Future Adaption
Humans have learned to live in rainforests and tundra, survive climatic upheavals, and eventually leave footprints on the moon.
This is one of the vital questions that has arisen from Dr Taylor’s research intoComplementary Cognition. In exploring how our species became so adaptable, she began to uncover how the same collaborative learning system can work against us.
These achievements have been made possible by our extraordinary capacity to adapt and learn. But why might this same capacity also have led us to undermine the conditions for our own survival?
This means that even if the collaborative learning system is operating to solve problems as it evolved to, it can end up being misdirected, so it no longer serves our collective survival on this planet.
This system can be disrupted through numerous mechanisms. The way we structure our organisations around hierarchy and status, for example, can slow our collective capacity to adapt. Increasingly, our ingenuity also serves the demands of a world we have constructed, while our learning loses touch with the ecological systems that sustain it.
‘To address this incredibly complex problem [climate change], we are going to need the collective power of Complementary Cognition. This will involve reassessing the cultural practices of our modern society.’
Understanding how adaptation and social change happen shows us what is disrupting that process, and how restoring the system could let us adapt more rapidly.
It also recasts something as familiar as economic growth, revealing it as an output of our adaptive system, a system that has increasingly lost touch with the world it depends on. Seen this way, reconnecting our learning with the living world is not just a moral appeal but a practical necessity.
Insights from Complementary Cognition offer a foundation for work in sustainability, ecological economics and regenerative design.
Dr Taylor is developing these ideas in a book about how our species learns and adapts, and what this means for our future.
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