A Darwinian Guide to Surviving the Anthropocene: Between Hopium and Doom Scrolling

ABSTRACT

Coping with the impacts of global climate change on the biosphere in general and humanity in particular requires that we shift attention from economic principles of sustainability to evolutionary principles of survival. Darwinism provides a third way between unattainable utopia and unacceptable apocalypse. The Four Laws of Biotics provide Darwinian guidelines for interacting with the biosphere and improving humanity’s chances of survival as a technological species. The biosphere is a complex evolutionary system comprising species that generate, store, and use their own potential to survive. This allows the biosphere to continue to cope with change by changing, making ecosystems robust, not fragile. This is the only means by which the biosphere has survived previous episodes of climate change, and it has never failed. Conservation policies need to shift from treating the biosphere as a material commons to treating the biosphere as an evolutionary commons. Within a survivable biosphere, humanity’s future can be enhanced by (1) implementing the economics of well-being, (2) reducing population density through climate migration into rural areas, revitalizing them into circularized economies, (3) re-growing sustainably by creating networks of cooperating circular economies, not consolidating into densely populated urban centers, and (4) ensuring social institutions are responsive to the desires of the grassroots. Technological urbanized humans can alter their behavior now at great expense and difficulty, extending the benefits of the Anthropocene, or can fail to act, and face imminent collapse.

KEYWORDS:
Biosphere dynamics; circular economy; environmental policy; species adaptation

Anthropocene humanity is heading for a fall. Some believe technological innovation will produce the capacity to control the planet sufficiently to save us from ourselves. Others believe that humanity has gone rogue and will des troy itself. The notion that we have only two choices-unattainable utopia and unacceptable apocalypse-is due to the mistaken belief that humans can control the planet. This false dichotomy creates a sense of crisis where there need not be one. A survivable third option will take determination, rationality and self-awareness to achieve.

Decades of good intentions have failed to deliver on hopes for a sustainable future. Humanity cannot stop, reverse, or even slow global climate change. Global climate change is an evolutionary feature of the biosphere, a by-pro duct of biological activities and affects all life on the planet. While understanding the nature and extent of the threat to humanity requires the knowledge of physicists, chemists, geologists and atmospheric and ocean scientists, policies for coping with the threat must be fundamentally biological in nature. Our survival will be based on how well we anticipate and, like any species, adapt. That will require changing the narrative from control and its corollary, sustainability, to evolution and its corollary, survivability.

Darwinian evolution (1) is the only theory of survival that we have; (2) is the only natural process that has allowed the biosphere to survive massive environmental perturbations and re-diversify; and (3) has never failed. What follows is based on Agosta and Brooks (2020) and Brooks and Agosta (2024a) and excerpted with modification from Brooks and Agosta (2024b). Our goal is to spread the message widely in as diverse arenas possible to motivate researchers, resource managers, policy makers and conservationists to ensure their efforts are well-grounded in Darwinian principles.

Darwinism 101: How Nature Works

“…there are two factors; namely, the nature of the organism and the nature of the conditions [italics ours]. The former seems to be much more the important; for nearly similar variations sometimes arise under, as far as we can judge, dissimilar conditions; and, on the other hand, dissimilar variations arise under conditions which appear to be nearly uniform.” - Darwin (1872).

Living systems are time machines. Organisms exploit their surroundings through metabolic processes, bringing in high grade energy, which does work in the system, then exporting the residue back into the surroundings as heat and other forms of low-grade energy. This creates Circular Time. Inheritance allows organisms to explore their surroundings, creating Linear Time through processes that produce a distinction between past and future. The only “goal” of life is indefinite persistence. For this, life must be evolvable, and that requires exploitation without losing the ability to explore. This is the nature of the organism.

Material inheritance includes information specifying the capacity for organisms to impose themselves on their surroundings for survival. Potential Capacity Space comprises all possible outcomes of reproduction. Realized capacity space comprises those possibilities that actually occur. Reproduction increases realized capacity, but potential capacity increases more, ensuring an ever-present realm of possibilities for the inheritance system to explore, within the context of the opportunities that emerge from the nature of the conditions. Where capacity intersects with opportunity we get fitness space. Fundamental fitness space for any species represents all places on the planet where members of the species could survive and reproduce. The portion of fundamental fitness space accessed by organisms at any given time and place is realized fitness space; the difference between these is proportional to how “sloppy” fitness space is, the evolutionary potential to do something new when conditions change (Agosta 2006, Agosta and Klemens 2008). This is Darwin’s nature of the conditions.

Natural selection occurs in proportion to the degree of misfit between organisms and their environments (Brooks 2011, Agosta and Brooks 2020). It arises from the conservative and largely autonomous nature of inheritance systems, routinely producing more organisms than the surroundings can support. The key to resolving conflicts created by this reproductive overrun is ecological fitting (Janzen 1985, Brooks and McLennan 2002, Agosta 2006, Agosta and Klemens 2008, 2009, Agosta and Brooks 2020), an umbrella term for the various ways that living systems cope with the conditions by exploring new opportunities in fitness space using information they have inherited from their ancestors.

