Daylife/Reuters Pictures
|
What would our forebears have made of test-tube babies, microwave ovens, organ transplants, CCTV and iPhones? Could they have believed that one day people might jet to another continent for a weekend break, meet their future spouse on the internet, have their genome sequenced and live to a private soundtrack from an MP3 player? Science and technology have changed our world dramatically, and, for the most part, we take them in our stride. Nevertheless, there are certain innovations that many people find unpalatable.
Leaving aside special-interest attitudes such as the fundamentalist Christian denial of evolution, many controversies over scientific advances are based on ethical concerns. In the past, the main areas of contention have included nuclear weapons, eugenics and experiments on animals, but in recent years the list of “immoral” research areas has grown exponentially. In particular, reproductive biology and medicine have become ripe for moral outrage: think cloning, designer babies, stem-cell research, human-animal hybrids, and so on. Other troublesome areas include nanotechnology, synthetic biology, genomics and genetically modified organisms or so-called “Frankenfoods”.
To many scientists, moral objections to their work are not valid: science, by definition, is morally neutral, so any moral judgement on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. That, however, is an abdication of responsibility. Some moral reactions are irrational, but if scientists are serious about tackling them – and the bad decisions, harm, suffering and barriers to progress that flow from them – they need to understand a little more and condemn a little less…
I left Jones’ Headline alone. It’s could be construed as opportunism, deliberately leading discussion to the sensational and uninformed – excused as “inviting comment”.
As societies become more scientifically literate, scientific developments may well be judged more from a position of knowledge and less on the basis of intuitive responses driven by moral heuristics. However, there is another serious obstacle to the rational approach: our emotions, and especially the most morally loaded of emotions, disgust. In the wake of the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep, bioethicist Leon Kass of the University of Chicago argued that the visceral feeling which many people have in response to the most contentious scientific advances embodies a kind of wisdom that is beyond the power of reason to articulate. Many people are guided by this supposed “wisdom of repugnance”.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is not one of them. He has coined the more disparaging term “yuk response” to describe this reaction, and believes we should challenge the idea that repugnance is a reliable moral guide and the ultimate arbiter. “You begin the process by questioning the validity of the yuk response, calling it into doubt and pointing out that the yuk meter may be untrustworthy,” says Caplan. Then it becomes possible to start exploring the reasons and justifications for people’s initial intuitions of right or wrong, and see how they stand up to scrutiny.
Most of what Jones describes is cultural and parochial, of course. How shall I oversimplify? If I included an illustrative photo at this point of a nubile, bare-breasted young woman, our religious brethren would reel back, aghast. Slightly less hypocritical Western males would leer – and hope ther wives and fellow workers didn’t see them looking. Much of the rest of the world – from Euro sophisticates to Oceania – would admire her beauty. In Japan there wouldn’t be a peep even if she was barely into puberty.
Found by KD Martin at Cage Match
By definition, the Universe is a black hole. Current cosmological theory postulates that it’s so close to “flat”, according to COBE and DIRBE and the remnants of the Big Bang, that it is bounded. Put your head around that one.
Here’s an image of the early universe and the anisotropy (variations in density / temperature) from COBE data:
While the initial discovery of variations in the intensity of the CMB (made by COBE in 1992) was based on a mathematical examination of the data, the new picture of the sky from the full four-year mission gives an accurate visual impression of the data. The features traced in this map stretch across the visible Universe: the largest features seen by optical telescopes, such as the “Great Wall” of galaxies, would fit neatly within the smallest feature in this map.
#148 – Thomas,
I think you make some valid points but have a lot of misconceptions about hunter gatherer society.
#125
> For the vast majority of the 10,000
> years of agriculture, life has been
> far far worse for the individual
> than in hunter-gatherer societies.
Are we comparing the dawn of agrarian societies or modern society to that of the hunter-gatherer?
I was thinking of comparing up to about 100 years ago. Agrarian society has, only with the advent of modern medicine and only where the majority of people are wealthy, finally provided some people with a healthier life.
