Open-mindedness: What is 'being open-minded'?

We have emphasised the importance of being open-minded about the life choices of people around us, that we should accept that others live different lives, and that we should never judge them for it. However, I feel there is more in this world that ought to be approached with an open mind. Part of being open-minded may be acknowledging that there are many ways to be open-minded!

In this fourth post, I want to expand our meaning of ‘open-minded’ and show the vast amount of life aspects that we should be open-minded about, as many as I can think of. There are situations where being open-minded may enrich your own life, and situations where you can make life richer for people around you by approaching them and their views open-mindedly. In other words, being open-minded can help yourself and your peers; it can make the world a much better place!

A dictionary definition of ‘open-mindedness’ is “willing to consider new ideas; unbiased”. I think that this is a good description of the strict sense of the word. However, when I think about being open-minded, especially in these posts, I mean being open to differences. Maybe that is something else; there is probably another word for it. But this is how I personally interpret ‘open-minded’. Maybe these two meanings can be combined into one, somehow?

By ‘being open to’ something, I mean being willing to accept, and assimilate something. This means both recognising its validity and being willing to learn from it. So, it is roughly the same as ‘willing to consider’, as the dictionary definition states.

New ideas will be different from previous, by definition – they would not be ‘new’ otherwise – so the ‘new ideas’ part could easily be included in the more broad word ‘differences’. So, my choice of word is simply broader; it is inclusive rather than exclusive – there is no contradiction.

‘Unbiased’ basically means unprejudiced. (Bias is defined as “prejudice in favour of or against one thing, person or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair”.) It is a good candidate for a synonym of ‘open-minded’. The word ‘unprejudiced’ also conveys the meaning that open-mindedness focuses on the first time you encounter a new idea or opinion – that is when it is the most important to be open. After, you may already have good reasons not to be willing to reconsider the idea – though it would never hurt to be open to re-evaluate your judgement!

Let us now try to combine these into one single explanation: ‘open-minded’ could be said to mean willing to consider and assimilate new ideas, opinions or views free from bias.

Of course, you are more than welcome to comment with your own input of what you think it means to be open-minded! Please share! This is only what I think, and maybe Hanna agrees with most of it… Our explanation is not the only one! We acknowledge this as we strive to be open-minded.

I hope we are all satisfied enough to move on to slightly more specific ways of being open-minded. However, on reviewing the post this far, it seems it will become too long if we include the examples. I will conclude here, but promise to follow up with the rest in a new post very soon! I hope next time will be able to inspire you cherish open-mindedness as we do, and make it your goal as well! 

This post was also published on Hanna's A Little Blog About Words. 

Skill... what is that anyway?

I first wrote this post for my paleoblog Weird & Wonderful, but the more I wrote on it, the better it seemed to fit nicely here as well. I find the points made about education very important, especially if we want to make a better world for the next generation! 

One of the things I noticed during my first year in the UK is that there is an almost ludicrous emphasis on skills. At least among the academics, much of what you hear is all about having skills, skills, skills and skills…

I must admit that I find this both amusing and a tad annoying. There is more to life than being skilled, in my opinion. Not saying that a solid set of skills is not useful or desirable, but this nagging about skills is extremely off-putting for me.

But, rather than judging too hastily, I thought maybe the problem is just that I do not know what they actually mean by ‘skills’. I had a good idea of what the word means and implies, but was not sure if I actually understood every aspect of the term.

So, one night I finally got down to looking it up (haha), and, when I got absorbed into the various divisions or types of skills, before I knew it, I found myself doing surprisingly keen research and even taking notes! Naturally, this had to be made into a post on this blog. It does not have much to do with paleontology, but rather with professional life in general.

Before we begin, I just want to mention that this clearly shows what type of academic I am. I found learning about skills interesting because of the many theoretical groupings of types of skills and the implications their respective demands and values have on education theory. Nothing of this has made me more eager to gain any ‘skills’; that does not appeal to me in the same way. I am a theoretical person, not practical.