Darwinian evolution “works” because it has no central control mechanism. Natural selection does not create anything and has no central control; it is a passive force, a blunt instrument that eliminates only those organisms that are incapable of reproducing at any given place and time, allowing many variants to survive. “The environment” is not a central control mechanism because the inheritance systems of each species are insensitive to environmental conditions, including other species. The conditions are indifferent to any species’ pain and suffering and aspirations. But life has an autonomous drive to survive facilitated by a built-in capacity for oscillating between exploring and exploiting the surroundings. It lurches along, always out of synch with the surroundings, but always evolvable with the capacity to cope with change by changing. It is never “extinction,” it is “extinction and renewal.” Every mass extinction has been followed by a mass evolutionary re-set, fueled by the evolutionary potential contained in the previous biosphere. The old biosphere lost many species, but those that remained sustained a transition to a new biosphere.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Or is it? In Darwinian evolution, necessity is never the mother of invention. Necessity is the mother of desperately trying to cope with changes in the conditions using preexisting capacities, fleeing if you cannot cope with the changes, and dying if you cannot flee. Control is the antithesis of evolution. Evolution is about survival of the fit (those that reproduce are fit enough) not the fittest. Life is a complex evolutionary system where persistence in time, not growth or optimal adaptation is key to survival. Species comprising organisms that are fit enough for survival now and may be fit enough for survival when conditions change are more successful evolutionarily than species comprising organisms that are fittest now and go extinct with the next change.

Despite being indifferent to any given species, Darwinian evolution is a hopeful phenomenon. It is at its best in a crisis - whatever it has on hand is deployed as much as possible to see what might work; exploring is at a premium, in response to conflict and changing conditions, moving away from the conflict and change. When conditions are stable and equable, new variants that are fit enough to survive but do not solve any immediate problems accumulate. Those variants represent the potential for survival when new changes in the conditions occur. Sufficiency, not efficiency, is the fundamental criterion of evolution.

How did We get into this Mess?

Humans of various forms have existed for about 150,000 generations, and for 149,250 generations they were an increasingly diverse and widespread Darwinian system. The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was a minor table-clearing episode in the history of life on this planet, but its aftermath provided novel opportunities for humans. Those who survived the LGM lived in unglaciated regions where the climate was stable and equable for nearly 10,000 years. During that time, they accumulated innovations, especially about domestication and agriculture. The way humans began to employ that knowledge at the end of the LGM represented a critical turning point in history, shifting us increasingly from a Darwinian to an Anthropocene existence.

There are five popular definitions of the Anthropocene that each represent part of a larger story. The Great Transition began about 15,000 years ago, with agriculture and domestication emerging as a way of life from earlier knowledge of natural history and plant and animal husbandry. This set the stage for The Great Amplification, about 12,000 years ago, with humans producing more food than needed. High intensity agriculture and domestication reinforced the construction of permanent settlements and the idea of staying in one place no matter what the conditions. From a Darwinian perspective, both these episodes represented enhanced exploitation of local resources with, ominously, an early erosion of the capacity to cope with change by changing, to simply leave a place when the surroundings dictated it.

Increasingly, humans lived permanent sedentary lives. Whenever a natural disaster made a settlement unlivable, however, people still employed the Darwinian default response to abandon the site and seek better living conditions elsewhere. Eventually, urban settings grew and became increasingly prone to collapsing during natural disasters until about 10,000 years ago, when some humans exhibited a new behavior. Rather than abandoning a place when conditions changed, they decided to take what they needed to remain in place from their neighbors. War as a lifestyle thus arose out of fear and weakness, not strength. Taking refuge from attacks in increasingly fortified cities, humans began to believe they could control their futures from behind walls. Evolutionary history never repeats itself, but for the past 9,000 years or so human history has. At some point we committed ourselves to a perpetual arms race that, rather than leading to control, created conflict with no resolution. No one truly wins a war; they simply stop it. During “peacetime,” conflict simmers beneath the surface and eventually re-emerges. Warfare is not “part of human nature,” it is a human choice we made about 9,000 years ago and to which we have become so accustomed we think it is an evolutionary imperative. That has led to a fallacious justification for constant war. In De Re Millitari published in the 4th or 5th century AD, Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus wrote Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum (“Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war.”). This encapsulates The Great Tragedy of the Anthropocene.

The commitment to war set the stage for The Great Deflection. The generally accepted arbitrary date for the beginning of this fourth episode of the Anthropocene is 1753, the year in which the first industrial grade steam engine came into operation. This marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, triggering a massive increase in technological innovation and demand for human labor. People flocked to the now industrialized urban centers from rural agricultural settings believing they could have a better life in the cities and factories, spawning a period of intense exploitation. This led to increasing food insecurity as agricultural areas became depleted, decreasing food production, while urban populations outgrew local food supplies. Technological innovations amplified high-production agriculture, but the overall result was an increase in the number of poor and undernourished urban inhabitants.