Even in agrarian societies, the population growth was generally greater.
Population growth is not a good thing. It’s true that agriculture won. It did so precisely because 100 malnourished farmers can still kill 10 well-fed hunters and gatherers. As can still be seen in today’s world, where population is growing people are poor. Population growth is bad for the individual. Children are an inferior good (or would be if they were actually a good). As people have more money, they generally want fewer children. And, people who have fewer children have more money. It’s a wonderful cycle if we would stop telling people that god wants them to breed like rabbits and instead help by providing education and birth control.
That there are some Cro-Magnons that lived to 65 cannot be taken as evidence that the overall survival rate was greater than that of Homo-Sapiens.
We’ve got another huge misconception going here. Cro-Magnons were homo sapiens. Cro-Magnons were us with a different lifestyle, the lifestyle for which we evolved.
Clearly the reverse must be true. It might be the case that Cro-Magnons that lived past a certain point had a higher probability of survival but prior to that age have a significantly lower probability.
Oh come now!! You ask me to back up my claims and then state this??!!? Nothing about that statement is clear or obvious. Back this up with a link or two please.
It is difficult to know. You cannot conclude that they were “healthier” as their lack of survival clearly argues against it.
What lack of survival??!!? Had they not survived we would not be hear. They are us. They were the same species as us and are our ancestors. We are here precisely because we/they out competed Neanderthals, despite the larger brains (even relative to body size) of Neanderthals. Life span is one of the strong hypotheses for why were able to out compete them. Old people knew how to survive times of famine.
#134
RE: Your quote from page 139
This seems to be the reverse problem of counting the misses and not the hits. When you make systems more efficient you increase the ability to take down larger numbers of nodes with a single input. Thus, when humans began settling in close quarters, an obvious consequence was that it increased the speed at which disease might spread. Hunter-gather’s might have been exposed to similar diseases as those of agrarian societies but their isolation helped prevent rapid spread.
I think you’re helping make my point here. But, malnutrition also increases with agriculture. Agriculture provides abundant cheap calories like proto-wonderbread. It does not provide healthy food. We evolved to eat a wide variety of different foods all containing different nutrients. With agriculture, even today, the vast majority of the world’s calories are in the form of rice, corn, or wheat, all of which have little nutritional value beyond calories.
If the problems in your quote were true it would argue against improved survivability and yet the opposite is clearly the case. That the development of societies created new problems in no way diminishes the success of its improved ability for the species to survive.
No. I said it was bad for the individual. Agriculture won, as I stated above, and as Jared Diamond stated somewhere in Third Chimp, because 100 malnourished farmers can kill 10 well-fed hunters and gatherers. Consider why it took agriculture 10,000 years to win. Consider that there are still hunters and gatherers in the world, where we have let them live.
I think a significant cause of our disconnect is in our respective definition of “healthier.” Spending all day hunting for food is not what I call a healthier lifestyle.
I agree. That’s why I found it really shocking when I read on page 184 of the same book that the San (a.k.a. bushmen of the Kalihari, though they find the term bushmen offensive) spend just 12-19 hours per week gathering food. With that in mind, consider this passage from page 184-185:
I would add that the San live in an area so dry that they live their whole lives getting all the water they need from the plants they eat, never having a drink of water. Imagine how much better life must have been for hunter-gatherers on fertile land.
bobbo,
I think we’ll just agree to disagree. I understand what you mean. I think you understand what I mean. And, we just have different opinion about the wording.
#152 – KD,
So flat it must be bounded??!!? I’ve not heard that before. Please explain how one leads to the other. I suspect some very interesting scientific theory or hypothesis there. Thanks.
#155,
Religious relativists say all kinds of ridiculous things.
# 155 Misanthropic Scott,
So flat it must be bounded??!!? I’ve not heard that before. Please explain how one leads to the other.
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
#57, #94, #103, #104, #106, #108, #114, #115, #127
When conventional, mainstream physicists write about black holes, they always mean something very close to the usual classification. Read the Wikipedia article on black holes. It correctly lists all the fundamental types and the standard cosmological Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric isn’t listed. So our universe is excluded.
