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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
#164 – Thomas,
> 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.
Do you have anything to back this up? All hunter-gatherer societies have a much longer list of plants they know they can eat than most modern day humans eat on a regular basis. See the note in my prior post about bushmen eating 85 different species of plants. More importantly though, why do the current hunter-gatherer societies persist despite being on poor land? Bushmen answered: “Why should we plant food when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” Same reference, The Third Chimpanzee.
#164 – Thomas,
> 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.
[opinion, faulty logic, unsubstantiated claim] I fail to see what the fact that European agriculturalists brought disease to American agriculturalists thus killing the majority of the 20-30,000,000 people that were here has to do with hunter-gatherers.
Have you never heard of leisure time? Hunter-gatherers tend to nurse their babies for 3 years. As for why population there is not exploding, maybe they just don’t want to breed like rabbits. Do you have 15 children? If not, why not? I think if you are going to claim that they are unhealthy individuals, you should back that up with something other than your own lay person’s opinion based on never having met them.
As a final thought, since you obviously view increasing population as a sign of a healthy society, take this thought experiment.
Imagine you are being forced to leave the United States, where I assume you now reside. You have choices of where to live in the world.
Clearly, you rule out Europe due to the low birth rate and declining population of all European nations, especially when immigration factor is considered as separate from births.
So, you look around the world for countries with healthy increasing populations where individuals must have the best possible lifestyle and be the healthiest.
So, you would clearly choose to move to the Maldives at number 1, or possibly the D.R. Congo at number 7.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_rate
#175
Yes there are some people that are obese but I do not accept that it is 1/6th of the planet’s population. The only way to come up with such a figure is to use the ridiculous body mass calculation which says that a stick with no muscle is healthier than a professional athlete.
#176
RE: Survival of agrarian societies
That agrarian societies were better suited for survival is obvious. Most hunter-gatherer societies are gone. Cheap calories makes for better fed humans which allows for more breeding. HG societies would breed more if possible. You need to provide evidence argue the contrary.
For all the health problems you are discussing, you are discounting the health problems encountered in HG societies and their inability to effectively deal with because of lack of specialization.
> [misunderstanding] I did not
> say that hunter-gatherers had wealth.
From #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.”
We have to agree on what we mean by “wealth” before we can state that because of it, agrarian societies are better off or worse.
RE: Fertility rates and infant mortality rates
Clearly fertility rates and capability must be lower or HG societies would have had larger numbers. You cannot attribute the decline of HG societies entirely on larger populations of agrarian societies.
RE: Population growth
> Population growth beyond
> a sustainable level is indeed bad.
The key word is “sustainable level.” Technology greatly extends what is considered sustainable. If you are a HG, sustainable might be entirely determined on the migration and population of one or two types of animals. With agrarian societies, they can make an area sustainable that would not be sustainable to HG. An example would be most deserts. Many large population centers are currently located in places that would be nearly impossible for more than very small HG societies to use for any length of time.
Obviously, if no one dies, then we will eventually exhaust the planet’s resources. However, technology provides the ability to sustain a much higher level of population growth than you give credit. There are a lot of empty places in the world.
Population growth per se is not bad. Population growth in the middle of Nebraska is not necessarily bad. A large population growth in the middle of Mexico City might be. You cannot arbitrarily state that all population growth is bad and no one is suggesting that infinite population growth with an expansion of territory is not bad.
(From #178
> If we leave this
. [regulation of population] to the natural
> self-correcting mechanism, billions
> will die horrible deaths by starvation.
You are discounting the possibility of lower birth rates. The wealthier (by today’s terms) a nation becomes, the lower their birth rate. More specifically, as the standard of living goes up, the birth rate goes down.
> To my knowledge, death
> from malnutrition in
> hunter-gatherer societies
> is nearly unheard of.
So why did they not survive in substantially larger numbers? Why were the populations of Native American’s not orders of magnitude larger when the European’s arrived? If food is in abundant supply, why weren’t their numbers much larger? Clearly there must be a reason. Given something you said earlier, I would guess that agrarian societies can produce a greater number of calories. In other words, HG are limited in the amount of people they can create because of the net production of calories from hunting. That would mean that food is not really abundant.