What on Earth is a skill, then? What is it really?

A dictionary definition of ‘skill’ is “the ability to do something well; expertise” or “a particular ability”. The same dictionary defines ‘ability’ as “possession of the means or skill to do something”. So ‘skill’ becomes the possession of the means or skill to do something well… Great.  

‘Expertise’ is moreover defined as “expert skill or knowledge in a particular field”, from which I gather that any expertise is a form of skill, but any skill is not necessarily an expertise.

Regardless, this seems to lead nowhere, except that ‘skill’ seems to be a very broad term, suggested by the repeated mention of “something”.

Luckily, Wikipedia rarely disappoints: “A skill is the learned ability to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both.” This immediately becomes much more interesting.

Although may not be overly keen on agreeing with the need for a skill to be learned, at least most skills would be. This implies that the skills must be acquired throughout one’s life. This effectively excludes innate talent, if you agree. This might make statements such as ‘Mozart was a skilled composer’ a bit tricky to justify. I believe few would disagree with the claim that Mozart had a natural talent of knowing what sounds good in music, so that may not be a ‘skill’. However, he was not born with practical knowledge of the standard procedures of how to structure a composition, in particular the language used to communicate it. That was a skill he obtained through dedicated learning and practice. So, he was skilled, but was he skilled in any way different from any other composer, who also must have learned the same skills? Are all composers not skilled? Skilled to a different degree, perhaps? Maybe we should adjust the statement to ‘Mozart was a talented and (highly?) skilled composer’.

Wikipedia’s definition also fleshes out the “something” from the dictionary version: the aim of the skill is to reach a pre-determined outcome. The skill works toward a goal, a goal that is defined in advance. It is not just doing anything, but carrying out focused tasks. I furthermore interpret this as implying that the type of skill may be determined by its purpose; different skills have different respective aims.

Examples of such pre-determined outcomes could be: accurately measuring the weight of an object, scoring above 100 000 in Angry Birds, convincing a friend to try a new dish, writing a good essay under 750 words, crossing the street without being injured, reading any novel by Garcia Marquez without crying (of boredom), etc.

This also means that trivial things such as picking your nose, walking to the toilet, signing a piece of paper, and asking for directions; these are all skills as well.

It seems this definition still is rather vague. It narrowed the ‘something’ down to ‘a purpose’, but it cannot exclude the trivial examples from above. We need something more, something to distinguish what most mean by ‘skill’ and any ability to perform any set task. Even the addition of the usual ideal to carry out the task with minimum time and effort fails to make the separation. How can we define ‘skill’ so that picking your nose is not included? (Note that I am making the implicit claim that picking your nose isn’t a skill, but that may very well be discussed… and disgusting…)

I have no answer to this question at the moment, but if we carry on maybe something will crop up eventually. Let us now look at the various groups of skills. It is human nature to organise the world into categories; by generalising about these categories, we can handle the vast complexity of the world in a simplified manner. That is why I find such groupings interesting and important to be familiar with.

Skills can be broadly separated into domain-general and domain-specific skills. Domain-general skills are useful in a broader situations or contexts, or useful across various different situations, while domain-specific skills are applicable only to a very specific situation. Literacy would be a domain-general skill, while the ability to identify a Gryphaea species (a type of extinct mussle, see Fossils) is a domain-specific skill, as you focus on the features that are unique to that species – being able to recognise those features will not help you identify any other species, as they will not possess them. Naturally, there are many grey areas. Many might say that speaking the lingua franca English is a domain-general skill, but what about speaking Swedish, which is only spoken in one country (and a few communities around in Scandinavia)?

This classification only separates skills into two categories, but there are more, independent ways of grouping skills (just like you can group people into left-handed and right-handed, with those who have lost their main hand in the grey area, but there are many other ways of grouping people, e.g. nationality, political leaning, eye colour, etc.).