The human costs of growth in emerging industrial urban centers were increasingly offset by importing food and raw materials from other places, sometimes produced by slave labor, sometimes simply taken with the aid of superior weapons. The proportion of humans engaged in exploiting distant conditions to benefit their growing, and increasingly static, home settings increased. These conflicts by proxy fueled colonial activities by, and warfare among the newly industrial countries, culminating in two world wars in the first half of the twentieth century.

After the end of the Second World War, technological innovation exploded during a period of relative peace when “times were good.” This produced The Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene beginning around 1950. Furthermore, during the first generation following the end of World War II, most of the places that had been subjugated by the industrialized colonial powers were able to regain some degree of autonomy. By this time, many humans had adopted the belief that technological innovation would allow us to control nature and ourselves, solving all the problems that led to war. Others recognized that technological growth was at the very least a double-edged sword. But the image of magi cal innovations leading to heroic solutions to humanity’s problems was too attractive and humanity largely invested its resources and its hopes in salvation by technology.

Today it is clear that Anthropocene humanity is in a mess, one largely of our own creation. We sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.

Can We Get Out of the Mess?

The Four Laws of Biotics

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a reaction to the horrors of WWII. Humanity now needs a Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Responsibilities based on the potential horrors of not responding to the impacts of humans on the environment during the Anthropocene. A declaration rooted in Darwinism would be based on what we call the Four Laws of Biotics (Agosta and Brooks 2020, Brooks and Agosta 2024a, 2024b), providing guidelines for how Anhropocene humanity should behave if we wish to survive indefinitely.

The Zeroth Law

Humanity may not harm the biosphere, or by inaction, allow the biosphere to come to harm. The most fundamental form of “harm” is restricting the biosphere’s ability to evolve.

We use “zeroth” because this law is so fundamental it creates the context for the remaining three. The biosphere has an indefinite capacity to survive. Its constituent species are evolvable, allowing them to cope with change by changing. At the same time, evolution does not favor particular species. Whatever works, persists; whatever doesn’t, goes extinct. The biosphere is more robust than any individual species, and evolution is indifferent to the fate of any given species.

While humanity faces an existential crisis, the biosphere is indifferent, no matter how self-important humans feel. Coping with large-scale climate change and other perturbations will produce a spike in unanticipated and unwanted events - charismatic species may go extinct, new diseases will emerge, biological control programs will fail, local ecosystems will change species compositions and ecological interactions. The biosphere will keep doing what it always does, coping with change by changing, as species alternately accumulate and use evolutionary potential.

The biosphere has a built-in capacity to adapt to global climate change and is already doing so without asking our permission. This must guide conservation and management decisions and must be better internalized by the research community. Observed responses to climate change include changes in behavior, growth, development, reproduction and physiology. These changes are often viewed as clear evidence that ecosystems are collapsing, giving cause to intervene and stop it. And yet, despite doom scrolling headlines, the impact of global climate change and other anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere does not constitute a “Sixth Major Mass Extinction” (Wiens and Saban 2025a, 2025b). Change is the expected outcome of an evolutionary system responding to changes in the conditions. It is a signal that the biosphere is robust, able to respond in ways that are sufficient for survival. While some species may go extinct, many more will survive. Reduced productivity, geographic range, or population size for a given species may be an indication that evolution is underway. When we intervene with policies designed to stop evolution, we violate the zeroth law in a manner similar to violating the political doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

The 1^st Law

Humanity may not injure any portion of the biosphere or, through inaction, allow any portion of the biosphere to come to harm, except when required to do so in order to prevent greater harm to the biosphere itself. Humans should allow as much of the biosphere as possible to exist as Evolutionary Commons. We can, however, use some portions of the biosphere, and protect ourselves from others, so long as the core ability of the biosphere to cope with change by changing is not infringed.

Humans may manipulate parts of the biosphere in their favor, but only in a manner bounded by Darwinian principles that does do not take away its fundamental ability to cope with change by changing. This law helps us judge whether action is required when changes occur. Emotions must not cloud our understanding of the biosphere’s res ponse to change, even if we caused it. Policies that attempt to impose stasis on particular parts of the biosphere will res trict what we have called the evolutionary commons (Agosta and Brooks 2020, Brooks and Agosta 2024a, 2024b), and could make the situation worse. The Precautionary Principle states that incomplete knowledge is not a reason for inaction. In applying the Precautionary Principle, however, we need “stop rules” specifying criteria for knowing when to modify or terminate some actions. Compromise based on prevailing consensus and gradually implemented half-measures are the worst options. When unexpected outcomes occur, the consensus always turns out to be wrong. Humanity cannot afford for decision-makers to refuse to admit they were wrong and continue with business as usual.