#181
You are the one that threw out the 10 HG vs the 100 farmers from your book so it is your misunderstanding, faulty logic and unsubstantiated opinion that is being made. I”m merely pointing out that it is strawman argument. If anything, the ability of agrarian societies to specialize, especially with respect to tool manufacturing, made them more successful fighters.
RE: Domestication
Domestication first occurred around 9000 BCE. Finding evidence of *attempts* at domestication are obviously more difficult. ;->. I seem to remember that Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel mentioned the difficulties in domestication and the circumstances that made it possible. If man has been around for 100K years but only domesticated plants and animals 10K years ago, why was it not accomplished earlier? As Diamond theorized, it was because of a confluence of events necessary to make it possible. HG is simpler to setup: find food, kill it/dig it up, eat it. If the food moves, you move. With domestication, you are somewhat stuck in one area.
#183
> I fail to see what the
> fact that European
> agriculturalists brought
> disease to American agriculturalists
> thus killing the majority
> of the 20-30,000,000
> people that were here
> has to do with hunter-gatherers.
Because HG live in smaller groups, they are generally more isolated than agrarian societies living in densely populated cities. The propensity to encounter disease is thus lower in HG societies. Because, the Native Americans lived in small population densities, they were not exposed to the same degree of diseases as Europeans and thus were vulnerable. HG have a lower probability of human contact and that makes them more vulnerable to disease. Agrarian societies are obviously also vulnerable. The Black Plague is an obvious example. Population density makes for rapid deaths from disease. However, as a society, their survival of these incidents made them more resilient to disease but by the same token were exposed more often. If you can get away with living isolated from everyone else, your odds of getting a serious disease are lower but your odds of dying from it are greater.
RE: Bushman leisure time.
So, what you are suggesting is that they sat around and did nothing for thousands of years? Agrarian societies had leisure time as well and yet look at the myriad of technological solutions that were borne out of their leisure time. I suspect that the average leisure time available to HG 10K+ years ago was less than near 60 hours that has been suggested or else some other explanation for the lack of productive use of that time needs to be explained. Doing nothing with your leisure time for 100 years is one thing. Doing nothing 90K years is another.
> As for why population there
> is not exploding, maybe
> they just don’t want to
> breed like rabbits.
This is your weakest line of thinking yet. Having more children, in pretty much every HG society, is seen is beneficial because it meant survival and because of infant mortality. Screwing like bunnies was desired and in fact encouraged. In this case, the onus is on you to substantiate the claim that HG would have decided to breed less for reasons beyond the physical inability of the partners.
*I* don’t have fifteen children because it is far more costly for me to have a child than a HG of 10K years ago. A HG of 10K+ years ago was only limited by the catchers to which he was able to pitch.
RE: Your thought experiment
Your logic again here is faulty. In your experiment, I’m going from one agrarian society to another; not from a HG society to an agrarian society. Comparison of similar types of societies purely based on population size is nonsense. I can also do a host of things in Europe that I cannot do in the Congo like eat at nice restaurants, watch nice shows, have learned discourse about books, play with technological innovations etc. All those things exist because of specialization made possible because of agrarian societies.
Further, my decision to relocate would obviously based on far more factors than simply the health of the populace. People in Singapore are far healthier than in the US and yet I have no desire to move there.
To turn your argument back on you, you also live in the US (NY if I remember). If the HG is healthier and as you pointed out, many HG societies still exist, why do you not drop everything you are doing and rush out to live in the bush? (Queue the Monty Python lumberjack song). Obviously, this “unhealthy” agrarian society has benefits that outweigh those supposed unhealthy aspects.
WELL! I’ve read the whole thread and parts of it twice. Misanthropic Scott for the win.
Although neither agreed on a definition of what “Healthy” means, a common sense definition would be the longer life with less disease.
How is this healthy life achieved today? Variety of food and active life style. Who does this describe?==the HG’s.
Common sense should end this discussion, irrelevant tangents and straw man arguments not without a separate interest of their own==but still irrelevant.
Thomas, I’ll specifically address your “triumphant” finale: why doesn’t Scott move to an HG society? Healthiness is one of 683 factors determning where we choose to live. Pretty stupid to balance 682 against one.
#173–Scott==you say a balloon is no t the correct visualization of the shape of our universe.
