IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 4 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 6
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1
It remains unclear how falling butterfly numbers will affect other wildlife.
2
Phenology describes changes in the place, rather than the time, at which a species performs stages of its life.
3
Britain's springtime warming has outpaced that seen elsewhere in the world.
4
The study drew on observations collected by members of the public.
5
Researchers have concluded that climate change fully explains the Amber Fritillary's decline.
6
The Barred Admiral's decline began earlier than that of other butterfly species.
Question 7 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Butterflies in the UK
The Dwarf Skipper
• forms
7.
that can contain up to a hundred individuals
• passes through several breeding cycles each year
• a later brood manages to breed again by the time
8.
arrives
The Amber Fritillary
• has a single breeding cycle each year
• is often considered the country's most
9.
butterfly
• aside from bare limestone, it relies on tracts of
10.
The Heath Argus
• in the warmer parts of the European
11.
, it already breeds twice a year
The Barred Admiral
• occurs only in the
12.
counties of England
• its decline may be linked both to climate change and to its caterpillar's dependence on one source of
13.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A-F.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F.
14
a mention of the steeply rising demand for a single material needed by the vehicle-manufacturing sector
15
an approximate figure for how much of the planet’s surface the seas take up
16
a note that nations have still not settled on shared regulations for working the ocean floor
17
an explanation of the way a mineral-rich deep-sea environment comes into being
Question 18 - 23
Match each statement with the correct person or people, A-E.
List of Findings
A
Renata Kovač
B
Professor Ingrid Halvorsen
C
Naledi Mokoena, Farid Haddad and Dr Wei Lin
D
Dr Tomás Valente
E
Dr Rowan Whitfield
18
Turning attention from over-worked land deposits towards the sea would be a wise step.
19
Little attention is being paid to the harm that seabed operations may do to nearby places and the people living there.
20
The sea may hold resources of greater value than its metals.
21
Nothing else people have set out to do will damage sea life as severely as mining the deep will.
22
Scientists understand distant worlds in space better than they understand the floor of our own seas.
23
On a single type of seabed feature, specialists are unanimous that mining must be avoided.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Extracting minerals from the seabed
Firms in the industry maintain that the metal ores lying beneath the sea could be of better quality than those obtained on land, and that bringing them up need generate hardly any . In most cases the work is carried out by modifying that was originally designed for use on land; seawater is stripped from the crushed rock once it reaches the surface vessels and then sent back down to the ocean floor. Those who are worried about the practice, however, insist that is called for, given how many of its effects remain unidentified.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the opening paragraph, what is the writer mainly doing?
A
setting out two contrasting theories of human nature
B
outlining a widely shared assumption about how people act
C
explaining why he believes people behave selfishly
D
defending his own position on human greed
28
What point does the writer make about Adrian Vosk's book The Rival Within?
A
Its appeal came from how radical its claims were.
B
It offered a fresh method for studying the human mind.
C
Its popularity rested on the scientific backing it provided.
D
It echoed an outlook that was already widespread when it appeared.
29
In the fourth paragraph, what does the writer imply about the prehistoric era?
A
Natural resources were most likely available in relative abundance.
B
The population figures from the period are generally unreliable.
C
Prehistoric communities were more sophisticated than is assumed.
D
People moved between regions more often than was once believed.
30
The writer refers to Tomas Vistrand's work in order to support the idea that
A
hunter-gatherer ways of life are disappearing across the globe.
B
only people in isolated communities can live unselfishly.
C
self-centred behaviour emerged comparatively late in human history.
D
almost no ways of living have continued unchanged since prehistory.
Question 31 - 35
Complete the summary below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Foraging peoples of the present day
The work of Tomas Vistrand indicates that foraging peoples living today generally display a marked degree of across every part of life. Sharing resources evenly among members is treated as a duty in such cultures. They also rely on techniques for stopping gaps in from opening up: among the Kalu, for instance, when one person succeeds in , the resulting credit is handed to another member of the band instead. Anyone acting in an way faces exclusion as a penalty, while women are granted a great deal of when it comes to decisions about employment and marriage.
