spent some time trying to think of ways that, you know, if you had to poke holes in this idea of power as an organizing principle, what might they be? And it feels like an obvious one is that exerting lots of power requires that you be able to take up lots of resources, and those resources and energy may not always be around. And you can imagine circumstances in which having less power or a very low energy lifestyle is actually the fitter thing to do. So how do you reconcile those two threads?
Geerat Vermeij 30:39
Easily, I would argue that having great power also brings risk. Those plentiful resources may not always be there, and if they're not, you're not going to survive, period. But for those organisms that use less power, they can survive. But on the other hand, there is always going to be selection, even in those organisms, for as much power as they can manage, given the resources.
Art Woods 31:06
So it's all kind of normalized to the power that's available from the local environments.
Geerat Vermeij 31:12
Yes, so it all depends on what I call enabling factors.
Cameron Ghalambor 31:16
But in some cases, it would seem that the accumulation or acquisition of more power, also results in greater vulnerability.
Geerat Vermeij 31:26
Yes, it does. Very much so. And of course, in human history, we've always known that, right? The most powerful are also the most precarious in many ways.
Cameron Ghalambor 31:37
But I think if I can't think of a specific reference, but I seem to recall that large bodied organisms tend to have a greater risk of extinction. Both on contemporary timescales in the Anthropocene. But also, when we've had these mass extinction events, they disproportionately fall out.
Geerat Vermeij 31:59
That's correct. It's a very consistent pattern. And I think the first person who ever pointed that out was Leigh Van Valen. But yes, it happens all the time, and it's because the system has failed to produce the resources. So when you get mass extinctions, you know, the whole bottom falls out of the productivity system, and that is curtains for the most powerful.
Cameron Ghalambor 32:25
Right, right. So I'd like to talk a little bit about another kind of angle on the evolution of power, sort of related to this idea of, of the sort of limits and constraints imposed by the environment, but also more specifically on the trade offs. And this is a kind of a deeply personal question for my research interests. Because in collaboration with Paul Martin, at Queen's University in Canada, we've been very interested in asymmetric competitive interactions. And one thing that we recently published on was across the tree of life, we see this very repeated pattern, where closely related species replace each other along environmental gradients. And it's always the case that the reason for the turnover across the gradient is because one species, typically larger, it has an asymmetric advantage, and is competitively dominant, and excludes the subordinate species and restricts the subordinate species to more stressful, less preferred part of the environmental gradient. But in looking at studies that do removals, when you remove the subordinate, the larger dominant species cannot expand into the stressful part of the gradient, and it doesn't have the physiological or ecological ability to live in those kinds of environments. And it really does seem that the evolution of greater size and power and the ability to competitively exclude come at the expense of being able to tolerate these kind of more stressful conditions. How important do you think these kinds of trade offs are in sort of putting the brakes on how far power can evolve?
Geerat Vermeij 34:21
It's hard to say, your perspective is probably from vertebrates, whereas I tend to think more about plants and so on. One thing I would say is that some of the replacements that you're talking about among close to the related species, more often than not, the replacement is actually by a different lineage, which may have for historical reasons, has the right physiological tolerances to be able to expand into a vacated “niche.” I think that the limits to power are influenced by one's inferior competitors. They do reduce, because of your trade offs, they do reduce your potential power. So I think trade offs are fundamental. And that's because there is no such thing as A perfection or B resource quantity and productivity, there are always going to be limits. And organisms have to negotiate those challenges in an evolutionary way.
Cameron Ghalambor 35:24
Yeah, the patterns we found, were actually in plants and insects and sort of across the tree of life, but it also made me kind of think more deeply about the integration of traits. And, you know, a lot of attention has been given historically to allometric relationships and how things scale with body size, but I was really sort of captivated and started thinking a lot more about how how power might change, or be constrained, by the way in which traits within an organism are integrated together and how they work together. And, how that might be related to the kinds of specific trade offs that they experience.