The category of black hole types lists Schwarzschild black holes as the only vacuum solution that is spherically symmetric, according to Birkhoff’s theorem. So I am perfectly justified in my comment. That classification purposely excludes the FRW metric.
“The Reissner-Nordström solution describes a black hole with electric charge, while the Kerr solution yields a rotating black hole. The most general known stationary black hole solution is the Kerr-Newman metric, having both charge and angular momentum. All these general solutions share the property that they converge to the Schwarzschild solution at distances that are large compared to the ratio of charge and angular momentum to mass (in natural units).”
Note too that the Wikipedia page on nonsingular black hole models also makes no mention of the entire universe being classified as a black hole.
Scott, The Universe could take one of 3 shapes. Curved up like a sphere, (gravity takes over), curved down like a saddle (hyperbolic, which some believe the new expansion factor of dark energy to help), and flat (can expand forever, but still has a boundary). Current data show the Universe to have a flat shape, and infinite but with a boundary (as if that makes any sense). See data from COBE, Hubble, and others, and theory from Hawking. I’ll see if I can find some citations for you.
Here’s an interesting article from NASA.
#143, Scott,
Life expectancy,
I attribute this to the advent of the beginnings of culture and later the start of agriculture. Remember though, just because some live to age 35 does not mean a significant number do. Also, infant mortality would have been extremely high, skewing the average age to the low side. But, as I write that, it is important to remember, adults that remained at home could not only care for the young, but also the injured. They could also prepare preserved food, tan furs and make clothes, and even make weapons.
The same is seen in some older wolf packs where older wolves will remain at home to rear pups and guard the den.
When mankind did make the transition to agriculture, the social culture was already in place. Yes, disease could have been more rampant, but only because of the population densities. At this point a sick person could be better cared for and was less a burden than one who was needed to hunt. I just don’t see the sudden decrease in average age. Remember, the transition to agriculture was not overnight but a gradual shift over several thousand years with different groups at different times.
#158, KD,
OK, you are way above my head.
Question,
Watching the History Channel and their series on the formation of the universe, it was stated (I believe) that there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. As solar systems and stars get too close they are “swallowed up”. Now if that is the case could it be possible that a black hole swallows so much matter and energy over that the black hole itself becomes so unstable it explodes, creating a new universe?
I’m asking as a layperson. It would seem to me that over the near infinite time span of the universe, all the galaxies could eventually collide. Or even if this happens on a slightly smaller scale of several galaxy’s black holes joining.
#160 – Mr. Fusion,
Around 1997, I heard Lee Smolin lecture on a new book in which he suggested the following as an hypothesis.
Consider that the universe has a bunch of odd constants that just happen to make it a long lived universe, neither rapidly torn apart nor rapidly going back to a big crunch. This fact also allows for life as a side effect. (Note that this was before it was known that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, which may or may not have changed his mind from suggesting this.)
Consider also that the known laws of physics allow for the possibility that at the point of every black hole in this universe, an entire new universe could be spawned out of the singularity with no loss of matter or energy to this one. (This was explained in more detail, though I am unable to parrot the explanation back, sorry.)
Imagine that each of these “child” universes has laws similar to our own, though not necessarily the same, by some mechanism not yet clear.
This would allow for the possibility that universes are subject to a form of natural selection and that the selection criteria is for universes that maximize creation of other universes. This would be a mechanism for the evolution by natural selection of our own universe.
Interestingly, as a theoretical physicist, he put forth a few ideas for theoretical ways to falsify such a hypothesis and hoped that practical physicists would find a way to execute such tests.
They did. The hypothesis failed.
Too bad. I really liked the hypothesis a lot. I’m sure he liked it even more. But, as a good scientist, he recognized that test failure indicates hypothesis failure. And, in the next book of his that I read, The Trouble With Physics, a paragraph or two mentioned his own hypothesis and the fact that it had failed.