Question 36 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
36
Many specialists believe communities of the Kalu kind were commonplace until farming took hold.
37
Aggressive people in prehistory stood a better chance of survival than peaceful ones.
38
The writer regards cooperation and peaceful behaviour as fundamental parts of human nature.
39
Studies of primates suggest that disrupting their environment leaves their behaviour unchanged.
40
Selfish behaviour is more pronounced in some present-day societies than in others.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The impact of climate change on butterflies in Britain
Conservation groups report that numbers have fallen across more than half of Britain's butterfly species over the last 35 years. Were this pattern to persist, the effects on other members of the ecosystem would be difficult to predict. When a butterfly egg hatches it turns into a caterpillar - the second stage in the creature's development - and it is at this point that the insect both strips away large quantities of vegetation and becomes a meal for birds, bats and an assortment of small mammals. Halting the losses, let alone reversing them, will depend on conservationists first understanding what is driving the numbers down.
What butterflies want from the weather is a comfortable middle ground, neither too warm nor too chilly. As the climate shifts and summer temperatures edge upward almost everywhere, the insects are left to work out how to cope. Rescheduling the part of the year in which they emerge and breed is among the chief strategies they use to keep their conditions bearable. The timing of such life-stage events is what biologists mean by 'phenology'; whenever a plant or animal takes up some activity earlier in the year than usual, it is said to be 'advancing its phenology'.
None of this is new - the same advances have already shown up across a wide variety of butterflies, and virtually every species is bringing its phenology forward to some degree. Britain's mean spring temperature has risen by around 0.7C across the past 25 years, and over that period butterflies have shifted their activity earlier by an average of four to nine days, staying in step with the cooler weather they prefer. Should we read this as evidence that the insects can take climate change in their stride, retuning themselves to new temperatures with ease? Or are their populations in fact under considerable strain, hauled along unwillingly by change that is arriving unnaturally quickly? For now the answer remains uncertain, but a fresh study has set out to resolve it.
The researchers began by drawing together several million sightings that hobbyist observers - people who spend their leisure hours watching what the different species get up to - had contributed over the years. Taken together, this covered 115 butterfly species found throughout Great Britain, recorded year on year across a quarter of a century. Using it, the team gauged how common each species was and how widely it ranged over that time, together with the distance it had travelled northward. Critically, the same material also exposed slight shifts in the moment each year when a given species matured into an adult butterfly.
Examining how each of these measures had changed, the team found that the species best able to profit from an earlier, climate-driven emergence were those with the most adaptable life cycles. A number of butterflies can pass from caterpillar to adult two or more times in a single year, which means the individuals on the wing this spring might be the grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, of the ones seen a year before.
Within this group, the butterflies that had pushed their phenology forward the furthest over the 25 years of the study also showed the strongest upward trends in numbers, range and northward spread. Take Britain's smallest butterfly, the delicate Dwarf Skipper, which gathers in clusters of as many as a hundred: some individuals reach the adult stage early in spring, so that their summer offspring can squeeze in a further breeding cycle by autumn, and the population grows as a result.
A second set of species, by contrast, is far less adaptable, confined to just one breeding cycle a year, and for these the researchers found no sign that emerging sooner did any good at all. More troublingly, the members of this group that are fussy about where they live - often because their caterpillars will feed on only certain plants - turned out to suffer most from an advancing phenology. The lovely Amber Fritillary, widely called Britain's most threatened butterfly, belongs here: it survives now only in fragments of limestone pavement and open chalk grassland, raises a single generation each year, and has advanced its phenology. Climate change, though certainly not the whole story, may therefore have had a hand in this butterfly's steep decline.
Yet the picture is not entirely bleak. On the European continent, a good many of Britain's single-brood species prove capable of squeezing in a second generation whenever a year turns warm enough. So, as warming continues, butterflies such as the Heath Argus may likewise begin producing several generations within the UK, drawing benefit from the extra heat and perhaps climbing in number as they do.
In the nearer term, this body of knowledge equips conservationists to read the early warning signs in species heading for trouble. Take the Barred Admiral of eastern England: its numbers swelled markedly from the 1930s onward, yet the past 25 years have seen them drop sharply. One reason may be that its caterpillar draws all of its food from a single climbing plant; another, in all likelihood, is climate change.
