Op-Ed Columnist - When Our Brains Short-Circuit - NYTimes.com

[Mac Davis]

This article is pertinent to the current discussion.   I’ve felt for years like people’s perception of risk is way out of whack with reality.   For example, consider how the DC shooter a couple years ago altered the behavior of thousands of people.   I’m certain that in the same time frame and geographical area affected more people died in traffic than those two guys killed, but that doesn’t affect their behavior at all.   So what’s the difference.   Intent?   
Mac



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02kristof.html?th&emc=th <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/opinion/02kristof.html?th&amp;emc=th>

[Neal Oldham]

I know I've mentioned this earlier, but there was an article in Scientific American a while back asking, Why did humans adopt agriculture?  

The short answer is that humans will always, ALWAYS, accept a high risk of morbidity before a miniscule risk of mortality.

Farmers had a much, much higher rate of disease than hunter-gatherers, but a lower rate of dying in accidents and tribal warfare.  

I've always thought that elephants were somehow "meant" to be the dominant land animal on this planet, and were for a long time, but for some reason, humans came along and mucked up the whole thing.

This reminds me of the greatest opening of the most insightful book ever written.

Far out, in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy, lies a small, unregarded, yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of 93 million miles lies an utterly insignificant blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has--or rather, had--a problem, which was this: most of its inhabitants were unhappy for pretty much of the time.

Lots of solutions were suggested for this problem. Many of them involved the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which was odd, for on the whole it was not the small, green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained. Many of the people were mean, and most were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Some were increasingly of the opinion that it has been a mistake to come down from the trees in the first place. And others said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a young girl sitting on her own in a cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what had been going wrong all this time. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, before she could get to a telephone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occured, and the idea was lost forever.

[Steven Tyree]

Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".  I ought to read it again!

 

The agronomists probably didn't know what was making them sick.  It's a fact, though, that five malnourished farmers could still whoop one robust hunter-gatherer, which is about how many more humans a given plot of land could sustain.

 

All this happened very slowly.  Hunter gatherers typically do things to increase yields, like regularly burning off forest to make more grassland, which attracts herds, (a role that mammoths and mastodons fulfilled before they were wiped out).  It's a long journey from gatherer through horticulture to agriculture.

 

The hunter gatherers didn't go quietly.  It took thousands of years for agriculture to move from the middle east to Britton, for example.

 

For more, check out "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jarred Diamond.

 

Steve

--
Steven R. Tyree
Odyssey Energy Solutions Inc.
IDCLLC
641 Huddleston Rd.
Lascassas, TN 37085
615-286-2716 office
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[Steven Tyree]

Good article.  I wonder what the ratios are for different segments of the population?  Theoretically, elites have an edge over the trailer population in terms of foresight (among many other factors).  It would make a good book!

 

Steve

[Neal Oldham]

Well, in historical farming, it became very hard to guarantee all your sources of nutrients, since farmers tended to monocultures.  This was particularly acute in extreme climates like Northern Europe where all you got was turnips, rye, etc.

Here's the fundamental problem.  The planet was never meant to be a place where we just try to maximize our numbers.  That's how a cancerous tumor "thinks," not a balanced and sustainable species in a niche.

It's a fact, though, that five malnourished farmers could still whoop one robust hunter-gatherer, which is about how many more humans a given plot of land could sustain.

One of my good paleontologist friends put it well last week:  "We should take a page from the ecology handbook and view the world as a zero sum game."