With greater ignorance than your own, I say that it is. I think you got confused by “shape” meaning the different values of Omega which have nothing to do with shape and only whether or not the universe will expand forever or collapse.
Least, I think thats what KD directly told us above====but based on track record, a roadkill squirrel may be a reference to fractal infinities consuming their start and finish existing on a vibrating thread in the 9th dimension.
Those physicist make up words and concepts like that as one big joke on the rest of us: “uuuuuummmmmmhhhhhh”
Can you hear them as proxies for the universe laughing?
#186
> Healthiness is one
> of 683 factors determning
> where we choose to live.
> Pretty stupid to balance
> 682 against one.
Huh? It was MS that proposed the idea of moving to another society purely based on population figures. I completely agreed that using that single factor is nonsense.
> Although neither agreed
> on a definition of what
> “Healthy” means, a common
> sense definition would
> be the longer life with
> less disease.
You are ignoring the ability to combat disease as opposed to just avoid it. Clearly, agrarian society’s ability to specialize gives them a far superior means to combat disease than HG.
Longer life clearly goes to modern societies and it is unclear whether it does not also go to ancient agrarian societies. As I stated, just because there are cro-magnon that lived to 65 does not mean that the average life span was 65. Further, it might be the case that HG spent less time warring with each other than agrarian societies. That does not make their life style “healthier” it just makes it less prone to being hurt.
#189==Thomas==bad form to use ignorance as a spear. If you don’t know==you don’t know. Its not a basis for doubt.
So– sounds like you got lost in the vagaries of the thread as well. Scott and you BOTH AGREE that MODERN SOCIETIES have the advantages of public health, medicine, technology etc. These are not available to early agricultural societies who used their spare time to develop the arts, politics, and religion. Healthcare came late upon that scene.
So–for future discussion, you might note the relevant time frames that comments are applicable. You are jumbling them up.
I note that without any facts to go on, the default position is to apply todays health knowledge? === the healthiest lifestyle is made up of a variety of food and an active life style.
Common sense beats ignorance until facts are presented.
Bobbo, to Scott:
Well, actually it does have to do with shape — the curvature of space, which leads to the ultimate demise of the Universe. But you never answered why you were insulted, which I had no intention of doing.
Did you know that Omega0 has an effect on the Pythagorean theorem and the triangle? The entire set of Pythagoras’s laws goes out the window (on a cosmic scale) if Omega0 is not equal to 1. Now that just freaked me completely out.
Triangles on a spherical surface and on a hyperbolic surface don’t comply with the old C^2 = A^2 + B^2, and the trigonometric functions don’t work, either. Frightening, eh?
Spherical triagles I understand, as they relate to navigation and great circle routes on the “spherical” surface of the Earth. But I’ve never had occasion to use hyperbolic triangles…
#184 – Thomas,
So much for keeping each point separate to avoid repeating our entire text with each volley.
Re: Obesity. I said overweight or obese.
Here’s the statement by the World Health Organization. Please don’t use the argument from incredulity again. It doesn’t work for religion and it doesn’t work for statistics. Try posting links instead.
http://tinyurl.com/a8h6p
#184 – Thomas,
#176, That agrarian societies were better suited for survival is obvious.
HG’s survived for 190,000 years. Agrarian for 10,000 years. We’ll see if we survive as agrarians for another 100 years. Then maybe we can begin to talk about which is better suited to survival. Right now, we are threatening our own survival with, among other things:
* Global warming
* Nuclear war
* Insufficient resources (top soil, ground water, and ocean fish to name a few are all in decline)
* Pollution (could be considered insufficient resources in terms of clean drinking water and air.)
* Loss of biodiversity (we depend on a complex web of life for our very survival, as Biosphere 2 proved.)
So, the jury is still definitely out on this one. As for our potential to survive for the really long term, millions or hundreds of millions of years, we don’t even know whether hunter-gatherers would have been able to do so.
#184 – Thomas,
Obviously, if no one dies, then we will eventually exhaust the planet’s resources. However, technology provides the ability to sustain a much higher level of population growth than you give credit. There are a lot of empty places in the world.
Obviously the word obviously means that you need to cite a source for the information.