Microbes drawn from the seabed may defeat drug-resistant infections. Yet those same depths are now prized for the metals they hold.
A
A. Geological surveys suggest that the seabed holds greater quantities of nickel, cobalt and rare-earth elements than every land deposit put together. Companies hoping to mine it argue that reaching for these underwater reserves would broaden the sources from which such metals are drawn, and they stress how sharply demand is climbing — for copper, for aluminium, and above all for the lithium and cobalt that electric-vehicle batteries and consumer electronics consume in ever greater volumes. Ore hauled from the ocean floor, they claim, would be richer than anything dug on land and would leave behind almost no residue. Techniques vary, but nearly all of them adapt equipment once built for mining on land: material is cut loose thousands of metres down, a slurry of rock and seawater is pumped up to waiting ships, ‘de-watered’, and passed to a second vessel, while the drained seawater is sent back to the depths and released near the seabed.
B
When Dr Tomás Valente watched a microbe taken from a deep-sea sponge wipe out disease-causing bacteria in his laboratory, he sensed he might be looking at a weapon against the antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’ that kill many thousands of people across Europe each year. The bacterium had been living more than 900 metres down in the Setúbal canyon, off the Iberian coast, and later tests showed that the antibiotic it produced was one science had never recorded — a finding that only sharpened its promise as a future medicine. Valente is one of a number of researchers who look on the deep ocean, with its countless unstudied and often unnamed species, as fertile ground for new drugs; and it is exactly this promise, they fear, that will be thrown away if the scramble for the sea’s metals and minerals is allowed to race ahead.
C
‘What we’re really asking,’ says Valente, a marine pharmacologist at the Atlantic Biomedical Institute in Lisbon, ‘is whether more medicines are waiting down there, and whether we can reach them before the place is ruined for good.’ He is among the many scientists calling for deep-sea mining to be halted while its costs and benefits are properly weighed. Handled this way, he suggests, the sea’s living riches might prove worth far more than its ores. The oceans, he points out, blanket close to three-quarters of the planet and remain barely charted; craft steered from the surface keep turning up creatures no one has catalogued — sea stars that drift on stalked fins, or the pale ‘ghost’ jellyfish filmed some 3,500 metres beneath the Coral Sea — any of which might one day save lives. By his reckoning a newly found antibiotic may need a decade to become an approved treatment, yet the contest to mine the ocean deep is already under way.
D
Recent research — among it a study in the journal Marine Frontiers — indicates that the deep seabed, and the hydrothermal vents that form wherever seawater seeps down and meets volcanic magma, matter enormously for marine biodiversity and for the world’s climate alike. Clustered around these mineral-laden vents live shrimp, tubeworms, mussels, limpets and eyeless crabs. Mining, the study warns, would throw up vast plumes of sediment and pour waste back into the water, badly unsettling the seafloor, and it concludes that the practice ‘endangers functions the seabed cannot do without’. Dr Rowan Whitfield, of the Marine Science Institute in Wellington, sums up the scientific mood plainly: ‘On the vents themselves, researchers speak with one voice — none of us wants them mined.’
E
Environmental campaigners and legal experts, for their part, urge restraint, warning that the fallout for ocean life and for coastal communities could be enormous and is largely unknown — and that no agreed set of international rules yet governs how the seabed may be exploited. In one much-quoted paper, Naledi Mokoena and Farid Haddad of the Ocean Justice Initiative, writing with Dr Wei Lin of the Institute for Marine Governance in Kiel, argue that this ‘new gold rush beneath the waves’ merely repeats the old story of resource grabs: scant regard for the damage done to nature or society, and the pushing aside of indigenous peoples. So little is known of the deep seabed, they add, that the far side of the Moon, the plains of Mars, even the surface of Mercury have been mapped in sharper detail — a gap that leads them to call the deep ocean a place where ‘we still cannot say what it is we are missing.’