Another contrasting pair of skill groups are basic skills versus higher-order thinking skills. Basic skills are learned by direct instruction, independently from other skills, and without larger (philosophical?) contexts. They are facts and methods learned one at a time, one after the other. All you need to learn these is someone to tell you how to do it; it requires no input from you other than being receptive and able to replicate. Examples include literacy, speech, counting, and basic algebra methods. They seem to make up the fundament of one’s knowledge and abilities, and the rest is probably built on this base.

Higher-order thinking skills, in contrast, include judgmental skills such as analysis and critical thinking, and creative skills such as problem solving and… well, being creative. These are much “more difficult to learn or to teach but also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be useable in novel situations” (Wikipedia). Novel situations refers to situations other than those in which the skill was learned. In other words, higher-order thinking skills are skills that are applicable to more than one situation. This may be related to the domain-general skillset, but these are separate groupings, although they may show a lot of overlap.

It has long been assumed that higher-order thinking skills cannot be learned without first gaining the necessary basic skills, but modern cognitive research seems to have challenged this notion. However, I doubt you could learn thinking skills effectively without first knowing a language (it may be possible, which is a truly fascinating idea to consider hypothetically: how would you think if you did not know any language – not even your own made-up one? what would your thoughts be like? images? or something else?).

I think the point they are making here is that you only need the most basic of the basic skills in order to gain higher-order thinking skills. You do not need to read the musings of Aristotle to reach similar conclusions; if you are faced with the same problems, you might solve it the same way as he did. Thus, higher-order thinking skills may be taught by presenting only the problem, and letting the students find the solution themselves.

This is of course much more challenging to teach and learn successfully; it requires a considerably greater input from the teacher as well as the student. However, since it has been shown that higher-order thinking skills can be learned without extensive knowledge other than the essentials such as language and basic logic, it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable, to begin teaching them already at elementary school.

I cannot emphasise enough how strongly I feel that these thinking skills are invaluably important. I am not only talking about academics here; anyone’s life may be improved by applying effective thinking to one’s situation. We are faced with problems that need to be overcome on a daily basis; the more efficiently we can solve them, the better.

Therefore, I am distraught that there was little or no attention toward such skills during my year at the University of Bristol. This makes their endless nagging about skills even more upsetting. This first year was intended to provide us undergraduates with a solid knowledge base before progressing into the second year, so it seems they prioritised plain knowledge over thinking skills. They consider that more important at this point. Fair enough, I can accept that. But it made me rather disillusioned with the quality of the teaching. There was so little effort to stimulate us to think on our own. They never got tired of telling us to read and learn more about what they mentioned in the lectures, but there were no instances that I can remember where they asked us to evaluate a theory or method or anything of the like.

Ironically, it seems they applied the approach I mentioned for teaching higher-order thinking skills to teach us the basic skills. They would give us five samples of rocks that many of us had never seen before in our lives, and tasked us to describe and identify them. They were kind enough to give us a handout with descriptions, but rock identification is too subjective to be explained by some vague words on a sheet of paper. It ended in a complete disaster and the teachers were disappointed with our results. They told us to make more effort the next time.

I feel it is a shame that there was no emphasis on thinking skills. What I find even more lamentable is that there seems to have been no attention toward them in England at pre-university level either. From what I have heard and seen from my peers, it seems their abilities to evaluate and think critically are poorly developed. A good friend even seems offended when I question big science theories. She argues that they were made by scientists who are much more intelligent than I am. Of that I have not doubt, but she clearly missed the point of critical thinking: it has nothing to do with intelligence, but with challenging the fundamental reasoning and assumptions of an idea; it requires logics, not intellect. If the students do not even fully comprehend what critical thinking means, they will find it difficult to start doing it when push comes to shove.

I am not trying to say my higher-order thinking skills are superb. I have much to learn, and I know this because I understand what these skills encompass and what they will require of me. But, at the same time, I also deem them indispensable to my life, and want to develop them at every opportunity. And I wish for more opportunities!