The 2^nd Law

Humanity may exploit any portion of the biosphere, except where such exploitation would conflict with the first two laws. Humanity can use its understanding of the biosphere to determine the maximum amount of allowable exploitation.

Humans are part of the biosphere and cannot be separated from it. Like all organisms, humans are exploiters and explorers. They require resources to fuel metabolism to “stay alive” and thus degrade their surroundings. But that does not give us permission to maximally exploit the environment, using as many resources as possible as quickly as possible with no thought for the future. The constituent members of ecosystems form an interconnected metabolic economy. The degraded energy of one species is high-grade energy for another species; therefore, exploitation itself does not restrict the biosphere’s ability to cope with change. What harms the biosphere is maximum exploitation for unlimited growth. We are now seeing that cutting down forests to build the largest cities possible, as fast as possible, was short-term gain for long-term loss. The notion that it is possible to “control” the environment is a myth. Anthropogenic aspects of climate change are side-effects of attempts to engineer the biosphere. We pay for maximum exploitation by diminishing our capacity to explore new options when conditions change. The second law underscores that principles of sustainability can be effectively applied only in the context of the more fundamental need to survive.

The 3^rd Law

Humanity must protect its existence so long as such protection does not conflict with the first three laws. Humans cannot destroy the biosphere to preserve themselves. Humanity must live within its means or go extinct.

Humans require a viable biosphere. Maximizing unlimited growth is the quickest path to eliminating options to escape conflict no matter how much potential capacity technology may create. We need to change our behavior from the non-Darwinian principle of “hurry up and get larger” to the Darwinian principle of “slow down and live within your means.” It is possible for us to harm the biosphere enough to destroy humanity.

Global climate change today alters the fitness space for every species on the planet, including us. Those changes in the nature of the conditions will cause some species to go extinct but others will survive and proliferate. We are in the midst of an evolutionary reset - life will persist but nothing will ever be the same. The biosphere is already coping evolutionarily with climate change and anthropogenic activities.

If humans want to be part of what survives, they must learn how to live within their means, within the parameters of the evolving biosphere. The third law mandates that humanity take seriously the concerns for life on a finite planet articulated in Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972 see also Turner 2014, Nebel et al. 2024).

The Four Laws of Biotics and Human Survival

Species live in an eternal present, synchronizing with the pace of changing conditions only to the extent allowed by their inherited capacities and access to new opportunities. They cannot be “perfectly adapted” to the environment and never match environmental change completely. But evol vability relies only on being good enough to survive. Life on this planet has done a good enough job to diversify, survive and re-diversify for more than 4 billion years. The key to human sustainability is to adopt evolutionary guidelines for survival; then there is time to act in response to climate change without panic.

Humans in the Biosphere

The foundations of contemporary conservation biolo gy encompass the writings of Alexander von Humboldt at the end of the 18^th century to 20^th century classics such as Aldo Leopold’s 1949Sand County Almanac and Charles Elton’s 1958The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants. Emerging as a distinct field of study in the 1970s conservation biology became the primary arena for discussions about biodiversity and global climate change. Its approach to protecting and managing biodiversity involves two common non-Darwinian beliefs.

The first is the idea that we must protect nature because it is fragile, and any change can destroy its delicate balance. Nature is not fragile. The biosphere is dynamic, changeable and adaptable, not static; resilient, not brittle. The majority of biologists recognize that any appearance of stasis in nature is an illusion. But the message seems to have been missed by much of conservation biology and the public that relies on it for insight and understanding. The Gaia hypothesis of popular literature represents the biosphere as a set of coordinated subsystems working to maintain a system-level homeostasis-in some kind of mythical balance of nature. The idea is that without humans, the biosphere would exist in a timeless state of perfection. This motivates notions about “returning nature to the way it was,” based on a nostalgia for nature in a past state of “perfect balance” that never existed.

The butterfly effect is another popular metaphor for describing the biosphere’s presumed fragility. In this view, ecosystems are so delicate that the extinction of even one species can cause them to collapse. Edward Lorenz (1972) proposed the metaphor as a thought experiment in the context of predicting the weather. In theory, small changes in one part of the system-like a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil-could have large effects on the whole system-such as causing a tornado in Texas. The butterfly effect metaphor was co-opted by environmentalists as a true description of nature and as a dire warning about the loss of any species and need to maintain nature in its current or even return it to some previous state. Nature is a complex evolutionary system, so the butterfly effect is an extremely poor way to describe it.