F
The seas remain vast and, for the most part, a mystery, notes Renata Kovač, chief executive of AbyssMetals, a deep-water prospecting firm in Vancouver: ‘It is only sensible to tap that unused potential responsibly, rather than keep leaning on the planet’s dwindling supplies of land-based ore to meet what society demands.’ Those pressing to lower mining machines far beneath the surface insist the harm will be slighter than what mining does on land. Critics reply that strange, little-understood communities in the deep could be obliterated and must be shielded. ‘No human undertaking has ever struck deep-sea life as hard as this one will,’ argues Professor Ingrid Halvorsen, a specialist in hydrothermal vents at the University of Tasmania, who holds that active vents ought to be placed entirely out of bounds — to protect the discoveries and biotechnology they may yet yield — with strict limits enforced everywhere else.
A psychologist offers his perspective on how human beings came to be self-centred
It has been taken for granted for a very long time that, at heart, people look out only for themselves. We are supposedly cold-blooded creatures, driven by powerful urges to fight one another over resources and to pile up influence and belongings. When we do treat others kindly, the reasoning goes, some hidden agenda usually lies behind it; and on the rare occasions we behave well, that is merely because we have somehow reined in and risen above the greed and cruelty we are born with.
A particularly grim version of this outlook is the one most often linked to the science writer Adrian Vosk, whose 1979 volume The Rival Within found a wide readership precisely because it chimed with - and helped justify - the competitive, individualistic mood that prevailed in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Vosk, in common with many, grounds his argument in evolutionary psychology, a discipline which holds that the characteristics we display today were laid down far back in prehistory, during what its practitioners call the 'environment of evolutionary adaptedness'.
Prehistoric life is conventionally pictured as a time of fierce rivalry - an existence so savage that survival was reserved for the aggressive, the ruthless and the self-serving. Because staying alive meant securing resources such as rivers, woodland and game, clashes between competing bands were, on this view, all but guaranteed, and from them grew tendencies like warfare and racism. The logic looks sound enough. The trouble is that the foundation it rests upon - the idea that prehistoric existence was a frantic scramble to survive - does not hold up.
One thing worth bearing in mind is how thinly the prehistoric world was peopled. By certain estimates, Europe was home to no more than around 24,000 individuals some 12,000 years ago, while the entire planet held fewer than 600,000. The humans of that era were hunter-gatherers, subsisting on wild game they hunted and wild plants they gathered. Where population densities were as low as this, it is hard to see why bands of hunter-gatherers would have needed to fight one another over resources, or to cultivate ruthlessness and a competitive streak, or to make war at all.
Plenty of evidence for this comes from present-day hunter-gatherer peoples, whose way of living mirrors that of our prehistoric ancestors. The anthropologist Tomas Vistrand has described such peoples as displaying a thoroughgoing political and sexual equality. In groups of this kind, Vistrand notes, individuals neither hoard property nor amass possessions, and everyone is bound by a moral duty to share. They also maintain their equality deliberately, taking care that differences in rank are never allowed to take hold.
The Kalu people of interior Borneo are a case in point: before hunting they exchange their spears with one another, so that when an animal is killed the praise goes not to whoever threw the weapon but to whoever owned it. Should a person grow too overbearing, the others simply shun them, driving the offender out of the community. In such groups, men rarely dictate women's lives. Across hunter-gatherer societies, women enjoy a high degree of independence: free to choose their own husbands, decide what work they take on, and work whenever they wish. And should a marriage collapse, it is they who keep their children.
A good many anthropologists hold that societies of the Kalu type were the ordinary state of affairs until only a few thousand years ago, when growing numbers of people brought about farming and a settled existence. Seen in this light, there is little basis for supposing that evolution would have favoured traits like racism, warfare or the domination of women, since these would have served scant purpose in the prehistoric world. Anyone who acted selfishly and without mercy would, if anything, have stood less chance of surviving, for their group would have cast them out.
It makes far better sense to treat qualities such as cooperation, fairness, altruism and peacefulness as built into human beings from the start. For tens of thousands of years these were the dominant features of human life, so in all likelihood they remain powerful within us even now.