From The Dominant Human Animal by Paul R Ehrlich and Anne H Ehrlich (on page 235):
Given that population is expected to increase by 40% and that individual lifestyle improvements in developing nations incur a greater land cost, just where do you expect this new land to come from? Certainly not from sea level rise? Certainly, desertification from climate change won’t help. Desertification from depletion of ground water and depletion of top soil won’t help.
#183 – Thomas,
no one is suggesting that infinite population growth with an expansion of territory is not bad.
How do you reconcile this with your prior statement from post %164?
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.
Population growth on a finite planet cannot continue indefinitely. So, it cannot possibly be necessary to long term survival of the species.
#184 – Thomas,
So why did they not survive in substantially larger numbers? Why were the populations of Native American’s not orders of magnitude larger when the European’s arrived?
You missed the point again!! Native Americans were agrarian. They had huge numbers. The initial estimate made in colonial times was based on a lack of knowledge about the fact that smallpox hit the natives faster than they were “discovered” by Europeans. Current estimates of human population in North America prior to European contact range from 20-30 million people. Numbers for all of the Americas are up to over 100 million people.
http://tinyurl.com/a4gwv
Do not use native Americans as your hunter-gatherer example again. Who do you think domesticated maize (corn)? Who do you think taught the pilgrims to farm it?
#185 – Thomas,
#181
You are the one that threw out the 10 HG vs the 100 farmers from your book so it is your misunderstanding, faulty logic and unsubstantiated opinion that is being made. I”m merely pointing out that it is strawman argument. If anything, the ability of agrarian societies to specialize, especially with respect to tool manufacturing, made them more successful fighters.
Which still has absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to do with individual health.
#185 – Thomas,
Re: Domestication.
We’re completely talking past each other here. I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
#185 – Thomas,
RE: Bushman leisure time.
So, what you are suggesting is that they sat around and did nothing for thousands of years?
Perhaps they enjoyed their lives. What do we do with all of our leisure time? Watch TV?
This is your weakest line of thinking yet. Having more children, in pretty much every HG society, is seen is beneficial because it meant survival and because of infant mortality. Screwing like bunnies was desired and in fact encouraged. In this case, the onus is on you to substantiate the claim that HG would have decided to breed less for reasons beyond the physical inability of the partners.
First, no, having more children is not necessarily desired in HG society. This is an assumption that you as an agrarian assert. Please provide support for this claim of yours.
Second, adequate food supply and abundant food supply are not the same thing. Agriculture provides an abundance of bad food, rice, wheat, corn, and
french friespotatoes. It does not supply good healthy food.Third, in order to breed like rabbits, one must have something like cow’s milk or other baby food to feed the infants. When children are weaned at 3 years old, women are only fertile every 4 years, and thus cannot breed like rabbits.
I find it rather amusing that you place the burden of proof on me when you have not accepted the burden of proof for a single factoid. You have not cited a single source yet. This is getting rather tiring. I suspect that if you knew how to google, I would not have to answer many of these questions. You would learn the answers as you attempted to back up your own assertions and failed.
#185 – Thomas,
*I* don’t have fifteen children because it is far more costly for me to have a child than a HG of 10K years ago. A HG of 10K+ years ago was only limited by the catchers to which he was able to pitch.
Surely you jest. You can’t really be serious with this. It is far cheaper relative to your wealth as an American to feed a baby just well enough to get it to breeding age than it is for a hunter gatherer to do so, given the complete lack of wealth you cited above. Hell, you don’t even need to spend the time with your kids, you can hire someone to do it for you.
#185 – Thomas,
RE: My thought experiment:
Exactly right. What you fail to appreciate though is how much of what you cite is a direct correlation with population size and more importantly, population increase. Poverty causes population increase causes poverty in a vicious cycle of positive feedback.
You don’t want to live in places with such a cycle. That’s why population growth is indeed inherently bad.
Consider that resources on this planet are finite. Consider the available resources as the total real wealth of the planet, because it is.
Now consider whether INDIVIDUALS fare better when those resources are divided among 6 million, 60 million, 600 million, or 6 billion people. Once you come to your conclusion, you will see why places with negative population growth tend, on average, to be wealthier per capita than places with positive population growth.
