Ep. 45 – Rob Dunn on what the laws of biology predict about our future

“These laws [of biology] are often very much at odds with our daily behavior,” says Dr. Rob Dunn. “In the context of a world that we’re rapidly changing, they seem actually to be growing in their importance, rather than contracting. And they’re not really a part of our discourse. We tend to get caught up with Elon Musk flinging himself out into space, and not pay attention to the fact that whatever we do in space, the species that we bring with us into space are still going to obey the rules of life that we’ve come to understand here on Earth.”
Photo by Amanda Ward.

Humans try hard to control the natural world. We’ve dammed and straightened meandering rivers and filled in wetlands. We’ve transformed primordial forests into farms and turned oceans into highways. Humans and our domestic animals now account for an estimated 96 percent of all terrestrial mammal biomass. Wild mammals account for just four percent. Amid the cataclysms of the Anthropocene, we tend to think of ourselves as the primary shapers of our planet. But for all our efforts to tame, simplify, and cordon off nature, we remain just as beholden to the world’s ecological laws as we were more than 200,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens first emerged.

Like the laws of physics, paying attention to our planet’s biological laws empowers us to understand how the world works and to make predictions about the outcomes of our actions. In his latest book, A Natural History of the Future, Rob Dunn – an extraordinarily creative author and ecologist – warns that continuing to ignore these laws will cause us to fail again and again in our attempts to build a sustainable future for our species.

Dunn makes the case that the human species will survive not by simplifying and isolating, but through embracing biodiversity and living in accordance with the knowledge that we are at the mercy of the law of natural selection, the species-area law, and the diversity-stability law, to name a few examples. These laws aren’t merely fascinating phenomena. Understanding these inescapable rules of ecology is key to our survival and quality of life. Whether or not we heed them will have profound consequences for our future.

Dunn has spent his career studying the little-known living world and creatures around and within us, and sharing his contagious enthusiasm and his and his fellow scientists’ astonishing insights with readers around the world. A professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, Dunn has looked at some of the most intimate, yet unexplored, connections between humans and the environments we inhabit. From the mycobacteria on our shower heads, to the mites on our faces, to the arthropods that live in our houses, he’s opened our eyes to the marvelous creatures around and within us. In the process, he’s illuminated just how much about life we have yet to discover and the depth of our codependence on other creatures.

“We don’t know how many species there are, we don’t know what the species are, we don’t know what their biology is, and we also don’t know, when we change the world, how will those species respond,” says Dunn. “And what we’ve done as a kind of shorthand is we’ve decided to pretend that most of life is like us, and to focus most of our study on the big things … And we’re so ignorant, still, that we have to at least be aware that we don’t actually know how most of these species are going to respond. And so for me, the only way to cope with this reality that the world is so much more unknown than we think it is is to try to make sure we know these general rules, laws, regularities, so we know what will tend to happen, even if we don’t know the details of what a particular species will do.” A Natural History of the Future is Dunn’s seventh book.

Rob Dunn’s book recommendations:

The Immense Journey and other works by Loren Eiseley

Straight Man by Richard Russo

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