The Oil Drum

A new study shows that the stress of overcrowding and lack of resources trigger primitive parts of the brain in mammals that activate aggression and lots of bad stuff.  Our genes are not optimal for the present situation.

However I came accross this interesting article;

General Adaption Syndrome
(cf. Selye, 1974)

Evolutionary safeguards are triggered in social species when populations grow exponentially and stress levels rise. This results in a predictable spectrum of physiological and behavioural responses that invariably reduce the population's fertility below replacement level. The Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye in 1936 named these responses the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), and many other studies have corroborated Selye's findings. A GAS decline typically appears well before famine and disease begin to cull the population, and its hormonal `fingerprint' often persists in wild mouse populations long after the population has shrunk to preplague levels and the habitat has recovered. GAS has led to the local extinction of a species in some instances.

Why should this concern us? There are four reasons:

1. There is no evidence that we are fundamentally distinct from other species. We too are shaped, driven and manipulated, both directly and indirectly, by our DNA, and no basic distinction has ever been detected in the biological fabric of our bodies --or in our behavioural drives.

2. The graph of our population growth for most of the past century was exponential and precisely mirrored that of any mammal entering what we call a plague phase.

3. All plagues end in similar fashion, with a population collapse that mirrors their exponential growth. Such an abrupt termination is essential to the evolutionary process. If it did not occur, `successful' species could proliferate indefinitely, endangering the existence of all life on Earth. This does not happen.

4. It follows that evolution's auto-collapse mechanism must therefore reside in the evolutionary process itself and persist via genetic replication. I would argue that this safeguard is essentially expressed via Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome. I would further argue that our species now displays most of the GAS symptoms and has already begun its GAS decline. And most significantly, many of our fertility inhibitors are associated with either a surfeit or dearth of hydrogen.

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