#185 – Thomas,
If the HG is healthier and as you pointed out, many HG societies still exist, why do you not drop everything you are doing and rush out to live in the bush?
It’s an excellent question. I would prefer life in such a society. There are a number of factors in my life for why I don’t do so.
1) It takes years, typically the years from birth to maturity, to learn what is necessary to live in a society. My years were wasted on living in this one. I do not know how to live in another.
2) I have diabetes and am dependent on modern medical technology. Were I born in a hunter gatherer society, I might never have come in contact with the virus that my body fought long after it was dead and thus killed my pancreas. Or, I might have and might have died from it. Either way, I do not have that choice now.
3) Most societies are fairly xenophobic and do not easily welcome newcomers into their tribe.
4) Most such societies living today are either A) in the tropics and susceptible to malaria, against which I have no resistance or B) in the high arctic eating very high fat raw meat that tends to make those who do not have the genetic modifications (similar to those that allow us to drink milk into adulthood) to successfully digest such a diet.
So, there are plenty of reasons why I do not really have this option today.
# 189 Thomas,
You are ignoring the ability to combat disease as opposed to just avoid it. Clearly, agrarian society’s ability to specialize gives them a far superior means to combat disease than HG.
Once again, clearly the word clearly here means that you need to do some research to contradict the words of a world-renowned anthropologist on the subject.
Jared Diamond states the opposite.
Thomas, why should I believe you over Jared Diamond? Got a link? A book citation? Anything?
#189 – Thomas,
Longer life clearly goes to modern societies and it is unclear whether it does not also go to ancient agrarian societies.
Why’s it unclear? It seems very clear that I provided a source of information. Do you possess some contradictory evidence? Or, are you just blowing out your ass?
As I stated, just because there are cro-magnon that lived to 65 does not mean that the average life span was 65. Further, it might be the case that HG spent less time warring with each other than agrarian societies. That does not make their life style “healthier” it just makes it less prone to being hurt.
Why is less warfare not healthier? I do not believe that to be the reason for the longer life based on the afformentioned studies showing how prone agrarians were to malnutrition. But, even so, just as smoking is an unhealthy activity, so is warring.
I think you have some very strong assumptions burned very deeply in your brain and are unwilling to take them out and examine whether they are indeed true. Most of us in our society have these elements of propaganda embedded just as deeply. Some of us are willing to reexamine them when presented with contradictory evidence.
bobbo,
Thanks for the supporting commentary. Interesting point about art, especially in light of Thomas’ comments about leisure time.
http://tinyurl.com/24zko
http://tinyurl.com/24xewo
Other than that minor point, you’ve made some very good points to which I have little to add, hence my non-responses.
#203 – me,
2) I have diabetes and am dependent on modern medical technology. Were I born in a hunter gatherer society, I might never have come in contact with the virus that my body fought long after it was dead and thus killed my pancreas. Or, I might have and might have died from it.
Note that this is true of either early agrarian or hunter gatherer societies, of course. If I actually contracted type 1 diabetes in either, I would soon be dead.
Of course you could also say that HG cultures are “healthier” because they aren’t capable of developing ways of preventing the unhealthy members from dying. I would say that our culture is very unhealthy because our healthcare advancements allow us to be, as we find ever more ways to keep chronically ill people from dying as they otherwise would (should).
#208 – Sea Lawyer,
Interesting point. But, I think that the fossil record would show a preponderance of the young dead.
As for current society, I think we have many ills. Some involve pumping air through the meat that was once a human. However, I think we have bigger problems than that.
Or, were you arguing that you would like me dead? 😉 I consider myself quite healthy despite my diabetes.
Still though, even I would argue that individuals in today’s society, at least in developed democratic nations, are healthier than either early agrarian societies or hunter gatherer societies.
Society itself may be less healthy; people may even be less happy (I have heard such arguments but am not making that case); but health has improved quite a lot in the last 100 years.
Never would I suggest that I would like you to be dead. Though I also won’t take the position that people with chronic diseases should have their lives artificially prolonged either.
# 210 Sea Lawyer said, “I also won’t take the position that people with chronic diseases should have their lives artificially prolonged either.”
I don’t have a problem with it. Although, if the State is to provide health care on my dime, I don’t think they should be allowed to breed.