Climate Change v. Maximum Power Principle and Path Dependency: an Evolutionary Trap

Abstract

Drastic and immediate changes in everyone's behaviour are required to combat climate change, yet this is not happening. The initiatives taken are insufficient, as demonstrated by the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and the global temperature of the Earth's surface. So why are the necessary changes so slow to come about? One emerging hypothesis is that an evolutionary trap is blocking them. Human ethologists believe that humans have innate, instinctive tendencies to behave in certain ways produced by natural selection in a context very different from the current one. These tendencies were adaptive in the environment of the time. In today's impersonal, mass-produced, industrialised societies, however, these instinctive tendencies are proving to be an obstacle to the changes imposed by global warming as they lead to unsustainable behaviour. The evolutionary trap hypothesis suggests that legal initiatives aimed at combating climate change should leverage a redirection of innate human tendencies rather than simply prohibiting the behaviours stimulated by them.