Geerat Vermeij 36:10
Well, of course, the more power you have, the fewer trade offs you need to worry about, or at least you're shifting the balance, right. So if you have less power, the trade offs are going to be pretty bad. And innovations that enable you to get greater power, reduce those trade offs. And then you can do more than one thing at a time.
Art Woods 36:32
Gary, I wanted to run another idea by you. This is also kind of a personal interest of mine, something I've been thinking about over the last few years. And that is that there's, in my view, two ways to unlock fitness gains, one of them is to find new ways to be more powerful, the subject of your book. It seems like another way to do that is to find new ways to use information productively, and thereby to require less power. So the path is to have less power, but to use it more effectively. And here's a metaphor. And if you thought about how to rob a bank, you could drive your powerful pickup truck at high speed into a wall and knock a giant hole in it before grabbing the cash and driving away. Or you can sneak in at night with a stolen key and sort of quietly unlock the vault and take what you want and then go away. And so like a biological analogue that I've considered as beetle grubs in a log, right. So many things are interested in eating those beetle grubs a bear, which is very powerful might tear that log up and lap up the beetle larvae, whereas a parasitoid Wasp can sense vibrations and stick a very small ovipositor down into the beetle larvae to get to those resources.
Geerat Vermeij 37:52
And kill just one beetle.
Art Woods 37:54
That's true, yeah. But to me, they seem like kind of fundamentally different ways of getting to the resources that you want, you know, one involves power one involves information. And so you know, do you think is information another organizing idea or organizing currency that you could use to explain the history of life on Earth in the same way that you've done so with power?
Geerat Vermeij 38:21
Right, so there's a recent paper, which I read with really great interest by Long et al, it was in PNAS, I think. And this paper also made the point that well, the whole organizing principle of life is information. My problem with information, and with energy itself as a currency, is if you don't use it, it isn't any good to anybody. The thing that I like about the idea of power is that it implies an interaction. Whereas information is a more static thing, just like energy isn't more static thing without power, it doesn't go anywhere.
Now you're right. You know, there are different ways of doing things. Now, I would argue that using more information requires quite a lot more brain power, literally power, requires a substantial investment in the neural infrastructure. So the immediate costs might be low, but the ultimate costs are quite high.
Art Woods 39:24
I guess I would say using information doesn't necessarily require nervous systems and cognition. So to circle back to something you brought up a few minutes ago, you mentioned venom. To me, venom is less about power because you know, venom doesn't exert watts. It exploits chinks in the sort of informational landscape, right, to disrupt interactions in cell membranes and on ion transporters and, and to me, that's like an informational way that snakes and other things that have venom have found to succeed
Geerat Vermeij 40:02
Except that venom is very expensive to make.
Art Woods 40:05
Okay. Yeah, touché, right? But the essence is one of exploiting information, right?
Geerat Vermeij 40:12
It's just a different way of doing things. But venoms and snakes and cone snails and so forth. millipedes, centipedes rather, have multiple kinds of venoms. And they're incredibly expensive to make.
Cameron Ghalambor 40:26
So kind of following on Art’s point, can we think about the accumulation, the increasing accumulation of power, in the absence of this type of like, information exploitation? Because it seems like, back to your point about agency, a very good agent would also be very good at exploiting information in its environment.
Geerat Vermeij 40:56
I think that's true. But I would argue that, in order to do that, you're going to need a very substantial infrastructure.
Cameron Ghalambor 41:08
And by infrastructure, do you mean the sort of internal cognitive ability or the external kind of landscape?
Geerat Vermeij 41:16
I would argue, mostly the internal, but of course, there’s gonna be feedbacks here as well.
Art Woods 41:21
Gary, we were also quite interested in the comments you made about the roles of contingency in the evolutionary history of life on Earth. And, you know, just thinking about whether or not if, you know, to invoke this famous metaphor, if you were to replay the tape of life, would things turn out more or less the same as they have? And Stephen Jay Gould, of course, argued, famously argued that, yes, that no, they would not. And you make the case that maybe contingencies have been the power of contingencies have been has been overestimated, and that there are sort of organizing principles, among which you named power, that sort of decrease the overall effects of contingency and that we would actually see quite similar trajectories of life on earth over time. And I just wonder, could you maybe unpack that, like, what do we mean by contingencies? And how do we get around those effects?