Gaia and the Butterfly Effect are not appropriate metaphors for how nature works. What should replace them? In Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold (1949) presented an integrated view of contemporary humans and their interactions with nature from the perspective of a field biologist and naturalist operating within a Darwinian tradition. He asserted that the biosphere is robust, not fragile, capable of persisting indefinitely if its own evolutionary capacities are not restricted. He was among the first conservation biologists to place the responsibility for safeguarding the biosphere squarely on humans and identified high density human settlements as a major threat to the biosphere. He strongly criticized the notion that for-profit nature conservation could produce high density humans living sustainably with the environment. Instead, he advocated conservation based on evolutionary principles, the mutual survival of humans and the biosphere.

The biosphere is full of life, full of evolvable life, but it is not alive. The members of ecosystems act in their own behalf, free to explore new opportunities for survival when conditions change because they are not part of a superorganism. Ecosystems represent the collective evolutionary potential of all members, the evolutionary commons (Agosta and Brooks 2020, Brooks and Agosta 2024a, 2024b). Adopting the perspective of the evolutionary commons, embodied in the Four Laws, causes humans to recognize the evolutionary nature of the biosphere and be guided in the use of biodiversity by that. This provides a hopeful contrast with the material commons concept (Lloyd 1833, Hardin 1968, 1974, Ostrom et al. 1999) which envisions the biosphere as a marketplace of resources useful for humans, a never-changing inventory of goods and services available when needed. The concept essentially predicts the apocalypse, as founders and advocates recognized that in the face of a growing human population (Lloyd 1833), and without unprecedented regulation (Hardin 1968, 1974) and cooperation (Ostrom et al. 1999), humans would inevitably deplete the biosphere.

Complex systems are characterized by multiple levels of organization where higher levels generally are immune to perturbations at the lower levels, making them robust in the face of change. If one ant dies, the entire colony is unlikely to collapse. If one cell dies, a multicellular organism is gene rally unaffected. The same is also true for ecosystems and the emergent biosphere. With increasing complexity come the emergence of new levels of organization, the robustness of the whole system increasing in the face of lower-level perturbations. This reflects the fundamental indifference of evolution to any particular species.

Diversity itself is a source of robustness in complex systems which can be seen through averaging and diminishing returns to type. Having a diversity of types, be they genotypes within a population, species in an ecosystem, or stocks in a portfolio, provides some assurance against an uncertain future. Averaging is a way to reduce the probability of really bad outcomes for the whole system, despite bad outcomes for some of its constituent members. For the whole system, diversity can prevent performance from falling below a survivable threshold because the average performance of individuals is positive. Diminishing returns to type occurs when the marginal return in productivity of a particular type decreases with the more individuals of that type that are in the system. This is known as the diminishing marginal pro duct of labor in economics, where additional workers of the same type contribute diminishing returns to total production. In ecosystems, adding members of the same species might contribute to diminishing returns to ecosystem performance, relative to adding members of different species. Diversity and multilevel structure work to increase the robustness of complex systems by providing a buffer against bad outcomes. Combined with the capacity for ecological fitting in sloppy fitness space, ecosystems exhibit an anti-butterfly effect, the capacity to routinely withstand lower-level perturbations and extinctions of species and their interactions.

All complex systems, however, have vulnerability thresholds beyond which disturbances can no longer be absorbed, at which point the threat of the butterfly effect becomes real. Some parts of the biosphere may already be near their tipping points, but the biosphere is still functioning. Like all past episodes of climate change, it is changing but not falling apart. This is a critical insight for conservation; when an ecosystem responds to a perturbation by its species moving away in geographical (physical) or functional (ecological) fitness space, both local abundance and productivity in the original site will decrease, but that is not a sign of collapse; rather, it is the expected outcome of spending evolutionary potential to cope with the change. When species extend themselves and generalize in fitness space in response to changing conditions, local population declines are expected but are not clear indicators of widespread extinction or collapse. Efforts to control and reverse those declines may violate the zeroth law.

The biosphere’s supposed fragility gave rise to the notion that humans must protect nature by separating themselves from it, controlling it in its current state or returning it back to a previous state that was “better.” Evolution is the fundamental process that allows the biosphere to cope with change by changing. Notions of stasis, nostalgia, and delicate balance are not relevant for describing an evolutionary system responding to change. Evolution is the only process by which the biosphere has survived all previous environmental perturbations and has never failed.

In the Conservation Revolution, sociologists Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher (2020) follow Leopold’s vision, making the case for what they call “convivial conservation.” Conviviality rejects neo-protectionist conservation that focuses on controlling or reversing change and separating humans from the rest of nature. Convivial conservation calls for more integration of humans with the rest of the biosphere, not isolation from it. Büscher and Fletcher criticized neo-protectionism’s conservation for profit, a growth-based model that is easily corrupted and restricts nature to a privileged elite. They called for a more egalitarian approach centered around the idea of embedded non-monetized value in nature. We believe the embedded value in nature is the potential stored in the evolutionary commons. For conservation biology to be convivial, it needs above all else to let evolution happen.