Dang.
#159 – Mr. Fusion,
…beginning around 30,000 years ago there was a sharp rise in the number of people who were over 30 years old. They were living significantly longer on average. Caspari and Lee calculated that there probably was a 4-fold increase in the number of grandparents, since generational times were likely to have been around 15 years.
This cannot be attributed to agriculture, an invention that first came 20,000 years later and slowly spread from there. As for culture, and even possibly language, that would be an interesting thought. Certainly, weaponry became quite advanced at this time.
Remember though, just because some live to age 35 does not mean a significant number do.
True indeed. I have not found statistics on life expectancy for this period. Nor do I suspect that the periods before it had sufficient numbers of fossils for a statistical universe. Perhaps we’ll have to wait for more data.
Also, infant mortality would have been extremely high, skewing the average age to the low side.
Perhaps. I’ll wait for statistics on this from the fossil record though. I see no reason to make such an assumption. It would be interesting to find out the statistics on infant mortality from the living groups of hunter-gatherers. I have not heard those either.
#158 – KD Martin,
Cool explanation about the universe being flat. I had heard that before, but forgot it. I still don’t get the bit about it having a boundary though. What about it being flat says that it is not infinite? What does infinite and bounded mean? Is this too much to ask in a reply? Perhaps this is an excuse for a cagematch topic … just a suggestion.
#150
In addition, not eating because your prey got away is likely to not be healthy.
#153
> Agrarian society has, only
> with the advent of modern medicine
> and only where the majority of
> people are wealthy, finally
> provided some people with
> a healthier life.
If that were the case, the agrarian societies as a solution would have never developed as it would have been inferior to survival. As for wealth, hunter-gathers had close to no wealth as accumulation would have been far more difficult than agrarian societies which generally stay in one location. Regardless, measuring wealth in either type of society is quite difficult. As to healthier lifestyle, I bet infant mortality rates and the fertility rates among hunter-gathers trail agrarian societies. If they did not, their populations would have boomed and yet they did not.
> Population growth is not a good thing.
> Population growth is bad for the individual.
These statements are overly broad. Anything to excess is not good. Population growth is not bad. Massive population growth over a short period in a confined region is bad. However some population growth is necessary. Without population growth, having easy access to food is not possible. Without population growth, we would not be here talking.
> As people have more money, they
> generally want fewer children. And,
> people who have fewer children
> have more money
That is fundamental rules of economics (in this case, I specifically mean the study of scarcity). As the cost of having children rises, the demand for them diminishes. If anything, that is evidence of a self-correcting mechanism in population growth. Population growth in poor countries however, can cause famine if left unchecked.
RE: Cro-magnon
In doing some investigation, I did not realize that paleontologists no longer use the term cro-magnon as it is not sufficiently precise. Thus, they simply refer to them as early humans. Given that, am I to conclude that your use of the term is merely to indicate a hunter-gatherer society?
RE: malnutrition also increases with agriculture
There are larger numbers of people in agrarian societies that die of malnutrition because they have larger numbers of people. In the modern era, most famines are not a result of insufficient food production. Most are a result of politics.
> No. I said it was bad for the individual.
> Agriculture won, as I stated above,
> and as Jared
> Diamond stated somewhere in
> Third Chimp, because
> 100 malnourished farmers can kill
> 10 well-fed
> hunters and gatherers.
Why are there only 10 hunter-gathers if they are healthier? If you are one of the people that exists or lived because of improved food production, clearly you do not think it is bad for the individual. Hunter-gatherer societies provide no means of specialization. Thus, it would be more accurate to say that 10 malnourished soldiers can kill 10 hunter-gathers. Living a healthy lifestyle does you no good if you cannot defend your ability to continue it.
> Consider why it took
> agriculture 10,000 years to win.
There are a host of reason the foremost being that it took some time to develop the technology to domesticate enough plants and animals on which to subsist. Hunting is relatively easy to learn. Knowing which plants you can eat and how to grow them in large numbers is not easy.