Wondering about the pre-university education of my peers in the UK, I remember how I struggled in Sweden from year seven through nine in the natural and social science classes.  Even though I remembered everything the teachers said in class, I never got more than Godkänt (a pass) because I could not think independently. Since the first test, they told me I need to learn to analyse the information in class in order to score a higher grade. Although I had consistent top grades in most other subjects, and though I put considerably greater effort into the natural and social sciences, I was stuck on Godkänt for about two and a half years, because I could not for my life figure out what I needed to do. No one explained how to analyse; they just made it clear that I had to do it.

Miraculously, it all changed in the last term of year nine. I still don’t know what ‘clicked right’ in my head, but something did, and finally I was able to analyse. Still, I did not know what I was doing right; it seemed I just scored higher grades. Even today, those years confuse me, but I remember having struggled hard, facing the fear of not knowing what to do, of working blindfolded, and somehow eventually prevailed.

If I had not learned to think independently, whichever way it happened, I would have struggled even harder in high school. International Baccalaureate has little emphasis on independent thinking in the individual subjects (except perhaps the literature courses, and surely in philosophy), but their so-called ‘core subjects’, which all students must study, irrespective of what other subjects they choose, place considerably more focus and demands on independent thinking and intellectual development. It is from these core subjects that I feel I have learned the most valuable thinking skills.

This makes me eternally grateful for the pressure my teachers in year seven though nine put on me, and, in retrospect, I honestly wish it had started earlier. Still, better late than never. And that is why I am concerned for my fellow students at university. I hope I have just misjudged them and that they have not shown evidence of their thinking skills because the course has not stimulated it!

Realising how long this article has become, and feeling I could go on about this for pages more, maybe it is best to stop here and leave the thread open to be followed up later. Although I do not feel much clearer about what a ‘skill’ really is, at least I have convinced myself even more that it is the higher-order thinking skills that I want to develop. Regretfully, I fear it will not be a welcome sentiment at university, but you now know my feelings on this issue, and have no intention of giving up on them!

Open-mindedness: Post 3

Our third post on open-mindedness, written by Hanna and also published in her blog: A Little Blog About Words

Unfortunately it’s quite difficult to avoid sounding like a lecturing know-it-all when you are writing about big issues such as tolerance and acceptance. These are such important and thought-provoking topics which everyone has their own opinions on and if you are not careful it is easy to sound as if you think that you have it all figured out and everyone else needs to learn from you. I have really tried to avoid this, but I still suspect that a few of you who have read mine and Sebastian’s posts might have thought that we seem to be very full of ourselves. That is not at all our intention and I think that we are both very aware of how far away we still are from our ideal of reaching a completely open-minded state. Personally, I find that my wish to be open is being challenged on a regular basis and particularly some things are difficult to embrace. In this third post I therefore thought that I would write a little bit about one area where I find myself being too close-minded sometimes.

If you don’t know any other way, you are likely to believe that the way you are living is the “correct way”. Therefore, for most people the attitudes we hold are deeply rooted in our childhood and the environment we grew up in. For me, growing up was largely about discovering that there were other ways to live in and that there were many cultures where the norms were completely different from those I was used to. In fact, even your next-door neighbours may be living differently from you.
In my case, one thing that has shaped me a lot is that I grew up in a family where both parents worked and the household chores were split equally. Both my parents value equality and happen to have been fairly successful at what they do, so they decided together that they wanted to divide the workload at home equally between them. Because of this, I found it difficult for a long time to be open-minded to more traditional homes where the wife is more involved in child-care and cooking, while the dad is responsible for earning money. This is probably a quite unusual example of close-mindedness; usually people talk about the opposite situation when someone thinks that women “should know their place” etc. but I think that it is important that I really make it clear that in my mind “open-mindedness” is all about respecting other people’s choices and realising that there are several right ways of doing things. Therefore, any type of failure to accept others’ lifestyles counts as close-mindedness.