The primary goal of conservation biology should be to maximize the biosphere’s ability to cope with change in a manner that also gives humanity the maximum chance to survive, in accordance with the Four Laws of Biotics. When we observe changes in species distributions or abundance or reductions in fitness associated with reduced performance, we should not assume extinction and collapse are imminent. If we do so, and intervene, we may be stopping the one process - Darwinian evolution - that allows the biosphere to cope with change. If conservation areas are established as functioning evolutionary commons, then loss of trophic connections, decreases in abundance, decreases in diversity, and decreases in productivity will be indicators that the system is coping evolutionarily, and human interventions in such cases would make matters worse by impeding the evolutionary process. Attempting to “help,” we violate the zeroth law.

Conservation biology must embrace the idea that change is not collapse. Reductions in productivity, abundance, and diversity are the expected signals when inheritance systems are spending potential by spreading out and exploring new options in fitness space. We must therefore turn our attention and funding away from studying species that are not coping well with environmental, including anthropogenic, changes. Some of those species will not survive, others will continue in diminished capacities in the biosphere that is adapting to current conditions. We must turn our attention to those species that are thriving in the new conditions. Too often those species are labeled “inva ders” or “invasive,” and research focuses on their presumed destructive influence on “native” species and the supposedly fragile ecosystems of which they are a part, all with an eye towards eradicating the new arrivals.

The Eurasian spongy moth Lymantria dispar is a prime example, considered highly invasive in North America where it has spread over more than 900,000 km² since its initial point of introduction in 1869 (Grayson and Johnson 2018). It is a voracious consumer of eastern deciduous forest, with larvae that can feed on >300 tree species. Its populations explode in some years defoliating huge areas with large ecological and economic impacts including high tree mortality, slower tree growth, changing species composition, and indirect negative effects on other species. Spongy moth has become a textbook example of an invasive species and there have been large amounts of time and resources invested in trying to stop it. But the other side of this story is often lost. It is a spectacular example of a species arriving in a new area, using the potential inherited from its ancestors to establish itself in a new ecosystem, and then evolving in response to the new conditions as it spread across the landscape (Powers et al. 2024). At the same time, while impacts on the new ecosystem it found itself in were substantial, the ecosystem is still functioning, able to absorb the “invader” by changing but still retaining its identity as “eastern North American temperate deciduous forest.”

In a Darwinian world, newcomers to ecosystems, no matter how they arrive, are evolutionary explorers. Many do not survive their exploratory forays, but those that do are the vanguard of future survival. Like all aspects of evolution, such arrivals bring costs and benefits. When costs exceed benefits, the evolutionary foray fails. When benefits match or exceed costs, the ecosystem is enriched.

To persist indefinitely, life must generate substantial potential. Fortunately, this potential emerges and grows naturally as part of the evolutionary process, as complexity and diversity accumulate over time. Efforts to engineer or control nature will only reduce potential, and increase the unintended consequences of those actions, leading some to advocate biodiversity policies focused on preserving the evolutionary process rather than species or places (e.g., Brooks and McLennan 2002, Agosta and Brooks 2020, Brooks and Agosta 2024a). We know of no other conservation effort that integrates the principles of the evolutionary commons and the Four Laws of Biotics better than the Costa Rican UNESCO World Heritage Site Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG). The ACG adopted a revolutionary, even renegade approach to conservation when it began in the 1980s, rejecting the attitude of “fence it and keep people out.” Its mission is founded on the principles that people need to be better integrated with, not more separated from nature, and that to persist in perpetuity biodiversity needs room to move, room to explore their evolutionary potential to cope with change by changing, The ACG has accomplished this through a combination of its sheer size and habitat diversity, connectivity of those habitats, and symbiotic relationship with local communities. It is a spectacularly successful example of how to establish a conservation area as an evolutionary commons.

Humans Among Humans

Shifting to the Economics of Wellbeing

Humanity is governed by economic philosophies from the far left to the far right of the political spectrum. All share a common anti-Darwinian principle: the solution of all economic problems is growth. This attitude is the problem. Darwin first showed that while growth is a built-in feature of living systems, unconstrained growth is inevitably pathological and destructive to the system when it exceeds its carrying capacity. The economics of wellbeing provides an alternative framework to the principle of maximum growth. It allows for achieving human ambitions but in accordance with Darwinian principles and consistent with the Four Laws of Biotics.

The economics of growth limits economies at any scale from adapting to change and fosters a preoccupation with control. Yes, the economics of growth and control lead to increased efficiency. But evolution is about sufficiency, not efficiency. Efficiency criteria destroy diversity and potential to respond to change; sufficiency criteria generate diversity which is the fuel for responding to change. Dips in productivity are necessary for economic adaptation, and efforts to promote constant growth are antithetical to survival. From this perspective, elements of the economy that do not contribute directly to economic growth, termed the informal economy, are essential for economic adaptation and survival because they represent economic potential being explored, much like evolutionary potential is being explored during periods of environmental perturbation. Economic systems built on Darwinian principles of survival would recognize that constant growth is not sustainable and that losses can encourage exploration (Chin et al. 2022). This allows for, and even encourages, economic growth and profit-making so long as they do not violate the Four Laws and do not harm the well-being of others.

