Mind the Gap: A Deeper Look at the Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot

Merz JJ, Garcia Murillo S, Doran BR, Rees WE, Barnard P, Kronfli FR, Diez Martini AL, Maroni M, Reardon JT, Joy MK, Rhodes CJ, Bryson K. "World scientists' warning: Mind the gap — a deeper look at the behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot." is currently in peer review.

Core claim: this paper supplies the mechanism Paper One asserted but didn't formally name. It asks: why do maladaptive behaviours and the evolved impulses behind them persist and scale even when they pose an existential threat? The answer is the Neurobiological/Fitness Gap — the paper's single load-bearing concept, and the Institute's main theoretical contribution to the literature (explicitly distinguished from standard evolutionary-mismatch theory, which explains why a behaviour misfires but not why the mismatch is allowed to persist and compound).

The mechanism

Behaviour is selected by its consequences (Skinner's Selection by Consequences, operating at ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and social/cultural levels). The paper distinguishes two consequence types (see Consequences):

• Neurobiological consequences — the immediate, felt, reinforcing-or-punishing outcome of a behaviour. This is what actually, moment to moment, determines whether a behaviour recurs.
• Fitness-relevant consequences — the effect of a behaviour on survival/reproduction, at individual, group, or species level. Often delayed, diffuse, and costly only in aggregate.

Under low-energy, pre-agricultural conditions these two were close together in time and space — a behaviour's fitness cost showed up fast enough (hunger, ostracism, death) to shift the neurobiological consequence from reinforcing to punishing, correcting the behaviour. Exosomatic Energy (fossil fuels) broke that proximity: trade, medical advances, synthetic fertiliser, drought-resistant crops and the like let humans keep reaping the reinforcing neurobiological payoff of a behaviour (status, pleasure, comfort) while pushing its fitness-relevant cost over the horizon in time, space, or social distance (Discounting). The resulting separation is the Neurobiological/Fitness Gap — and it is this gap, not the behaviours or impulses themselves, that is novel to MTI civilisation and that the paper identifies as the actual target for intervention.

Crucially, the paper argues the gap doesn't just let individual maladaptive behaviours persist — it lets the surrounding Information Environment keep Contextualisation of evolved impulses running in maladaptive directions, entrenching the behaviours as Social Norms. The same impulse (status signalling, say) gets expressed as a private jet instead of a feather cloak purely because of what the information environment currently rewards. This active shaping and inheritance of the information environment is itself an instance of Niche Construction Theory.

Worked example used in the paper

A fictional low-energy fishing community over-exploits a temporary glut of fish; fitness-relevant consequences (declining catch, malnutrition, elevated infant mortality) arrive quickly and locally, converting the neurobiological payoff of fishing from reinforcing to punishing, so the community adaptively redirects labour to gardening and population contracts to carrying capacity. Contrast this with a high-energy society: when a drought threatens crop yields, fossil-energy-enabled technology (synthetic fertiliser, trade, drought-resistant seed) absorbs the fitness-relevant consequence before it can bite — so the neurobiological consequences never flip from reinforcing to punishing, and the underlying behaviour, and the norms built on it, persist and scale instead of self-correcting.

Planetary boundaries and the ecology of overshoot

The paper roots the mechanism in the Planetary Boundaries framework (seven of nine boundaries now crossed) and frames the Levers of Overshoot — population, consumption, waste — as compounding via the Maximum Power Principle (systems, including MTI Society, structure themselves to maximise energy capture, producing a self-reinforcing, top-heavy, unequal power structure that actively resists correction).

The intervention logic

The paper proposes two complementary intervention routes within the information environment, since actually closing the gap would require cutting exosomatic energy use (unlikely, near-term):

1. Recontextualise evolved impulses — redirect existing impulses (status, belonging, resource acquisition) toward adaptive, ecologically restorative expressions, rather than trying to suppress the impulses themselves.
2. Bridge the neurobiological/fitness gap with proxy consequences — deliberately engineer immediate, salient neurobiological consequences (reinforcing or punishing) that act as stand-ins for the real, distant fitness-relevant consequences, so behaviour gets corrected on a human, not geological, timescale. Levers of Overshoot aside, Localisation follows directly from this: small-scale, local social structures are precisely where proximal consequences (and thus self-correction) remain possible without engineered proxies.

The paper is explicit that the goal is redirection, not suppression, of evolved drives — and flags, as a risk the authors take seriously, that the same toolkit could be captured by existing power structures for more effective authoritarian control rather than genuine correction.

See Human Behavioural Crisis for how this mechanism connects back to Paper One's naming of the crisis.

Status

Unlike World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot, this paper is not yet published: it is a sequel/deeper-look paper currently under peer review, so there is no publication record, Altmetric score, or press coverage to report yet. This page will be updated with publication details, DOI, and reception once a decision is reached.

See also

Paper One: World Scientists' Warning: The Behavioural Crisis Driving Ecological Overshoot (2023) · Human Behavioural Crisis · Neurobiological/Fitness Gap