Beginning to discuss equality and family arrangements with friends and family, as well as reading and hearing what people had to say about it in the media opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes you can be equal without having to take care of the exact same things. In some families the parents make the mutual decision that the mum will stay at home because she prefers that and she doesn’t get as much money from working anyway.

When I moved to England I also found out how difficult it is to stay at home with children and still keep your job here. When you give birth, your boss basically expects you to be back at work as soon as you have healed enough. If you are a man you have next to no chance at all to stay at home with your newborn and remain employed. If you like many parents, feel opposed to the idea of hiring a nanny, a common solution is therefore that the mother becomes a stay at home mum to be able to care for her infant and then she often remains a house-wife because it is difficult to get out onto the job market when you have been away for years. This scenario was completely foreign to me when I first heard of it, because in Sweden both parents have the right to stay at home with the child for several months each and still be employed. Learning that this is not something to take for granted even in Europe, made me adjust my view and become a lot more understanding and accepting towards families that have more traditional gender roles.

I definitely believe that the key to personal development is to meet others and find out what they have to say. I remember being so surprised, maybe even a little shocked, when we discussed equality in my English literature class once in school and I realised how differently many of my friends viewed gender roles. Personally I would prefer it if there were no such thing as gender roles, because I think that men and women are both perfectly capable of doing the same things as long as they want to. I believe that it is all about choice and motivation!  But, with my growing understanding and awareness of different perspectives I have been able to see that what people want is not always the same and while some women want a career, others don’t. I still find it difficult to accept people who have the attitude that men are less capable of taking care of children, but I try not to get too worked up about it. If both I and the other person can put our close-mindedness aside it will be a lot easier for us to get along and if I have to be the person to set the example then I will try my best to do that.
I guess what I wanted to say by giving you this personal example is that everyone struggles with changing our opinions and/or accepting that others might have other opinions and I am absolutely not any different. What we can do is to try to be aware of these weak point we have, and maybe sometimes just stay away from topics which you know that you won’t be able to agree on!

/Hanna

Learning from cartoons: Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants

Less stuff is more happiness...

Open-mindedness: More about lifestyle

I first wanted the second text in our open-mindedness project to be about the many different ways of being open-minded, to show how many aspects of life this topic plays an important role in. However, the more I think about it, the longer the list grows. So, to give it time to reach near-full length, and still keep this project flowing, I built a little on what Hanna wrote in her introduction. This text will also be available in her blog: A Little Blog About Words.

Hanna already explained what we mean by being open-minded in the introductory post. An open-minded person is someone who is willing to consider and appreciate other lifestyles than his/her own. There is no requirement to let them influence your own life; but you ought to accept and respect the choices other people have made in their lives without passing hasty judgement.

Among our friends and acquaintances, Hanna and I have noticed that several people blindly consider their own lifestyle and/or world view to be the correct one. Some may be aware of this mindless conviction, others may just hold that belief subconsciously. We can find it rather irritating to have a conversation about important life questions if every idea we utter seems to shatter into dust against the solid wall that is the mind of our peer.

However, that is not the reason Hanna and I feel so strongly about this project. We feel sorry for them, really. We believe that their stubbornness will restrict their lives, fettering their minds to a single world, a single life. If you think that your lifestyle is perfect, you will be too complacent to see ways it could be improved. Just as life always can get worse, it can also always get better!

I personally believe that if you do not strive to become a better person, if you are too satisfied with yourself, you will stop changing. This is natural: why would you want to change if you are perfect? But, if you don’t try to improve, it means you have essentially stuck in the state you were in. I think that your life freezes the moment you stop wanting to change. You may end up in a self-destructive stalemate while the rest of the world moves on around you. A very sad thought, I find.

I believe this can be avoided by approaching people with different ways of living and being open to what their lives can teach you about yours. Imagine meeting a highly religious family that spends three hours every day praying and meditating. If you laugh at them because that is a ridiculous waste of time, then it is very possible live a rather stressful life with little spare time to enjoy living it; maybe you should actually consider starting to meditate yourself to calm down and appreciate your life more!

