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On the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, little greenish-brown warblers mate for life—or at least a substantial part of it. Year after year, male and female bring the young chick insects to eat while vigorously defending the nest from skinks or predatory birds. These pairings are remarkably stable, lasting up to 15 years—a good chunk of their lifespans, which can reach 20 years—with just under 7 percent of warbler couples separating every year on average.

But scientists are finding that changes in climate can upset these harmonious partnerships. In a recent study in the Journal of Applied Ecology, a team of scientists discovered that in years with little rainfall or extremely high rainfall, divorce rates soared, sometimes more than doubling to 16 percent.

Researchers suspect these higher rates of divorce may be driven by the stress brought by food scarcity in years with harsher climate—a conclusion that may bode ill for the little birds’ partnerships in a world with increasingly variable rainfall. But scientists are still working out whether higher warbler divorce rates are necessarily a bad thing in the long run, or if they might even help the birds adapt to adversity. In the worst case, “it could have long-term effects on the population size,” says evolutionary biologist Hannah Dugdale of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Since 1985, researchers have been carefully monitoring warblers on the Seychelles’ Cousin Island, catching them every year during the breeding season; each bird carries a metal ring with a unique identifier around its leg, along with a unique combination of colored rings so they can be identified with binoculars. The program is so thorough that if a bird isn’t sighted in a year, “we know that it has died,” Dugdale says. The bird couples are very territorial, so if one of them disappears from its territory and reappears in another, it’s clear that it has separated from its partner.

If divorce is causing warblers to break up with perfectly good mates, they may wind up single or with worse partners.

The reality is that males and females are sexually promiscuous and often cheat on one another, but once pairs begin to share a nest, the male will still stick with his female mate to care for her offspring—even when the chick is not his. The bird couples typically live together with helper birds—usually the female’s older offspring, both male and female, who help them in raising young. Female helper birds sometimes also breed and contribute an egg to the nest.

Scientists don’t know much about exactly how warbler divorces play out—when it happens, whether it’s the male or the female initiating the separation, or if it’s preceded by a period of strife or aggression. “Maybe one just leaves without saying anything. It could be a very sad affair,” says behavioral ecologist Augs Bentlage of the University of Groningen, a joint first author on the paper with his colleague Frigg Speelman, also at University of Groningen. After splitting up, some birds stay single while many find new partners.

The warblers’ average annual divorce rate of 6.6 percent per year is comparable to that of other birds that tend to live out their lives in a single region but lower than that of many migratory species that have much higher annual divorce rates. For great reed warblers, for instance, it’s 85 percent. That’s partly because partners lose each other over long seasonal journeys and end up finding new mates along the way.

Seychelles warbler divorce rates were highest in years with unusually low rainfall, according to the team’s analysis of divorce data and local weather records. Bentlage suspects that dry weather reduces the vegetation that insects feed on and evaporates waters where the insects lay their eggs. Warbler couples would then struggle to find enough insects for their offspring, causing physiological stress. The birds may blame these difficulties on their choice of partner, the researchers hypothesize. “You might actually start to perceive your partner as being a low-quality partner,” Bentlage says. On top of this, male helper birds appear to be less likely to assist with chick-raising in years with low rainfall, while females didn’t change their behavior, according to some previous research by Dugdale and her colleagues.

The year of 1997, which saw exceptionally high rainfall in the Seychelles, also saw a spike in warbler divorce rates. Extreme rainfall can kill insects while strong winds can destroy bird nests. And if birds get wet, it’s harder for them to maintain optimum body temperatures. Parents would need to stay with chicks to help keep them warm, limiting their time for insect-gathering, causing stress. From low to high rainfall, “both extremes kind of have the same effect,” Bentlage says.

It’s still unclear what all this means for the warbler populations overall. Extreme years in the Seychelles are predicted to become more common as the global climate warms—a trend that is already making the birds less likely to attempt to breed and lay an egg as well as lowering fledgling survival rates, probably because there are fewer insects for them to eat.