If prehistoric life was never the brutal affair it is so often painted as, though, why do people today act with such selfishness and cruelty? One possibility is that these darker traits came later, arising from environmental and psychological pressures. Time and again, studies have found that when the natural surroundings of primates like chimpanzees and gorillas are thrown into disorder, the animals grow more aggressive and hierarchical.
It may well be that we have undergone something similar. My own view is that the close of the hunter-gatherer way of life, and the arrival of agriculture, went hand in hand with a shift in the human mind. A fresh sense of being a separate individual emerged, and with it a new selfishness that led in time to ranked, male-dominated societies, and to war. However that may be, these negative traits seem to have surfaced so recently that explaining them in evolutionary or adaptive terms hardly appears possible.
Conservation groups report that numbers have fallen across more than half of Britain's butterfly species over the last 35 years. Were this pattern to persist, the effects on other members of the ecosystem would be difficult to predict. When a butterfly egg hatches it turns into a caterpillar - the second stage in the creature's development - and it is at this point that the insect both strips away large quantities of vegetation and becomes a meal for birds, bats and an assortment of small mammals. Halting the losses, let alone reversing them, will depend on conservationists first understanding what is driving the numbers down.
What butterflies want from the weather is a comfortable middle ground, neither too warm nor too chilly. As the climate shifts and summer temperatures edge upward almost everywhere, the insects are left to work out how to cope. Rescheduling the part of the year in which they emerge and breed is among the chief strategies they use to keep their conditions bearable. The timing of such life-stage events is what biologists mean by 'phenology'; whenever a plant or animal takes up some activity earlier in the year than usual, it is said to be 'advancing its phenology'.
None of this is new - the same advances have already shown up across a wide variety of butterflies, and virtually every species is bringing its phenology forward to some degree. Britain's mean spring temperature has risen by around 0.7C across the past 25 years, and over that period butterflies have shifted their activity earlier by an average of four to nine days, staying in step with the cooler weather they prefer. Should we read this as evidence that the insects can take climate change in their stride, retuning themselves to new temperatures with ease? Or are their populations in fact under considerable strain, hauled along unwillingly by change that is arriving unnaturally quickly? For now the answer remains uncertain, but a fresh study has set out to resolve it.
The researchers began by drawing together several million sightings that hobbyist observers - people who spend their leisure hours watching what the different species get up to - had contributed over the years. Taken together, this covered 115 butterfly species found throughout Great Britain, recorded year on year across a quarter of a century. Using it, the team gauged how common each species was and how widely it ranged over that time, together with the distance it had travelled northward. Critically, the same material also exposed slight shifts in the moment each year when a given species matured into an adult butterfly.
Examining how each of these measures had changed, the team found that the species best able to profit from an earlier, climate-driven emergence were those with the most adaptable life cycles. A number of butterflies can pass from caterpillar to adult two or more times in a single year, which means the individuals on the wing this spring might be the grandchildren, or even great-grandchildren, of the ones seen a year before.
Within this group, the butterflies that had pushed their phenology forward the furthest over the 25 years of the study also showed the strongest upward trends in numbers, range and northward spread. Take Britain's smallest butterfly, the delicate Dwarf Skipper, which gathers in clusters of as many as a hundred: some individuals reach the adult stage early in spring, so that their summer offspring can squeeze in a further breeding cycle by autumn, and the population grows as a result.
A second set of species, by contrast, is far less adaptable, confined to just one breeding cycle a year, and for these the researchers found no sign that emerging sooner did any good at all. More troublingly, the members of this group that are fussy about where they live - often because their caterpillars will feed on only certain plants - turned out to suffer most from an advancing phenology. The lovely Amber Fritillary, widely called Britain's most threatened butterfly, belongs here: it survives now only in fragments of limestone pavement and open chalk grassland, raises a single generation each year, and has advanced its phenology. Climate change, though certainly not the whole story, may therefore have had a hand in this butterfly's steep decline.
Yet the picture is not entirely bleak. On the European continent, a good many of Britain's single-brood species prove capable of squeezing in a second generation whenever a year turns warm enough. So, as warming continues, butterflies such as the Heath Argus may likewise begin producing several generations within the UK, drawing benefit from the extra heat and perhaps climbing in number as they do.