If you reflect upon your own lifestyle and world view through the eyes of other people, and listen with open ears, you may even find that you enjoy the realisation that your life might not be as good as you thought it to be! I know from my own experience that there are many ways of discovering that my habits, morals or ideologies are lacking, and most are pretty unpleasant. For example, when someone I care about stops talking to me for something I have said or done without thinking; or when I loose a good job because I did not appreciate it enough to make efforts to keep it; or when I have too much fun playing with my friends, loose control and accidentally hurt someone. When things like these happen, I get a sort of shock wake-up and the suffocating guilt is what triggers me to try to make amends and make sure I never repeat the mistake.

If I could learn to avoid such disasters simply by being open to what other people can tell of their own experiences, and by being open to understanding how different people feel about and react to different things, I would gladly embrace this pain-free way of learning.

So, to put what I want to say with this post in a simple sentence: be open-minded for your own good!

Open-mindeness: Post 1

My good friend Hanna and I have been discussing our feelings toward the importance of open-mindedness: how essential it is for tolerance and acceptance of the vast diversity of people that we live among. We are both active bloogers (honest, I do write quite a lot for my paleo blog at least), so we thought of making an open-mindeness project. Hanna took the initiative to introduce us to it.


One of the things which Sebastian and I spent a lot of time talking about during my visit in Bristol earlier this week was the importance of open-mindedness. I know that I have talked about this many times before, and some of you might think “Alright, we get it, stop nagging about it”, but if that’s how you feel I’m afraid that I’m going to have to disappoint you. For me, this is one of the most important issues there are, and I will probably continue to bring it up for as long as I live because unfortunately I doubt that there will be much change in people’s attitudes during my lifetime. Sebastian shares many of my opinions about this and we have therefore decided that we are going to collaborate and write a series of posts, in which we will discuss different aspects of open-mindedness.

To start this project, I would like to begin by trying to explain to you what I mean when I say open-mindedness. I don’t think it is necessary to be open to doing anything you are asked to be open-minded; there is no need to do things which you might not feel comfortable with doing. What you need to be able to do however, is in many ways more challenging and uncomfortable than all those other things put together: You need to be able to accept that although you might feel like you know how you want to live, there may be others who have chosen different life-styles and who are also perfectly happy with their lives. Every single person is shaped by so many different factors ranging from genes to cultural heritage, parental influences, school, friends etc. There is rarely a right or wrong way in which to live. To be open-minded is in my mind the ability to acknowledge this and to try to see beyond people’s choices and life-style and instead focus on their personalities. The truth is that most people are nice if you approach them with an open and accepting attitude.

To be open-minded does not mean that you need to love everyone you meet. You are bound to feel like you have very little in common with many people, and you are probably not going to like everyone’s personality and if that is the case you don’t have to be friends with them. However, you need to understand that this does not necessarily mean that you are living the right way and the other person has chosen the wrong life-style. I have previously said that to be open-minded you don’t have to change your world, but you need to be able to take a step out of it now and then and visit the “parallel worlds” in which the people around you live.

This guy has misunderstood the concept of open-mindedness…

Sebastian has a quite sarcastic and brutal sense of humor sometimes, and when I met some of his university friends I noticed that a couple of them seemed to be taking him too seriously. I really liked these people, and I thought it was a shame if they had misunderstood what kind of person Sebastian is. Afterwards we talked about this and Sebastian said that he knows that he should probably show more clearly when he is joking and when he is being serious. I agree about that and I think that would help others understand him better. However, at the same time Sebastian’s humor is a large part his identity and I would find it sad if he would have to change that completely just because others want him to be different. In situations like these I think open-mindedness can build bridges, prevent misunderstandings and help people connect in spite of differences. In this case, Sebastian needs to understand that with some people he might have to switch down his humour a bit and his friends need to accept that Sebastian has chosen to face life with a very light-hearted attitude because it is a life-style that suits him.

