Rebecca Costa

Today, scholars and scientists who study ancient civilizations cite environmental factors, overpopulation, wars, disease, politics, and energy and food shortages as the reasons for collapse. And although these explanations are factual, they also leave out the single most important principle of life on earth: Evolution. The process and rate at which bio­logical change occurs between one generation and the next.

The principles governing the speed at which the human organism can biologically adapt offer us the single greatest insight into why civilizations succeed and fail as well as the most reliable preview of our own destiny.

Biological capabilities - the genetic features of each human organism - represent the only common denominator in every civilization and, therefore, must necessarily play a role in every civilization's outcome.

Yet, despite knowing this, when it comes to explaining how and why civilizations decline, we continue to account for every factor except evolution. We treat the discoveries of Charles Darwin in 1859 as if they relate only to our cave-dwelling ancestors or animals crawling around the Galapagos Islands. Evolution has become marginalized; ­imprisoned in the backrooms of zoology departments, treated as the precursor to microbiology, and relegated to what we see in our rearview mirrors rather than what lies ahead of us through the windshield.

Why has evolution been left out of the conversation?

Because for more than 150 years, scientists have failed to show how the principles governing evolution explain the rapid progress of human societies for a brief period, followed by their paralysis and cataclysmic failure. Somewhere along the line, biologists handed the task of under­standing the relationship between evolution and modern man to psychologists and sociologists, who quickly formed theories of their own. So the ramifications of evolution on day-to-day life, public policy, and persistent, irresolvable problems were never solidified. As a result, aside from a few enthusiasts in the ecology movement and their naturalists brethren, evolutionary principles have managed to become irrelevant.

Yet, to solve the highly complex, dangerous global problems we face today, we must first recognize the crucial relationship between evolutionary change and the modem human condition. To finally answer the question scholars have wrestled with for centuries - why do human beings compulsively follow the same pattern of collapse again and again and again - we must come to terms with how we are wired to behave, irrespective of nationality, race, intelligence, wealth, or political convenience. We must look to the physiological capabilities, as well as the limitations, of the human organism itself.

History makes it clear that we hit some obstacle that causes progress to slow long before the specific event(s) blamed for the collapse of a civilization -some recurring obstruction that is both natural and predictable: The uneven rate of change between the slow evolution of human biology and the rapid rate at which societies advance eventually causes progress lo come lo a standstill.

This excerpt is from Rebecca's book The Watchman's Rattle - for more information, click here