In the nearer term, this body of knowledge equips conservationists to read the early warning signs in species heading for trouble. Take the Barred Admiral of eastern England: its numbers swelled markedly from the 1930s onward, yet the past 25 years have seen them drop sharply. One reason may be that its caterpillar draws all of its food from a single climbing plant; another, in all likelihood, is climate change.
B. When Dr Tomás Valente watched a microbe taken from a deep-sea sponge wipe out disease-causing bacteria in his laboratory, he sensed he might be looking at a weapon against the antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’ that kill many thousands of people across Europe each year. The bacterium had been living more than 900 metres down in the Setúbal canyon, off the Iberian coast, and later tests showed that the antibiotic it produced was one science had never recorded — a finding that only sharpened its promise as a future medicine. Valente is one of a number of researchers who look on the deep ocean, with its countless unstudied and often unnamed species, as fertile ground for new drugs; and it is exactly this promise, they fear, that will be thrown away if the scramble for the sea’s metals and minerals is allowed to race ahead.
C. ‘What we’re really asking,’ says Valente, a marine pharmacologist at the Atlantic Biomedical Institute in Lisbon, ‘is whether more medicines are waiting down there, and whether we can reach them before the place is ruined for good.’ He is among the many scientists calling for deep-sea mining to be halted while its costs and benefits are properly weighed. Handled this way, he suggests, the sea’s living riches might prove worth far more than its ores. The oceans, he points out, blanket close to three-quarters of the planet and remain barely charted; craft steered from the surface keep turning up creatures no one has catalogued — sea stars that drift on stalked fins, or the pale ‘ghost’ jellyfish filmed some 3,500 metres beneath the Coral Sea — any of which might one day save lives. By his reckoning a newly found antibiotic may need a decade to become an approved treatment, yet the contest to mine the ocean deep is already under way.
D. Recent research — among it a study in the journal Marine Frontiers — indicates that the deep seabed, and the hydrothermal vents that form wherever seawater seeps down and meets volcanic magma, matter enormously for marine biodiversity and for the world’s climate alike. Clustered around these mineral-laden vents live shrimp, tubeworms, mussels, limpets and eyeless crabs. Mining, the study warns, would throw up vast plumes of sediment and pour waste back into the water, badly unsettling the seafloor, and it concludes that the practice ‘endangers functions the seabed cannot do without’. Dr Rowan Whitfield, of the Marine Science Institute in Wellington, sums up the scientific mood plainly: ‘On the vents themselves, researchers speak with one voice — none of us wants them mined.’
E. Environmental campaigners and legal experts, for their part, urge restraint, warning that the fallout for ocean life and for coastal communities could be enormous and is largely unknown — and that no agreed set of international rules yet governs how the seabed may be exploited. In one much-quoted paper, Naledi Mokoena and Farid Haddad of the Ocean Justice Initiative, writing with Dr Wei Lin of the Institute for Marine Governance in Kiel, argue that this ‘new gold rush beneath the waves’ merely repeats the old story of resource grabs: scant regard for the damage done to nature or society, and the pushing aside of indigenous peoples. So little is known of the deep seabed, they add, that the far side of the Moon, the plains of Mars, even the surface of Mercury have been mapped in sharper detail — a gap that leads them to call the deep ocean a place where ‘we still cannot say what it is we are missing.’
F. The seas remain vast and, for the most part, a mystery, notes Renata Kovač, chief executive of AbyssMetals, a deep-water prospecting firm in Vancouver: ‘It is only sensible to tap that unused potential responsibly, rather than keep leaning on the planet’s dwindling supplies of land-based ore to meet what society demands.’ Those pressing to lower mining machines far beneath the surface insist the harm will be slighter than what mining does on land. Critics reply that strange, little-understood communities in the deep could be obliterated and must be shielded. ‘No human undertaking has ever struck deep-sea life as hard as this one will,’ argues Professor Ingrid Halvorsen, a specialist in hydrothermal vents at the University of Tasmania, who holds that active vents ought to be placed entirely out of bounds — to protect the discoveries and biotechnology they may yet yield — with strict limits enforced everywhere else.
