The inheritance of energy and the evolution of unsustainability

Abstract

Across contemporary and historical human groups, there is variation in how cultures interact with the environment and this variation is inherited through culture. Some human-environment relationships maximize group fitness relative to other relationships. Thus, there is heritable, fitness-associated variation in human-environment interactions and so human-environment interactions may be understood to be an evolved trait. However, one fitness-maximizing human-environment relationship could be unsustainable resource extraction. Anthroecological theory proposes that human cultures and genotypes have been selected for unsustainability, although several mechanisms have been proposed for how this selection may have worked. Here, I extend anthroecological theory and argue that energy inheritances are critical to understanding the evolution of human unsustainability and the human-environment relationship. I develop an agent-based model to illustrate the hypotheses and find that the ability to pass energy to successive generations has impacts on sustainability. Simulations in which energy cannot be passed to subsequent generations are more stable and sustainable than those that can pass energy to offspring, but simulations in which energy cannot be inherited evolve higher reproductive rates than those with energy inheritance. A significant loss of diversity occurs in the simulations and I tentatively compare this loss to the cultural hegemony associated with historic colonization.