Geerat Vermeij 42:17
So contingency is kind of the historical stamp. How did the past influenced your morphology, your ecology, your limitations, and so on? And I would argue that it plays a dominant role in what an individual is, or what a clade, that is to say, an evolutionary branch of life does. What it’s trajectory is, which we can't really predict in any substantial way. So contingency has a distinct stamp in evolutionary biology, but I would say that, given the role of power and natural selection agents, and so forth, there are these overriding principles, which at a large enough scale, are not contingent, because they're literally quite predictable. You can't say exactly what happens when, where and by whom, but you can say that it will probably happen.
Art Woods 43:13
So what kinds of things can you say will probably happen?
Geerat Vermeij 43:16
Increasing power would be my number one, and an expansion of life would be a related point that I would make.
Art Woods 43:24
Okay, so it's a sort of very broad and statistical way of thinking about the patterns of diversification, rather than being able to predict that, you know.
Geerat Vermeij 43:35
Well, notice that I did not use diversification. And the reason I didn't is one that I pointed out in the book, I think, in one or two places. We humans are a single species, by far and away the most powerful one ever to have existed. But it's only one species.
Cameron Ghalambor 43:53
So I wanted to just kind of follow up a little bit on the distinction between predictability versus repeatability, when we look at these major patterns in the evolution of life on Earth. So we can say with some caveats that there may be some general patterns in terms of predictability, like the evolution of power, but is that also contingent on seeing those patterns repeat over and over again? Every time there's been like, say, a mass extinction event that kind of allows for an independent assessment of that trajectory?
Geerat Vermeij 44:36
Yeah, I think those two ideas are probably related to each other. I haven't thought deeply about repeatability, except that almost every innovation that has ever been studied has evolved more than once. Even though most unusual, we keep thinking that the eukaryotic union between a bacterium and an archaeon is a totally unique event in life. But actually it isn't because symbioses like that have happened thousands of times. So I think repeatability and predictability are kind of related to each other.
Art Woods 45:23
Let's turn now more specifically to humans and think about the origins of our own power as a species, both in terms of, you know, energy usage, and maybe cultural aspects. If you just think of the amounts of power that we have available to us now compared to several 100 years ago, right, we have vastly more available to us. We can fly in planes, drive cars, run our computers, so we can talk to each other on podcasts. So how is it that humans are unique in this sense? And how have we managed to unleash so much power?
Geerat Vermeij 46:00
Well, of course we, I think number one is we're a social species, a rather highly developed social species, it doesn't mean we all cooperate all the time, as we see even with all the wars going on and crimes, and so on, and so forth. But that's very important. We also use energy sources that other organisms have not used before. And we have employed tools outside our own limited bodies to do a lot of work for us. All of those are related to each other. But I would say those three things together, define why we have so much more power than anybody else.
Cameron Ghalambor 46:39
So when we think about the sort of causes and consequences of humans acquiring this much power, you talk about the sort of perils of the human monopoly on this planet. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about both what you mean specifically is a human monopoly, and whether there are other sort of analogs in the natural world that would be kind of analogous to what humans have done? Or are we in a unique sort of period of time?
Geerat Vermeij 47:17
So I would argue, along with Egbert Leigh, with whom I wrote a paper about this years ago, that there really is no parallel to our monopoly. There have been and there are very brief, local monopolies. There are a couple of examples of ant trees that survived for about 40 years without competition, and then somebody grows over you, and that's the end of that. But we are unusual, in that we have hogged a disproportionate amount of the world's energy, and we have eliminated largely through medicine and so forth, we've eliminated most of our competitors. Which means that there's no one to tell us we're wrong, as a species. We can tell ourselves that it doesn't seem to be doing a lot of good, but there is no force out there that limits our monopolistic power.
Art Woods 48:11
So what are the solutions? If monopoly brings peril? How do we minimize that peril?
