Faster than we thought | Smarter than we thought.
As the natural world begins to fray faster than expected, we are just beginning to discover that it is populated by creatures must smarter than we thought.
Among those who make a masochistic habit of tracking the news and science around climate change, there is a phrase that has become something of a mantra. Part cynical meme and part sigh of resignation, it’s common to see grim climate news met with the quip:
“Faster than we thought.”
It’s become a joke because facing the reality of what it means is intolerable. Over and over again, we are reminded how our collective experiment in atmospheric terraforming is accelerating unexpectedly quickly. Old models are compared to the new reality and the results drive an inescapable conclusion: it’s all coming to a head faster than we thought.
This truth is driven home by the relentless drumbeat of once-in-a-century climatic events that seem to strike every couple of months at this point. A 2022 Nature News feature commenting on that years IPCC report bore the grim headline: Climate change is hitting the planet faster than scientists originally thought . It’s not necessarily that the world is getting warmer faster, or CO2 concentrations are accelerating unexpectedly (in fact, a retrospective analysis of models going back to the 1970s found that, with respect to temperature, climate models have been pretty good). It’s the secondary, emergent effects that seem to be accelerating. The Vancouver Sun reports that the surge in catastrophic wildfires that damaged British Columbia arrived “decades sooner than expected”. Rates of sea-level rise and coastal flooding are exceeding historical estimates for the East Coast, and the loss of polar ice is accelerating “faster than we thought.” The Thwaites Glacier, colloquially known as the “Doomsday Glacier” because of it’s potential to facilitate catastrophic sea level rise, appears to be fracturing faster than anticipated, suggesting the possibility of a shattering breakdown rather than a gradual, slow melt. The same IPCC report mentioned above estimates that the consequences of incremental warming above 1.5 degrees are likely to have more severe impacts than had previously been believed.
For me, and I suspect many others, this grim reality was made inescapably visceral this summer. As the Northern Hemisphere warmed, the Internet was transfixed by the incredible temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean. Day by day, we watched the curve begin to drift higher and higher, before suddenly beginning a vertiginous climb in mid-May. First past all existing records, and then past the limits of what anyone had imagined. Dr. Michael Sparrow (head of the World Meteorological Organization's world climate research department) described the anomaly as “much higher than anything the models predicted”. The graphic showing the North Atlantic Sea Surface Anomaly went viral over the summer in a way that technical data visualizations almost never do, with one Tweet getting over six million views and thousands of shares. Ultimately, the North Atlantic achieved heights that staggered scientists and laypeople alike. The exact reason for this incredible climb is debated (it’s an El Nino year, recent changes to tanker ship fuel standards may have increased sunlight hitting the ocean, etc), but what’s not up for debate is how completely unprepared many of us were to see it in action. I saw Floridians describe the experience of wading in the Atlantic Ocean as feeling like a hot tub, and there were areas of shallow seas that reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit, which may have been not just a local record, but a global one.
When I was a kid, just a short two decades ago, climate change was something to be feared and responded to, but it was also very safely off in the future. Statistics like like “by the end of the century”, or “by the year 2075” were common and there was a sense that, even if everything went bad, it wasn’t going to get bad any time soon. We should address it, for the sake of future generations, but I don’t think there was any widespread sense that it had to be addressed for us.
But now, six months before my thirtieth birthday, it has become absolutely undeniable that climate change (or climate crisis, or climate catastrophe) isn’t just an issue for our children or grandchildren. It’s an issue for us. And I’m not just using “us” to refer exclusively to homo sapiens either.
The constant drumbeat of “faster than we thought” has surreal echos another trend that I’ve been curious about for years.
As a neuroscientist (or at least, someone who got their PhD in neuroscience), I’ve always had a passing interest in non-human cognition. As I’ve casually followed the literature over the years, I’ve noticed an similar refrain: over and over again, studies come out showing that animals (of all kinds) are “smarter than we thought.” As David Robson, in the New Scientist wrote in 2021: “Human-like intelligence in animals is far more common than we thought.” It’s a kind of reverse-echo of the mantra of climate doom. Everywhere we look, from bugs, to birds, to fish, we recognize that intelligence (maybe even sentience) has actually been there all a long. Nature is alive with the sparks of intelligent consciousness.