Of course, nobody is perfect. For instance I personally – ironically – often find it hard not to judge close-mindedness. This in turn makes me less open-minded myself! I try my best to at least be aware of this however, and that is a good start. I hope that by writing about it and giving you everyday examples, Sebastian and I will be able to provoke your thoughts a bit too and make you reflect upon what attitudes you might have and why you hold certain opinions!

This is all I had to say for now though,

Hanna

This was also published in Hanna's blog: A Little Blog About Words

Learning from the past: polar ice caps and climate chaos

Months ago, I wrote a second article for The Natural Planet school magazine, but it has not been published and I suspect the editor rejected it without informing me. Then, I decided to include it in this blog, seeing as I have not written anything for ages. 

Since I was working against an upper word limit, I had to skipp the explanations to many of the processes involved, but if anything is unclear, please ask and I'll be happy to try to explain more comprehensively. 

We are all aware that the ice sheets at the poles are melting as you are reading this. We hear about its consequences on a regular basis: that the sea levels will rise, flooding cities and crop fields, that the polar bears’ natural habitats will be destroyed, and so on. However, exactly what will change in the future is very hard to tell. Maybe, just maybe, we could find some clues in prehistory: if we study what happened when the ice caps first formed and in what ways the world changed in response, perhaps we could tell something about what we can expect when we cause the reverse. 

Before the Eocene epoch (56-34 million years ago), Earth was in a greenhouse phase: high concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the absence of glaciers created a warm, humid world with productive oceans and dense tropical forests teeming with tiny mammals – no larger than modern rodents – since being small makes it easier to move through the thick vegetation.

What caused the Earth to cool down in mid-Eocene is not crystal clear, but it is likely a combination of several factors. A typical explanation is relating it to the Milankovitch cycles, a mathematical model for how the Earth’s orbit, change in tilt of the axis, and the way the axis wobbles, control surface temperatures.

In addition, the previous greenhouse conditions caused huge blooms of plants and algae; many of these were not decomposed, for some reason, so huge amounts of carbon were removed from the carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide decreased noticeably. (Today, by burning fossil fuels, we are reinserting massive amounts of carbon into the cycle, while deforestation and ocean pollution kills off the organisms that can sequester it from the air, which is why we see such an increase in carbon dioxide.)

Also, the movement of the continents caused changes in the ocean currents in such a way that the global heat transport to Antarctica was hindered: as South America and Tasmania detached from Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current – a current of cold water that encircles the continent – effectively isolated the Antarctic region from warm water currents. With no heat influx, the continent quickly froze. Other tectonic rearrangements (e.g. the closure of the Tethys sea) may be accountable for the glaciers in the North Pole.

The polar glaciations bound huge amounts of water into ice, so, naturally, the sea levels regressed and the air was stripped of moisture. The next epoch, the Oligocene, thus saw the tropical jungles everywhere replaced by vast plains of grass, which is more resilient in dry, cold conditions. On these open spaces, the mammals grew much larger, and with tough, nutrient-poor grass as the main food, certain mammals with more sophisticated stomachs (especially the ruminants, such as deer, cows and goats) did extremely well and replaced their predecessors as the dominant herbivores.

This might not sound very dramatic, but this transition was actually a minor extinction event, where as much as 20% of all life at that time may have become extinct. The ones that did well did so because others could not cope with the drastic changes!

As the Eocene life perished, the plants and animals we are more familiar with today – most notably, grasses and cattle – emerged. They are adapted to such conditions, and, if we reverse the processes that brought them success, we could see our main food stocks crumble. Warmer, more moist conditions may favour increased yield in our crops, but it will favour interfering organisms such as weeds and insects more, forcing us to expend more resources – probably oil and nasty chemicals – on crop management. Even though we take special care of the crops and cattle so that they have little competition, the more unsuitable the global climate becomes, the harder it will be to maintain the food production, which is already dwindling.