The usual invocation of "human nature" is that people are X based on our chromosomes, that one can look at human behaviors and say "it must be in the DNA." This is, I suppose, what one can read in Steven Pinker books, though from limited exposure I know that I can't stand Steven Pinker so I don't really know for sure.

At any rate, the refutation of what Richard C. Lewontin calls "biology as ideology," or genetic determinism, is offered in an anthology by Kathleen R. Gibson titled "Complexities; Beyond Nature and Nurture" titled "Epigenesis, Brain Plasticity, and Behavioral Versatility: Alternatives to Standard Evolutionary Psychology Models." The point of this essay is that people's brains differ from those of other animals in such a way that we can't simply skip over culture, free will, et cetera in attributing behavior directly to DNA. People are capable of: 1) higher order reasoning, 2) repurposing portions of their brains, and 3) lifelong learning in ways in which other animals aren't. This is why we are not simple reflections of our DNA.

Gibson's paper is of course narrowly focused upon evolutionary psychology. For us, however, what matters is that people are basically tool-makers, and that people are (like the rest of the natural world, and, yes, people ARE part of "nature") fragile. The first of these things is a byproduct of the higher-order reasoning capabilities, though our tool-making abilities didn't have to turn out in the specific way they did. Human fragility, on the other hand, is a sort of baseline quality -- like any other animal, people are mortal.

What does it mean to say that people are fragile? When something is fragile, that means that it can be broken beyond repair. We know that the rest of the world is fragile; this can be ascertained from a history of wild animals, whose populations have suffered precipitous declines around the world since 1960. Even the oceans are fragile; they're being fished out so that sometimes-mercury-laden fish can be placed upon dinner tables. Meanwhile coral reefs are disappearing as significant increases in Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide endowment acidify the oceans. As regards human fragility, I have to regard the extended period of human childhood as the example par excellence of this. People (unlike other animals) live in thinking communities because they have to go through childhood.

As for people being tool-makers, one of the byproducts of our advanced tool-making is our ability to use it to kill each other. The last century saw this ability on full display in two catastrophic world wars, the first of which ended in an influenza pandemic which killed millions of people.

So here today we're on the verge of another influenza pandemic. The panic is tangible; Italy is on lockdown, the state of Washington has banned large gatherings, the NBA is considering eliminating fans from games, the Presidential campaigns have ground to a halt. As for Italy, we see this on Facebook:

I am writing to you from Bergamo, Italy, at the heart of the coronavirus crisis. The news media in the US has not captured the severity of what is happening here. I am writing this post because each of you, today, not the government, not the school district, not the mayor, each individual citizen has the chance, today to take actions that will deter the Italian situation from becoming your own country’s reality. The only way to stop this virus is to limit contagion. And the only way to limit contagion is for millions of people to change their behavior today.

If you are in Europe or the US you are weeks away from where we are today in Italy.

I can hear you now. “It’s just a flu. It only affects old people with preconditions”

There are 2 reasons why Coronavirus has brought Italy to it’s knees. First it is a flu is devastating when people get really sick they need weeks of ICU – and, second, because of how fast and effectively it spreads. There is 2 week incubation period and many who have it never show symptoms.

When Prime Minister Conte announced last night that the entire country, 60 million people, would go on lock down, the line that struck me most was “there is no more time.” Because to be clear, this national lock down, is a hail mary. What he means is that if the numbers of contagion do not start to go down, the system, Italy, will collapse.

Why? Today the ICUs in Lombardy are at capacity – more than capacity. They have begun to put ICU units in the hallways. If the numbers do not go down, the growth rate of contagion tells us that there will be thousands of people who in a matter of a week? two weeks? who will need care. What will happen when there are 100, or a 1000 people who need the hospital and only a few ICU places left?

On Monday a doctor wrote in the paper that they have begun to have to decide who lives and who dies when the patients show up in the emergency room, like what is done in war. This will only get worse.

There are a finite number of drs, nurses, medical staff and they are getting the virus. They have also been working non-stop, non-stop for days and days. What happens when the drs, nurses and medical staff are simply not able to care for the patients, when they are not there?

And finally for those who say that this is just something that happens to old people, starting yesterday the hospitals are reporting that younger and younger patients – 40, 45, 18, are coming in for treatment.

You have a chance to make a difference and stop the spread in your country. Push for the entire office to work at home today, cancel birthday parties, and other gatherings, stay home as much as you can. If you have a fever, any fever, stay home. Push for school closures, now. Anything you can do to stop the spread, because it is spreading in your communities – there is a two week incubation period – and if you do these things now you can buy your medical system time.

And for those who say it is not possible to close the schools, and do all these other things, locking down Italy was beyond anyone’s imagination a week ago.

Soon you will not have a choice, so do what you can now.

Please share.

It would have been nice if people had focused upon their fragility, and looked earlier to stop the juggernaut of global conquest and thereafter to find ways in which we could all live in small, tightly-knit, communities in which values were appropriate to collective human flourishing.

Medicine and sanitation might have been appropriate things to develop as opposed to the standard overinvestment in tools of warfare. Common sense might have provided appropriate collectivist alternatives to capitalist or state-capitalist ideology.

Instead what developed was what environmental historians call the Great Acceleration, an anomalous development of human tool-making in which ecological limitations were discarded in favor of the capitalist system's imperative of endless "growth." Nothing like the Great Acceleration occurred over the previous 200,000 years of human existence on the planet -- but it's happening now. The Great Acceleration, like capitalism, is not a fact of human nature; it's a confluence of several things, all of which can be attributed to the hierarchical societies which conquered the world over the past five centuries -- capitalist "growth," elite ignorance of human fragility, conquest itself, new tools of warfare among them. For nearly all of human history there was no Great Acceleration; that's the dominant fact.

Part of this Great Acceleration is the great acceleration in human populations. Now, "populationism" has itself become a problem; it's the ideology which preaches that there are too many people, without reference to the cause of there being too many people -- capitalist "growth." The overpopulation catch, however, is that if there are too many people, there can also be a dieoff of too many people, and nobody wants to live through that. Well that's what the coronavirus has become -- panic in light of what appears to be a fated mass dieoff. We will need all of our human nature to deal with it.