This is more than just a interesting conceptual symmetry though. As climate change accelerates and its consequences reverberate through both the natural and man-made worlds, the a bitter irony is that we are waking up to the incredible complexity of the world around us, just as it begins to come apart at the seams. As the natural world begins to fray, we are only just now beginning to realize how brilliant and glorious what we’re losing really is.
This creates a bizarre form of psychic whiplash where the intelligence of animals is horribly juxtaposed by increasing instability and collapse of their world.
One day we learn that honey bees have a concept of numerical zero (a feat of cognitive power that is mind-boggling coming from an insect the smaller than my thumb, and which took humans thousands of years to work out), and then learn the next day that the population of wild bees (who make up the majority of native pollinators) are cratering, with as many as one in four species facing risk of extinction in 2017.
Or perhaps one day an article drops detailing how widespread intelligence is among birds (and not just in long-lauded corvids and parrots, but even among small songbirds like chickadees and finches), and then another appears detailing how those same song birds are experiencing catastrophic population collapse. A heartbreaking study by the Cornell Lab or Ornithology reported that the continental United States has lost three billion (yes, with a “b”) breeding adults. In local surveys, some specific species of birds have collapsed by 97%. The loss of three billion birds would be a tragedy regardless of how smart they are, but it’s hard not to feel a peculiar punch to the gut upon realizing that those three billion lights that got snuffed out where actually a lot brighter than anyone realized at the time.
Perhaps the most radical challenge to our cultural assessment of animal intelligence come from the work of Dr. Culum Brown, a professor of biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Dr. Brown has spent considerable time working on the problem of fish intelligence, and his work presents a pretty compelling argument that fish are vastly more intelligent than our culture assumes. Fish are generally placed firmly at the root of the evolutionary tree of vertebrates, believed to have evolved well before all the interesting “higher order cognition” associated with mammals. However, Browns work (published in Fish intelligence, sentience, and ethics, and helpfully summarized in an accessible interview in Vox) shows that this is far from the case. Fish can rapidly learn new behaviors and remember them for their entire natural lifespans (so much for the meme of a 3-second memory). Fish also appear to be capable of social learning (with groups of fish learning faster than fish trained on their own), and can learn from merely observing other fish. Researchers have pushed this concept to its limits, finding that some coral reef fish have multi-generational transmission of information, with new generations learning from observing the behavioral patterns of their elders. It may seem provocative to refer to this as something resembling “culture” (which most people generally assume is a uniquely human phenomenon), but in fact, the whole concept of animal culture is an active area of research. Putative cultures have been observed in non-human primates, birds, cetaceans (whales and dolphins), and of course, fish.
You know what’s coming next: the discovery of structured social interactions and complex cognition in fish is horribly juxtaposed by the appalling condition of the world’s ocean environments. The coral reefs that many of these fish call home are experiencing catastrophic collapses in the form of mass coral bleaching events. Bleaching occurs when stressed corals expel the symbiotic algae that normally lives inside the polyps, leaving them a stark, bone-white color, and the frequency of these events appears to be accelerating (there’s “faster than we thought” rearing it’s ugly head again). A historical analysis published in Science found that, globally, coral bleaching events are occurring as much as five times more frequently as compared to 40 years ago, and the inter-event interval has fallen by as much as half. Relentless over-fishing has gotten so bad that some scientists are seriously discussing the possibility of a collapse of global fisheries, which would have catastrophic impacts that would reverberate through the oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems. And of course, the sea itself is becoming carbonic as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acidifies the water and dissolves snails and shellfish in their shells. Even the foundations of the ocean food chain, tiny diatoms, are being negatively impacted by ocean acidification, and any serious decline in diatoms could have negative ripple effects throughout the entire system. Incidentally, in another echo of “faster than we thought”, for years scientists had assumed that diatoms would be resistant to the acidification of the ocean water, but some recent results suggest that, perhaps predictably, they’re far more vulnerable than was initially believed.
Once again, we are only beginning to appreciate the fullness of Nature as we watch it slip away.
There’s a sense in which I think that both of these trends, “faster than we thought” and “smarter than we thought”, come from a similar place: our inherent difficulty in understanding and wrangling with the realities of complex systems. Especially in cases where assumptions of simplicity are financially lucrative. As science progresses, we learn over and over again that previously-held beliefs about Nature were, in retrospect, grossly oversimplified: the Earth is not the center of Creation, but rather one of billions of planets orbiting average, main-sequence star in a cosmos teaming with galaxies. Human health cannot be reduced down to four basic humors, but is instead an intricate process that scales across orders of magnitude: from the molecular machinery of genetics, to global coordination of billions of neurons across the surface of the cortex. And animals are not simply soulless automatons put on Earth for human consumption – they’re so much more then that.