The economics of wellbeing calls for long-tailed business models, where companies value long-term persistence more than constant growth and maximizing short-term profits. Profit does not tell you if potential was realized, so it cannot predict future success or survival. Profit, like fitness, is a measure of potential spent, not potential made. You cannot project future survival from current profits or current fitness. The economics of wellbeing recognizes that the more profits are put into potential, investing in workers and research and development in ways that generate and maintain a diverse set of capacities sufficient for the conditions at hand, the more secure the future. For humans to live sustainably in a survivable way, how the average person is doing - how healthy, financially secure and optimistic about the future - is a more important indicator of economic strength than how profitable the last quarter was for corporations and the wealthy elite, though they are related. That is the essence of the economics of wellbeing, profit and growth bounded by the principles of survival which favor the generation and maintenance of the potential to explore new conditions over the ability to maximally exploit current conditions. We need to live within our means or go extinct. That is the starting point for any economic system designed for long-term success in an uncertain world.

Reducing Population Density

For nearly 15,000 years, humans have moved increasingly to fewer areas of high population densities. At the beginning of the 20^th century, about 13% of humans, or approximately 200 million people, lived in urban confines. Today, more than half of humanity, or more than 4 billion people, live in cities. Biologists generally recognize that crowding increasing numbers of plants and animals into fewer smaller places is a recipe for competition for limited resources, high levels of stress and aggression, the spread of disease, and populations crashing. Cities, like the economics of growth, are a problem, not a solution. When they grow too large and concentrated, they are a vulnerability to our long-term survival. Added to that is the reality that many of the largest cities are climate-insecure, especially those along the coasts, threatened by sea level rise and more frequent and powerful storms.

In The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, Charles Elton (1958) was prescient when he suggested that the greatest threats to humanity associated with climate change would be conflict and migration. We are now beginning to see climate migration from large cities, the evolutionary default to living in areas of high population density and deteriorating conditions. While it may seem that urbanites have no place to go in today’s world, many come from rural areas that have been largely deserted by younger people attracted to the supposed benefits of urban living, whether recently or generations ago.

Climate migration takes advantage of the natural ins tinct to flee from trouble and reuse and repurpose existing infrastructure provided by small urban centers in recently abandoned rural areas. These efforts represent excellent opportunities to introduce the economics of wellbeing by creating more circularized local economies. Circular economies mimic metabolism in organisms and ecosystems by replacing the economics of maximum short-term gain by linear input-output with the economics of long-term persistence by recycling and reusing resources for maximum long-term use within the system. “Make and reuse” is cheap and persistent, like evolution, rather than the usual expensive and wasteful “use it and lose it.” Circular economies promote longevity by slowing the movement of materials and energy through the system, allowing us to better live within our means, maintaining bounded growth, and buying time to find effective solutions to environmental problems. They produce as much as possible without violating the Four Laws of Biotics, and maintaining the economics of well-being (Brown 2018, 2025, Brown and Brooks 2021).

Successful interconnected circular economies will eventually outgrow their capacity for self-sufficiency and social cohesion. When this happens, we must resist the urge to consolidate, repeating the mistakes of the past. Instead, we should choose to establish new nodes in the network of interconnected cooperating circular economies, much like speciation produces new nodes in the Tree of Life. Such economic systems would become human-centered evolutionary commons, analogous to the ACG, where exploitation is possible without sacrificing the future. Better can be bigger, growth is possible, but only within the boundaries dictated by the principles of Darwinian Evolution embodied in the Four Laws of Biotics.

Building Trust in Social Institutions

Social stability requires familiarity, cooperation and trust among social group members. Many believe that widespread social instability stems from a lack of cooperation. We believe it stems from a lack of trust, specifically a lack of trust in social institutions. From religion to local governance, they originated when simple social cohesion did not seem robust enough to encourage cooperation among people who were unfamiliar with each other yet relied on each other for their welfare. Most humans wish to avoid conflict, and social institutions aspired to minimize conflict and resolve conflict. But those institutions were quickly commandeered by a small number of people that could use them to amplify their personal power and turn them into agents of social control and coercion, contributing to The Great Tragedy (Brooks and Agosta 2024a). Despite the best intentions, social institutions generally have become stumbling blocks, not solutions, to problems at the grass roots (Brooks and Agosta 2023). They become more concerned with self-preservation, turning rigid and imposing one-size-fits-all solutions from the top down. This disconnect and lack of trust between institutions and those at the grass roots they are supposed to serve must change dramatically for contemporary human civilization to have a chance to persist far into the future.

