Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting biogeochemical cycles and the climate at a global level. We argue that anthropogenically-driven climate change must be understood in terms of a monumental niche construction process, generating long-term ecological inheritance and eco-evolutionary feedbacks that are putting our health and well-being and those of future generations at risk. We then list five major sources of climate change counter-intuitiveness, highlighting how evolved cognitive biases and heuristics may stand in the way of providing effective responses within tight deadlines. Drawing on our framing of the climate breakdown, we finally call for an evolutionary perspective in approaching the adaptive challenge posed by climate change: we argue that putting the brakes on a genuine self-endangering evolutionary trap ultimately depends on our counteractive niche constructing abilities, played at the level of our institutional and innovation capacity.

中文翻译：

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人为气候变化作为一个巨大的生态位构建过程：背景和哲学方面

从历史上看，气候变化一直是我们物种的进化决定因素，影响着人类的进化创新和灭绝率，以及非洲以外的早期迁徙和扩张浪潮。今天，智人已经变成了一股主要的地质力量，能够引发一场与之前的大规模灭绝事件相当的生物多样性危机，塑造地球表面并在全球范围内影响生物地球化学循环和气候。我们认为，人为驱动的气候变化必须从一个巨大的生态位构建过程的角度来理解，产生长期的生态继承和生态进化反馈，这些反馈使我们和子孙后代的健康和福祉处于危险之中。然后我们列出了气候变化违反直觉的五个主要来源，强调进化的认知偏差和启发式方法可能会阻碍在紧迫的期限内提供有效的响应。借鉴我们对气候崩溃的框架，我们最终呼吁从进化的角度来应对气候变化带来的适应性挑战：我们认为，对真正的自我危害进化陷阱的刹车最终取决于我们的反作用利基构建能力，发挥在我们的体制和创新能力层面。