Divorce could either help or hurt the birds during harsh years. Separation could counterintuitively be a good thing if the birds are indeed ditching partners who are bad at finding food, for instance. This might give them the chance to find ones who are better at it, giving future chicks a higher chance of survival. In line with this idea, some long-term research on black-browed albatross couples has found that when they divorce—which increases in years with warm sea surface temperatures—the females tend to find new partners with whom they’re more likely to produce chicks.

But, if divorce is causing warblers to break up with perfectly good mates, they may wind up single or with worse partners instead. This could, in turn, lower the number of chicks they make and, theoretically, over many generations, even increase extinction probability, Dugdale says.

Either way, it’s clear that the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere has not only obvious and direct impacts on animal survival, but also more subtle and complex influences on their lives, the decisions they make, and the relationships they cultivate with one another.

Lead image: inimalGraphic / Shutterstock

• Katarina Zimmer

  Posted on December 6, 2024

  Katarina Zimmer is a freelance science and environment journalist.

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1 Tech Has Become the Most Dominant Faith of Our Time

Though I am an atheist, I have built my life and career around religion. First I spent five years pursuing ordination as a secular humanist rabbi, including 18 months living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, studying ancient and modern Jewish sacred texts I believed—and continue to believe—are human creations, reflective not of divine inspiration but our own projections and needs. From there I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve spent almost 20 years now as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Advising atheists, agnostics, and allies on ethical and existential concerns, my work has taken many forms, including writing about and building a diversely nonreligious congregation of my own. But as we approached the end of the past decade, I’d begun to wonder whether the congregation, as a form of organizing, was really how I wanted to spend my energy. Yes, congregations can help “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” as is roughly how I’d imagined them in my rabbinical seminary and at Harvard Divinity School. The problem is, that isn’t my language—it’s a quote from Facebook’s mission statement, as Mark Zuckerberg relaunched it in 2017.

When I was invited to join MIT as its humanist chaplain in 2018, alongside my work at Harvard, it first occurred to me: Silicon Valley, or “Big Tech,” had superseded religion as the largest force in the world, not only economically, but in terms of influencing our views and experiences of what it means to be human. As historian of technology Mar Hicks told me in 2023, “we’re in a period where tech has expanded to take over nearly every aspect of our lives, economically, socially, and politically.” I then asked Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served President Barack Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to what extent he agreed with Hicks. One could attempt to quantify such a statement in any number of potentially valid ways, but ultimately, Furman said, it simply “seems true.” As someone who genuflects before his own stained-glass black mirror altar a couple hundred times a day, as many of us do, I would have to agree.

My first revelation, then, was that if tech is a religion, as leading technology critics have pointed out for generations, it has become the most dominant faith of our time.

2 The Leading Ideas in Tech Today Are Bizarrely Religious

The leading “ideas” in tech today—which I think are better understood as the “theology” and religious “doctrines” of contemporary Silicon Valley—are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious. My book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation is filled with examples of tech products, services, and marketing missives that are based in religious thinking, like: new AI religions and AI worship; artificial souls; AI Gods; AI Jesus; AI Buddha; Robo Priests, a kind of “rapture” or end-times known as “The Singularity”;  Epistles from AI utopia; fervent and even proudly “fanatical”  calls to colonize the stars immediately; and so much more. In my book I spell out why there are frighteningly close parallels between mainstream beliefs about AI and religious visions of Heaven, Hell, and the “Chosen People.” But all of that was written mainly over the course of 2021-23. Which is, of course, now ancient history.

Since tech religion is all about the now, let’s also look briefly at examples from this year. Like the viral Friend.com necklace, the glowing AI pendant that surveils everything you say and hear, feeding the input through Chat GPT to make recommendations as a “friend.” This company’s founder Avi Schiffmann says the app aims to provide a digital/AI alternative to “a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world,” by providing a constant, all-knowing companion and guide.

The leading “ideas” in tech today are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious.