Social institutions supporting the needs and desires at the grass roots rather than imposing policies set from above, would solve problems and build trust. To be truly responsive rather than punitive means supporting grassroots initiatives that sometimes will not succeed, then offering support and alternatives when they fail. This will increase trust and strengthen the bonds between people and their institutions, increasing chances that the grassroots will trust institutio nal suggestions for improved solutions or changing course, especially if those suggestions produce positive outcomes.

Conclusions: A New Beginning

All organisms, including humans, impose themselves on the biosphere using inherited capacities to engage functionally with the environment. That is how nature works. We cannot control the biosphere because it is a global evolutionary system comprising many independent parts for which there is no mechanism of central command. Evolution is about survival and coping with change by changing. Stasis is impossible, and we cannot stop or control the waves of change, but we can learn to navigate the waves without being overturned and drowned. The biosphere will continue to change. Species and ecosystems will be lost, but many will survive and be modified, producing new biodiversity connected to, but different from what existed before. Evolution has shown us indefinite survival can best be achieved by having a diversity of sufficient solutions rather than having a single most efficient solution.

Never change a winning game; always change a losing game - sports adage

Despite the best intentions of well-meaning people, humanity has been playing a losing game with respect to coping with the environmental problems stemming from our activities and behavior during the Anthropocene. Resistance to accepting this reality is sustained by inherent components of the human psyche - a strong need for drama, a strong attraction to magic, and a strong aversion to bad news, especially news that involves taking personal responsibility. It is time to replace those human instincts with all the professional detachment scientific training can provide. Humanity must adopt an indefinite event horizon and imagine life on this planet extending millions of years into the future to cope effectively with the challenges of the near future.

How much help does the biosphere need from us and how much help do we need from the biosphere? Viewed with an appropriate amount of scientific detachment, and with all the evidence of Darwinian evolution, it is clear that the answers are, respectively, “little, if any,” and “a lot, perhaps everything.” It is the ultimate Anthropocene hubris that we have convinced ourselves of the opposite, actively excluding those scientists who claim otherwise.

Global climate change is a by-product of biological activities and affects all life on the planet. This is the reason for a policy platform based on the Four Laws of Biotics. The human condition does not need to be optimal, just survivable to avoid general collapse, and that requires implementing evolutionary, rather than design and control, principles. Whatever policy proposals arise from the decision to follow evolutionary guidelines must be judged by three questions: (1) Does it contravene any of the four laws? If not, proceed; (2) Does it enhance survival and wellbeing? If yes, then proceed; (3) Can it be made more efficient? If yes, then proceed to the extent that the four laws and the economics of wellbeing are not violated. This leaves an enormous amount of survivable space for human creativity to produce and follow effective plans.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) needs a bucket of cold water in the face. Coping with change by changing not fighting against change first requires an adequate understanding of the true nature of the threat. Neither the biosphere in general, nor Homo sapiens in particular, are in danger of extinction. Technologically advanced human civilization, flawed, incomplete and full of hubris, is the “human climate niche” that is in peril (Xu et al. 2020). It is time to admit that 30 years of business as usual has not worked. It is time to switch perspectives from trying to sustain what we have without paying a penalty to coping with inevitable change by changing. We have left this until very late in the game; these are not the good times when we can afford to make mistakes, especially ones of hubris. We must make plans to survive a future of change and uncertainty.

The program of COP 31 should be entirely composed of scientists who have published evidence demonstrating the myriad shortcomings of the previous 30 COP meetings and reports.

Taking that information seriously the IPCC should quickly move to encourage humans to abandon 9,000 years of unsustainable behavior and, at great expense, move into the future guided by the Four Laws of Biotics. This is our best chance at extending the Anthropocene in a way that maintains our technological infrastructure and extends it more widely and equitably. But even inaction leading to general collapse of Anthropocene humanity does not mean utter destruction. Enough humans and remnants of today’s technological world will probably remain to pick up the pieces and rebuild. Using the Four Laws of Biotics as guidelines, the survivors might even decide to rebuild civilization along survivable lines.

Ce que vous avez perdu dans le feu, vous le retrouverez dans la cendre.

(What you lose in the fire, you will find among the ashes.)

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ADDITIONAL NOTES

• Data Availability
  No datasets were generated or analyzed in this study.
• Funding
  This research received no external funding.
• ZooBank register
  https://zoobank.org/8F2627E9-B922-4F42-9710-4FA59F64E738
• How to cite this article
  Brooks DR, Agosta SJ (2025) A Darwinian Guide to Surviving the Anthropocene: Between Hopium and Doom Scrolling. Zoologia 42: e25080. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1984-4689.v42.e25080
• Published by
  Sociedade Brasileira de Zoologia at Scientific Electronic Library Online - https://www.scielo.br/zool

Edited by

• Editorial responsibility
  Sionei Ricardo Bonatto

Data availability

No datasets were generated or analyzed in this study.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Nov 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  08 Sept 2025
• Accepted
  22 Sept 2025