> Hunter-gatherers are healthy,
> suffer from little disease,
> enjoy a very diverse diet, and
> do not experience the periodic
> famines that befall farmers,
> dependent on few crops
Tell that to the Native Americans who were introduced to smallpox. That lifestyle of “little disease” almost eradicated them entirely. If Bushman only spend 12-14 hours a week searching for food, what do they do the rest of the time? How is it that there is not more specialization in hunter-gatherer societies if this is indicative of the amount of time spent locating food? What about fertility rates? If hunter-gathers are far healthier and supposedly have plenty of food, why are their populations not exploding? Clearly, something has to be killing them or impeding their ability to multiply.
M. Scott, I’ll consider writing this up as a topic on the Cage Match. Esoteric as it may be…
Mr. Fusion, “Now if that is the case could it be possible that a black hole swallows so much matter and energy over that the black hole itself becomes so unstable it explodes, creating a new universe?”
The theoretical limit of black hole mass is something that is still debated, and may be infinite. It is determined by Stephen Hawking that black holes lose mass through particle events at the event horizon, and eventually “evaporate.”
However, the mass of galactic center black holes is so great that the Universe is likely to die of entropic heat death before that can happen to these behemoths. Even so, they will, it seems, eventually evaporate and explode as they reach a microscopic limit (which has yet to be named) due to Hawking radiation. By that time their mass is so small that it would have no effect on the Universe, ie. to regenerate it.
If everything is due to expand out of sight, eventually our galaxy (and the local group which might be absorbed) will be alone — there will be no other galaxies within our horizon. We’ll be completely alone. And once the nuclear fuel runs out for all the stars, even those which may be born from supernovae or collapsing cold gas, there will be nothing left but cold matter.
Sad, but the Universe as we know it appears to have an end in the distant future due to unlimited expansion.
This must really honk off certain Indian religions, which predict the big crunch as the Universe regenerates due to collapse.
FLAT????
The last tv show I “studied” on this subject analogized the universe to an expanding balloon==in the observed universe all the galaxies appear to be accelerating away from all the other galaxies. Such expansion would keep most of the black holes from running into each other.
Theoretical Physics is beyond me–so is calculus for that matter “but” still seems to me that sometimes the standard explanations/models that physicists use have been simplified/anthromorphized/(or maybe 3 dimensionalize? to the point they don’t make sense? I’m thinking of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Schrodinger’s Cat Paradox. To the degree I’ve been able to (mis)understand them, it seems like the postulations are flawed. A constant source of humor for the physicists?===kinda like the “high art” community?
Just think of the earth as that small blue marble and not your own weapons laboratory, and we should all get along.
and further===wouldn’t a flat universe speak against the “Big Bang?” Everything expanding in all directions from a common point. Thats how we get the age of the universe.
Simple minds like myself cannot hold the concepts of flat and balloon as both being valid.
bobbo, “flat” is a mathematical term for the possible values of Omega0. It doesn’t mean “flat” like road kill. It differentiates the possible curvatures from Omega0>1, Omega0=1, Omega0<1. See my diagram above in comment 158.
Omega0 is the value of the density of the Universe (the ratio of the density to the critical density, which also changes as the Universe evolves), and is the constant for determining the curvature of the Universe. It’s all just a bunch of math which, unless you’re a math major and cosmologist, is somewhat complex.
The curvature of the Universe describes whether or not the Universe will expand forever or collapse to the “big Crunch.”
Just use the easy definition.
Here’s a good introductory article with links.
#168–KD Martin==I could really irritate you by taking your post seriously, but I won’t.
YOU SAID the universe was represented by 3 SHAPES==Now you say its all about whether or not the universe will continue to expand or not? I can see by your changing story and introducing contradictions that you have never been arrested much.
Further, maybe on that ADVANCED TV SHOW (ie–it was on after 10PM at night==for “adults”) its already been MEASURED that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, thereby calling for black energy (?–from memory) and that the universe will expand infinitely until entropy takes over and it becomes a big frozen balloon. I guess everything would keep expanding though right–entropy having to do with temperature and not with momemtum? Course, its just a theory==who knows?
