One of the sophisticated, yet simple sounding, lessons in ecology is that natural selection does not / cannot foresee a future selection pressure.
In the past, human cleverness modifying materials was among our more successful adaptations, right up there with long-distance running and social groups.
Now we have reason to rue outcomes of our clever material modifications: toxic waste, scarcity of essential resources, and this dreadful thermal alteration of the planet.
As I posted over at Climate Progress, we could go the way of the cyanobacteria, once the prevalent form of
life, which produced so much oxygen as a byproduct that the world’s
atmosphere shifted in favor of other life forms.
Cyanobacteria are still
around, but they don’t pretend to have authority over the earth. Or
they aren’t telling.
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