Geerat Vermeij 48:19
Well, I wish I knew, you know, I am not an optimist on this score. I mean, it's clear to me that what we need is a sort of global human oriented regulation, which will involve governments and it should involve a sort of democratic process. But given our track record, I'm not awfully optimistic. On the other hand, I think by being made aware of the fundamental properties of our economy and our monopolistic tendencies, one might hope that economists, at some point, will seriously consider the possibility that eternal growth is impossible. I am deeply disappointed in the economics community for not having thought seriously about how to construct a human economy that is not growing, but at the same time is healthy.
Art Woods 49:16
Yeah. I was just saying to Cam, before we got on to the recording with you that I had. Seems like I've read quite a few articles in different magazines, including the New York Times that have decried countries and populations in which population growth rates are below replacement. And there's good evidence that they're going to be declining and then decrying the potential economic consequences of that. And it's really interesting to read, especially like letters to the editor from people who are responding to this, because many people are pointing out well, wait a minute, you know, ecologically this is what we need is less pressure on local areas. And the parallel thing to that is to figure out a way to have sustainable economies that don't depend entirely on growth.
Geerat Vermeij 50:03
That's right. And you know, almost always, the people who write about the aging of the population and the declines in birth rate and so forth saying how awful this is. And I'm thinking No, no, this is exactly what we need. But really, I'm serious, it is time for economists to really grapple with this, I just don't think they've done it because their mode is so tied with economic growth. They haven't considered other possibilities seriously. I mean, there are people who have written books about, you know, the sustainable economy, and so forth. And I think a lot of that stuff is pie in the sky. But to have a real economist, really grapple with this is utterly crucial. And if the Nobel Committee ever could have an influence on what prizes they give out for economics, that would be my first choice.
Art Woods 50:57
Have you tried to collaborate with economists on this?
Geerat Vermeij 51:01
I have talked to economists, but on the whole, they have been dismissive. I've also submitted articles to economics journals, and they say, we're not really interested.
Art Woods 51:12
Thanks. But no, thanks.
Geerat Vermeij 51:14
Yeah, they are not as a group, I would have to say, from my perspective, at least, they're not ready to expand their horizons.
Cameron Ghalambor 51:23
I'm also curious about the sort of tension between, as an evolutionary biologist, between you know, the benefits to the individual versus the benefits to the group. And it seems like when we, when we talk about any social group of different individuals, as a group, we should recognize that there are these alternative paths that we should take towards more being more sustainable, but it’s also potentially consistently going to be undermined by those few individuals that, you know, would take a more selfish perspective and
Geerat Vermeij 52:04
This had been going on, throughout history of life, right? You have parasites, you have selfish individuals.
Cameron Ghalambor 52:09
So does this fundamentally undermine our ability to save ourselves? Or?
Geerat Vermeij 52:15
I don't know, I frankly, don't know. I mean, obviously, selfishness plays a huge role in human society, but so does the potential to get things done, culturally, and collectively. We've seen both. And I frankly, don't know how it'll end up, you know, it's a good question.
Cameron Ghalambor 52:35
Because I see it being very much linked to power now. Because if you have energy, and you exert it in the form of power, what we are saying right now is that, you know, we're asking humans to not exert power and to hold back on exercising that and, and how do we do that?
Geerat Vermeij 52:59
Yeah, self restraint. That's the problem, right? It's self restraint. On the other hand, it is in the long term for our own good. Now, humans have famously been bad at considering long term consequences, or doing something about them, even if they know about them, as we seem to, for example, with climate change. Humans have a terrible track record there. That's why I'm not entirely optimistic.
Cameron Ghalambor 53:26
Yeah. Yeah, well, I guess, where I would find optimism is, you know, there are some of the billionaires I can't remember if it was like Warren Buffett, or some of these people who are claiming that they will give away all of their wealth before they retire.
Geerat Vermeij 53:42
I approve of that, you know, and I actually mentioned, people who, who are philanthropists, there are people who decry philanthropy. I'm not one of them. Because not only have I benefited from philanthropy, myself, but I also think that they often are doing a great deal of good.
