Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change

Biological evolution is an organic process that can never proceed more rapidly than one generation at a time, and many generations are nearly always required for any appreciable change to occur. At the same time, as cultural evolution proceeded and we endowed ourselves with language, impressive cognition, complex social organization, and increasingly potent technology, the ability to employ these skills to master our immediate environment almost certainly outran our biological evolution. The biological nature of these individuals will be comparable whereas cultural evolution will have produced qualitatively different circumstances in the two cases, such that individuals carrying only their shared biology into each situation would find themselves woefully unable to function in the other’s cultural milieu.

Source: nautil.us