Thanks for the response. I feel like a dreidel you just spun with a very long string.
No contradictions, bobbo, it’s just math. The shape of the Universe, it is currently believed, is ” flat”, ie. Omega0=1. It will expand forever, but even with the new cosmological constant, it is not curved like a saddle. I apologize if my explanations have been unsatisfactory. You know I would never deliberately mislead you.
You can google “omega0” and find articles which will explain this apparent contradiction way better then me, but you’ll need a rather good math background to comprehend some of them. Or google “curvature of the universe”. Also good.
Here’s another reference for you. “All the light emitted by stars during the past 14 billion years has an average energy density less than the Cosmic Microwave Background.”
And yes, the shape of the Universe depends on the density of matter in it. That’s the whole deal.
Nothing about “light” on that link ((would that be “visible light” in which I even I wouldn’t think it would be equal to “all” the electromagnetic waves)) but the first thing to read was:
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity – and I’m not sure about the former.” – Albert Einstein
Really not too subtle what you really mean to communicate. I’m very insulted, and won’t post again for at least 5 minutes.
I don’t know why you would be insulted, I’m only trying to help you understand the energy / matter density of the Universe as we understand it today, including visible matter and energy, and dark matter and energy.
The reference shows: Space is flat if the density of mass (plus energy divided by c^2) is equal to a value known as the critical density.
This critical density is the key, and current COBE data show that the Universe is described by Omega0=1. Why that is, is a source of speculation in cosmology. Why should the Universe be flat? We don’t know.
Change any of these constant values, like the mass or charge of the electron, or the speed of light by a factor of 1 in 1,000,000 trillion, and the Universe could not exist. Strange, no? So, why is Omega0 = 1? What a lovely coincidence, to which some cosmologists apply the anthropic principle — we exist in the Universe because it’s the way it is.
You should visit Cage Match, you’d be very welcome there, and there are a lot of science / tech articles I think you’d enjoy. Like this one, which would drive Mr. Mustard to commenting.
Bobbo,
I’d also add about the balloon that it is just a way to visualize that the expansion of space causes all (or nearly all) objects to move away from each other, especially those that are far enough apart to have only minimal gravitational attraction. It is not, in my lay person’s opinion, intended to be a visualization of the shape of the universe.
#164 – Thomas,
Without trying to be needlessly insulting, I’m a little surprised by your response. I posted cited sources to back up my claim in the form of clips of text from Jared Diamond. From Wikipedia:
Your response contains an assortment of misunderstandings, personal opinion, and faulty logic, all of which without any attempt to cite a single source for anything. I will attempt to answer your post point by point making each point an individual reply so that we need not continue to quote each other in entirety to continue the conversation but can reply to individual points without further repetition.
Please though, if you choose to reply, cite sources to back up your statements. It gets tiresome doing the level of searching that I do for someone who does not have the level of interest to do likewise.
Thanks,
Scott
#164 – Thomas,
#150
In addition, not eating because your prey got away is likely to not be healthy.
Consider the current alternative as well please, where 1.2 billion of today’s humans are obese or overweight.
#164 – Thomas,
#153
> Agrarian society has, only
> with the advent of modern medicine
> and only where the majority of
> people are wealthy, finally
> provided some people with
> a healthier life.
If that were the case, the agrarian societies as a solution would have never developed as it would have been inferior to survival.
[misunderstanding of my point, unsubstantiated opinion] You are confusing survival of the species with individual health. Availability of cheap, empty calories made it possible to breed much faster, even with shorter life expectancies and increased health problems.
As for wealth, hunter-gathers had close to no wealth as accumulation would have been far more difficult than agrarian societies which generally stay in one location.
[misunderstanding] I did not say that hunter-gatherers had wealth. I said that agrarians did not exceed the hunter-gather health and life expectancy until fairly recently and even today, only in societies where people are generally wealthy.