We forget about this complexity at our peril though. It was the belief that Nature is “simple” and unchangeable that made the prospect of filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide palatable: if the skies and seas have an unlimited capacity to absorb carbon with no consequence, then why not build a global civilization runs on industrial-scale combustion? You can just route the emissions to the great planetary /dev/null in the sky and never think about it again. Whatever early concerns scientists studying the Greenhouse Effect might have had were uniformly ignored: the wealth being generated by burning carbon was too great to ignore, and the concerns about the long-term impacts too abstract and removed from daily experience. By 1950, humanity has been burning fossil fuels at scale for over a century and the climate didn’t appear to be noticeably different to anyone. Of course, it turned out that our atmospheric system does not have an unlimited capacity to absorb carbon, but at this point we have bootstrapped our species to the literal moon on fossil carbon, and despite encouraging signs in the green energy sector, existing trends don’t look likely to keep us under the 1.5 degree threshold generally agreed to be required to avoid truly catastrophic consequences. Our initial assumption of simplicity has inadvertently locked us into a wickedly complex problem. Even as climate models have become more complete and holistic, scientists are still discovering missing features: a 2022 paper by Ripple et al., showed that there are a number of potentially catastrophic feedback loops that are not generally accounted for in existing models. Every one of these non-linear feedback looks is an opportunity for an unexpected acceleration pushing us forward faster than we thought.
In the sphere of animal intelligence, the assumption of simplicity (that non-human animals were essentially mindless automata with no real “spark” of intelligence or consciousness) has metastasized into an industry that is morally beyond appalling. To take just one tragic case study: pigs are ferociously intelligent: they can be taught to play games, appear to have a sense of self, and perform complex social cognition. But in factories, they can spend their whole lives living in tiny cages, unable to turn around, never seeing the sun. Similar stories can be found for almost any animal: chickens, cows, even fish. And, for those readers who are rolling their eyes at my bleeding-heart liberal do-gooder concern for animal welfare, it’s worth remembering that our instrumental approach to animals and unwillingness to consider that they have needs can also negatively impact us. High-density factory farms are breeding grounds for novel potential pandemics, and the relentless use of antibiotic drugs is driving the development of horrible infections resistant to our best medical interventions. You may not care how much a pig suffered on its way to becoming your pork chop, but you’ll probably care about how much you’ll suffer if you’re unlucky enough to contract an antibiotic-resistant infection. Just as with the climate, an initial assumption of simplicity, that animal agriculture could be scaled indefinitely with no emergent or knock-on effects has proved to be catastrophically wrong.
Usually, this is the part of the think-piece where the author presents some kind of insightful synthesis of everything and proposes an elegant (or at least, emotionally satisfying) path forward that helpfully confirms all the biases of the reader.
I have nothing of the sort of offer here.
Just like knowing the physics of gravity is of no help to someone plunging off a cliff, the idea that there’s a symmetry to the “faster than we thought” pattern in climate change and the “smarter than we thought” pattern in animal cognition contains no actionable insight. Whatever compelled me to write this out and share it is ultimately more of an aesthetic experience than anything practical: feeling two ideas “click” in a moment of “ah ha” insight. Seeing a symmetry and then looking behind the curtain to see if they are both reflections of some deeper feature of the world. But the world isn’t getting less complex, and if I’m being honest, I don’t have a tremendous amount of faith that humanity is going to pull climate victory from the jaws of defeat at this point. So perhaps the best take away from this is a change in perspective.
I’m writing this on the coast of Maine, staying with my partner’s grandmother, in a house that has a beautiful view of the Kennebec River flowing down towards Phippsburg. Every morning for the last week I have marveled at the beautiful sunlight that illuminates the salt marshes and watched various families of ducks wheeling through the air. And after a year of wildfire smoke, COVID-sickness, a social media feed choked by footage of wars, and a recent historic storm in New England, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find myself appreciating the view from the window more. Whatever it is like to be a duck, I feel pretty confident that it’s probably a lot richer, and perhaps more akin to my own consciousness than I’ve ever imagined. But that beautiful interplay of water, reeds, and pine trees is also a lot more fragile than I would ever like to admit.