Art Woods 54:01
Here's one other human power related question. And that is thinking about, you know, in part, it seems like the damage that the human monopoly has been doing to the biosphere stems from the fact that our energy economy is still very biological, in the sense that the energy is mostly carried by carbon compounds, right? We're tapping sources that were, you know, photosynthesized hundreds of millions of years ago, we're now returning that carbon to the atmosphere, and that's what's driving a lot of the change that we see. But you can also see this starting to be rapid transition to renewables, solar and wind. And, you know, there's significant chunks of energy in some parts of the world that are produced by nuclear processes. And, in a sense, those lie outside of the biological realm, right, because they're, they're extracted from the carbon economy. And so, can you imagine this sort of more fully renewable future in which we've detached ourselves from the carbon economy in a way that helps
Geerat Vermeij 55:03
I can imagine it, but we have to remember that almost all those technologies will have their downsides. You know, I consider habitat destruction and modification as one of the most important human effects. And that's not going to change with expending or with gaining access to even more energy sources than we now have.
Art Woods 55:23
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly the downside is then every individual and every entity has more power to exert on the world around them, and that may result in more destruction.
Cameron Ghalambor 55:34
So does that mean that if physicists figure out how to make fusion reactors that can provide, you know, cheap, renewable, sustainable energy that is abundant, that won't have as much of an impact on transforming human societies, as we might like?
Geerat Vermeij 55:55
Well, it'll have an effect, no question about it, it’ll have a huge effect. But what exactly it'll be is a little hard to say, and I am anything but an expert on this subject?
Cameron Ghalambor 56:08
Yeah, Neither am I. But I do think that what I appreciated about the book, as a biologist, but then thinking about, you know, these human challenges that we face, is that it does provide almost like a conceptual framework, you know, based on this idea of power, and how we've accumulated it, how we apply it and use it. I guess, maybe the currency is energy, but how we apply the power and perhaps if more people kind of viewed their place in the world, from this perspective, maybe it would change the way they behave?
Geerat Vermeij 56:46
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I did write it as a sort of a framework for how to think about things. But at the same time, I think it's also important to realize that humans follow entirely in the footsteps of previous episodes in the history of life. We're unique in many, many ways, but in the way that we have added to the increase in power over time, is entirely consistent with the patterns we've seen for three and a half billion years.
Cameron Ghalambor 57:15
Yeah. So if we were to go to another planet, for example, it's very likely that given sort of a planet of the same age, sort of a similar sort of biosphere that we might encounter very similar patterns to what we see here on Earth?
Geerat Vermeij 57:33
That's my point of view.
Art Woods 57:36
Well, great, I think that might be a good place to wrap up. It's been fantastic to talk to you, Gary.
Geerat Vermeij 57:41
Let me also say that I think you've really read that book very carefully. And I really appreciate that.
Art Woods 57:49
Absolutely, it was our pleasure. We always end by asking our guests, if there's anything else, they'd like to say that we haven't covered,
Geerat Vermeij 57:54
Not that I can think of straight away. I think, for me, it's really important to think about humans in the larger context, not just in the context of the environment, in the context of history. You know, we're part of a long system that has existed here for millions, billions of years. And I think that perspective is important.
Art Woods 58:16
Great, perfect place to end.
Cameron Ghalambor 58:18
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk to us.
Geerat Vermeij 58:21
Thank you, and I really appreciate it. I enjoyed doing it.
Cameron Ghalambor 58:36
Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, let us know via X, Facebook, Instagram, or leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you don't, we'd love to know that too. Write us at info at big biology.org
Art Woods 58:50
Thanks to Steve Lane, who manages the website and Molly Magid for producing the episode.
Cameron Ghalambor 58:54
Thanks also to Dayna De La Cruz for her amazing social media. Keating Shahmehri produces our awesome cover art.
Art Woods 59:01
Thanks to the College of Public Health at the University of South Florida and the National Science Foundation for support.
Cameron Ghalambor 59:06
Music on the episode is from Podington Bear and Tieren Costello