Regardless, measuring wealth in either type of society is quite difficult. As to healthier lifestyle, I bet infant mortality rates and the fertility rates among hunter-gathers trail agrarian societies. If they did not, their populations would have boomed and yet they did not.
I was not attempting to measure relative wealth of hunter-gatherers versus agrarians. [opinion, unsubstantiated, citation needed] Don’t bet on infant mortality and fertility, check, post a link. Also note that even if correct, booming population may not be a measure of individual health and well-being. See next reply.
#164 – Thomas,
> Population growth is not a good thing.
> Population growth is bad for the individual.
These statements are overly broad. Anything to excess is not good. Population growth is not bad. Massive population growth over a short period in a confined region is bad. However some population growth is necessary. Without population growth, having easy access to food is not possible. Without population growth, we would not be here talking.
[opinion, unsubstantiated, citation needed, and inherently faulty logic] Population growth beyond a sustainable level is indeed bad. Agriculture has increased this by orders of magnitude. It is easy to show mathematically that any even slight growth of population is a geometric progression that would, if it were possible to sustain such growth, result in a mass of humans greater than the mass of the planet. This is obviously a physical and logical impossibility. So, this point of yours is clearly incorrect.
#164 – Thomas,
> As people have more money, they
> generally want fewer children. And,
> people who have fewer children
> have more money
That is fundamental rules of economics (in this case, I specifically mean the study of scarcity). As the cost of having children rises, the demand for them diminishes. If anything, that is evidence of a self-correcting mechanism in population growth. Population growth in poor countries however, can cause famine if left unchecked.
I think you are making my point here. If not, what point were you trying to make? Certainly though, this does not argue for population increase being a good thing. Further, I think you miss a crucial point about the means by which population should be regulated. If we leave this to the natural self-correcting mechanism, billions will die horrible deaths by starvation.
#164 – Thomas,
RE: Cro-magnon
In doing some investigation, I did not realize that paleontologists no longer use the term cro-magnon as it is not sufficiently precise. Thus, they simply refer to them as early humans. Given that, am I to conclude that your use of the term is merely to indicate a hunter-gatherer society?
I meant it in the way that Jared Diamond used the term in his book, as the specific group of humans who lived in what is now France from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. I believe they are one of the earliest known and best studied of early modern humans. I am using them as a proxy for hunter-gatherer societies in the world before agriculture relegated such populations to the least hospitable lands on the planet. If you feel that this is a wrong use, please state why and provide a citation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon
#164 – Thomas,
RE: malnutrition also increases with agriculture
There are larger numbers of people in agrarian societies that die of malnutrition because they have larger numbers of people. In the modern era, most famines are not a result of insufficient food production. Most are a result of politics.
To my knowledge, death from malnutrition in hunter-gatherer societies is nearly unheard of. See the example of the San (a.k.a. bushmen) that I cited from Jared Diamond’s book The Third Chimpanzee. If you have contradictory data, please post it with your citations.
#164 – Thomas,
> No. I said it was bad for the individual.
> Agriculture won, as I stated above,
> and as Jared
> Diamond stated somewhere in
> Third Chimp, because
> 100 malnourished farmers can kill
> 10 well-fed
> hunters and gatherers.
Why are there only 10 hunter-gathers if they are healthier? If you are one of the people that exists or lived because of improved food production, clearly you do not think it is bad for the individual. Hunter-gatherer societies provide no means of specialization. Thus, it would be more accurate to say that 10 malnourished soldiers can kill 10 hunter-gathers. Living a healthy lifestyle does you no good if you cannot defend your ability to continue it.
[misunderstanding, assumption, faulty logic, unsubstantiated opinion] Maybe, they are healthier because there are only 10. Maybe they are healthier because they eat better food. That I am a product of the society in which I was born does not blind me, the way it does you, to other possibilities. As for defending my lifestyle, for 190,000 years, humans did do just that as hunter-gatherers. For just 10,000 years, we have been practicing agriculture and are now showing many signs that we may kill ourselves off because of it.