It has been taken for granted for a very long time that, at heart, people look out only for themselves. We are supposedly cold-blooded creatures, driven by powerful urges to fight one another over resources and to pile up influence and belongings. When we do treat others kindly, the reasoning goes, some hidden agenda usually lies behind it; and on the rare occasions we behave well, that is merely because we have somehow reined in and risen above the greed and cruelty we are born with.
A particularly grim version of this outlook is the one most often linked to the science writer Adrian Vosk, whose 1979 volume The Rival Within found a wide readership precisely because it chimed with - and helped justify - the competitive, individualistic mood that prevailed in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Vosk, in common with many, grounds his argument in evolutionary psychology, a discipline which holds that the characteristics we display today were laid down far back in prehistory, during what its practitioners call the 'environment of evolutionary adaptedness'.
Prehistoric life is conventionally pictured as a time of fierce rivalry - an existence so savage that survival was reserved for the aggressive, the ruthless and the self-serving. Because staying alive meant securing resources such as rivers, woodland and game, clashes between competing bands were, on this view, all but guaranteed, and from them grew tendencies like warfare and racism. The logic looks sound enough. The trouble is that the foundation it rests upon - the idea that prehistoric existence was a frantic scramble to survive - does not hold up.
One thing worth bearing in mind is how thinly the prehistoric world was peopled. By certain estimates, Europe was home to no more than around 24,000 individuals some 12,000 years ago, while the entire planet held fewer than 600,000. The humans of that era were hunter-gatherers, subsisting on wild game they hunted and wild plants they gathered. Where population densities were as low as this, it is hard to see why bands of hunter-gatherers would have needed to fight one another over resources, or to cultivate ruthlessness and a competitive streak, or to make war at all.
Plenty of evidence for this comes from present-day hunter-gatherer peoples, whose way of living mirrors that of our prehistoric ancestors. The anthropologist Tomas Vistrand has described such peoples as displaying a thoroughgoing political and sexual equality. In groups of this kind, Vistrand notes, individuals neither hoard property nor amass possessions, and everyone is bound by a moral duty to share. They also maintain their equality deliberately, taking care that differences in rank are never allowed to take hold.
The Kalu people of interior Borneo are a case in point: before hunting they exchange their spears with one another, so that when an animal is killed the praise goes not to whoever threw the weapon but to whoever owned it. Should a person grow too overbearing, the others simply shun them, driving the offender out of the community. In such groups, men rarely dictate women's lives. Across hunter-gatherer societies, women enjoy a high degree of independence: free to choose their own husbands, decide what work they take on, and work whenever they wish. And should a marriage collapse, it is they who keep their children.
A good many anthropologists hold that societies of the Kalu type were the ordinary state of affairs until only a few thousand years ago, when growing numbers of people brought about farming and a settled existence. Seen in this light, there is little basis for supposing that evolution would have favoured traits like racism, warfare or the domination of women, since these would have served scant purpose in the prehistoric world. Anyone who acted selfishly and without mercy would, if anything, have stood less chance of surviving, for their group would have cast them out.
It makes far better sense to treat qualities such as cooperation, fairness, altruism and peacefulness as built into human beings from the start. For tens of thousands of years these were the dominant features of human life, so in all likelihood they remain powerful within us even now.
If prehistoric life was never the brutal affair it is so often painted as, though, why do people today act with such selfishness and cruelty? One possibility is that these darker traits came later, arising from environmental and psychological pressures. Time and again, studies have found that when the natural surroundings of primates like chimpanzees and gorillas are thrown into disorder, the animals grow more aggressive and hierarchical.
It may well be that we have undergone something similar. My own view is that the close of the hunter-gatherer way of life, and the arrival of agriculture, went hand in hand with a shift in the human mind. A fresh sense of being a separate individual emerged, and with it a new selfishness that led in time to ranked, male-dominated societies, and to war. However that may be, these negative traits seem to have surfaced so recently that explaining them in evolutionary or adaptive terms hardly appears possible.