Then there is Character.AI: It features dozens if not hundreds of chat-ready Gods and deities, explicitly labeled as such, starting conversations with comments like, “I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.” Character.AI is a massive, unregulated, unprecedented experiment: Its founder, Noam Shazeer, left Google to create the company a few years ago, after the tech giant refused to release a new chatbot he’d been working on. Google later paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to hire Shazeer back. And as Shazeer has told The New York Times, his “ultimate vision” is to build artificial general intelligence—which, as many have pointed out,  is a lot like building a god. Shazeer’s inventions are “a cool first use case for” such tech, he says. With more and more kids as the AI’s target audience, what could go wrong, right?

3 The Solution Isn’t … Tech Atheism

Though I work as a “professional atheist” in my day job as a Humanist Chaplain, in the “tech religion” I’m just an agnostic, because despite all the strangeness and often destructive absurdity in the ideas I hinted at above, I often can’t say for sure whether a given form of Silicon Valley tech might have a meaningfully positive impact on humanity. Surely some of these technologies are worthy of our faith, in the secular sense, it can just be very hard to know which ones.

Still, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch such an influential set of companies and industries influence so many people (not to mention government institutions and policies) in the wrong direction because of the problematic beliefs of so many of their individual leaders—optimization as a commandment and inefficiency as a sin; profits (and their prophets) over people; AI “lives” tomorrow over more earthly concerns like the climate or social justice now. That’s why my third revelation was that a massive effort to reform the tech religion is already underway.

“I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.”

When I talk about a tech “Reformation,” I’m thinking of the kinds of movements led by modern religious reformers: people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and his transformative influence on American Christianity; or the organization Rabbis for Human Rights, in which rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum work to protect Palestinian rights; or my friend Lama Rod Owens, a self-described “Black Buddhist Southern Queen” who was originally ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and who is working to reinvent Buddhism as a more radically inclusive religious tradition. These aren’t people who’ve walked away from their religions, muttering loudly on the way out about how “deluded” those they’re leaving behind are. They’re examples of individuals who believe in the potential their religious communities have to do good, but who are honest and clear-eyed about the communities’ failings and injustices, and who devote themselves to improving them. Tech Agnostic tells many stories about people who are the equivalents to people like these, for the tech world—tech heretics, apostates, skeptics, mystics, Cassandras, and whistleblowers who range from seminal scholars to labor activists to everyday gig workers to social workers, psychotherapists, pastors, and beyond.

One of the youngest and most gifted of the reformers I spoke to, a recent Princeton University graduate in African American studies and computer science named Payton Croskey, gave me hope with her call for the creation of an “augmented undercommons”: “a parallel location where all who refuse to submit to technology’s watchful eye may freely reside while reconfiguring the world’s understanding of freedom and security.” It’s not that Croskey is attempting to build some physical tech utopia in a bitcoin city somewhere; rather, what impressed me was her ability to envision, as an undergraduate, a kind of mythological or even spiritual alternative to the mythological place known as “Silicon Valley” (which perhaps began as a reference to a geographical territory in California, but surely now is an idea, an imagined community, more than a space with discernable borders). When I was feeling most hopeless about the future of technology, to be reminded by a young student of the possibility of something more equitable and uplifting was as surprising as it was encouraging.

And actually, the alternative digital world Croskey describes very much reminds me of BlueSky right now: a place where those of us who have been feeling marooned from healthy online conversations can connect, without algorithmic manipulation. Don’t get me wrong, no website or app is perfect. But an online space where thoughtful people can discuss ideas, current events, and the little details of life, bringing together different aspects of humanity without being actively manipulated by billionaires? That, for the moment, sounds like, if not a revolution, then at the very least, a revelation.

Lead image: Viktory Viktor / Shutterstock

• Greg M. Epstein

  Posted on December 5, 2024

  Greg M. Epstein serves as humanist chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch‘s first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion.” He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling book Good Without God and has also written for MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Newsweek. His latest book is Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

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