As I buy all my books (and indeed pretty much everything else apart from food) from charity shops any review of the books I’m reading is unlikely to be characterised by theme or contemporaneity. However, the combination of being an exceptionally quick reader, a very brisk reviewer and not having much else to do with my time means that I should be able to provide quantity at least.

Jared Diamond – Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

An intrinsically fascinating subject, but I found it hard work to get through. Partly because Diamond’s thesis – that environmental factors are the primary cause for  the differing pace and form of development around the world throughout history rather than being down to innate racial differences  – is basically a common sense one (well, at least it’s what I’d assumed working from basic ignorance). Partly because his writing style is rarely inspired and is unnecessarily verbose.

Charlie Brooker – Dawn of the Dumb

In one piece in this book (the second collection of Brooker’s Guardian journalism, particularly his TV column Screen Burn), Charlie offers advice as to what to do if no-one is talking to you at a party. “[S]tart saying the word ‘despair’ out loud. Begin the incantation at conversational level, then increase the volume incrementally until someone asks you to leave.” It kind of sums up what it’s like to read his work in book form.

In single segments, Screen Burn is refreshing, a caustic and witty assault on the banality, idiocy and small-minded cruelty of contemporary culture. His brutal hatchet jobs on those he dislikes (Psychics, Tories, Stupid People, TV Executives Who Are Convinced Their Audience Are Morons) really help raise the morale of people like me who think that these things are evil and must be stopped.

In book form however, it’s a bit like being hit by a sledgehammer of righteousness. And despair. Because Brooker is under no illusions that the enemy are winning, and his articles are no more capable of stopping them than Cnut was of stopping the waves. He approvingly quotes Kurt Vonnegut to the effect that television is contemporary society’s equivalent of the lead pipes that gradually drove the Romans mad – an unlikely view for a TV critic.

There is TV that Brooker likes: Dr Who, Deadwood, The Shield, The Thick of It, Peep Show; but then it’s back to some soul sucking horror like The Jeremy Kyle Show, Love Island, and so on ad nauseam.

Ultimately, Brooker’s journalism stands the test of time surprisingly well given that much of his material is the definition of ephemeral – Big Brother, X Factor, I’m a Celebrity… – but read too much of it at a time at your own peril.

Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything

I think Bill Bryson is a genius, who can make almost any subject diverting. I’ve read, with pleasure, his work on grammar for God’s sake so with the considerable amount of material he has to play with here, an interesting read is basically guaranteed.

The book is basically a twin history, one of the physics, chemistry and biology that has led the Universe from its creation to the present state of the Earth, and one of the progress of human scientists in discovering all these secrets. The first part is clearly explained, generally easy to follow and often fascinating. The second part is where Bryson gets his laughs, poking gentle fun at the many foibles that accompanied the astonishing ingenuity of the leaders of scientific discovery.

Unfortunately, having read all of it, and been fairly sure I understood most of it at the time (I never really got to grips with protons and quarks and so on) I can barely remember a single concept that was explained. In fact, the only clear bit of knowledge that did stick with me is that if a meteor is heading directly for Earth a) we won’t see it in time to fire a nuclear weapon at it, and b) we’re screwed.

The monster two-thousand pages health reform bill is going to pass, I think. There are two silver linings to this disaster, First, I have never in my life seen Americans pay such attention to the mechanics of how legislation is made. (The 300 million bribe to Sen Landrieux of Louisiana is common currency.) Second, as I said, the Obama administration is making so many mistakes we may well have a one-term President and a groundswell of conservatism in three years.

Except, paradoxically, if there is a terrorist attack, it will save Obama. Americans rally around their leadership in times of calamity.

Don’t get discouraged. We can roll back everything, except massive debt, of course. We are stuck with it, especially you, starry-eyed, good-feeling young people who voted massively for Peter Pan.

The next disaster is going to be cap-and-trade legislation. There could be national security justifications for a tax on carbons, which include petroleum. We are getting too muchof it from bad neighborhood, Iran, for example and unstable Saudi Arabia. The fact is that Iran could shut down the Straight of Hormuz for a long time by sinking two dozen old ships in the right places. (Look up the Straight in an atlas; it’s good for you.)

Not the justification chosen by the administration, and with good reason. Instead, they insist on taxing carbon emissions because of our carbon footprint, because of climate change. Climate change was formerly called global warming. It was re-named because the climate stopped warming about ten years ago. Time to review systematically the absurdity of this set of beliefs. A systematic review is needed because, I noticed around me and among my radio listeners a tendency to lose the forest for the trees. Below are seven points worth keeping in mind that organize the issue somewhat. (My radio program, “Facts Matter” is available on ksco Santa Cruz 1080 AM, every Sunday, 11 am to 1 pm. You can also catch live on-line.)

1 There is no global warming trend, except over a very small number of years. Does not matter. Advocates have been caught repeatedly manipulating data to show a suddenly, abrupt climb in global temperature in the 19^th and 20^th century. (The “hockey stick.”) In fact, it was warmer in 1100 than it is now. The medieval viking settlers in Greenland ate beef. That means they grew grass in significant quantity, which you could not do now reliably in Greenland because it’s too cold. I got the information on the settlements and on their beef diet from Jared Diamond’ good book, Collapse. Diamond is a serious environmentalist and a climate change advocate but an honest man.

There is no scientific consensus on climate change, as the Obama Administration would have you believe. There is a a shared religious conviction among establishment scientists who depend on government funding. Advocates publicize every anecdotal item that could conceivably support the thesis and nothing that invalidates it: It’s unseasonably warm in NY in November, they say but early winter in Colorado does not get a notice.

For a small sample of the intellectual dishonesty among climate change advocates, follow the Times of London link below.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6926325.ece

The main part of the story is not how vile many advocates are. It’s simply the observation that if you need to lie on behalf of your cause, it’s a bad cause. Period.

2 If there were a significant warming trend, it would not be reasonable simply to attribute it to the burning of petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Water vapor and bovine burps play a similar role. (I am not making this up!) Climate change advocates should tell us clearly what part each type of gas plays in alleged global warming. Or they should tell us that they don’t know. Clarity and thoroughness matter when you wish to impoverish billions, as carbon emissions reduction would do without a question.

3 If there were increased emission of carbon and if we cared about it, advocates would have to show that the normal natural means of absorption of carbon emission are not working, or not working well enough. The National Geographic, a strong advocate, just showed (December 2009 issue) a graph indicating that 56% of carbon emissions are absorbed by earth and ocean. The National Geographic is a consistent advocate of climate change, of course. This unaided rate of natural absorption suggests solutions to alleged global warming other than the reduction of carbon emission and the consequent crippling of the world economies. I don’t know if it’s feasible but I want climate change advocates to tell me: How about planting more forests instead? I mention this because hardly anyone is against planting trees, not even mean-hearted conservatives like me. By the way, enlarging forests could create jobs where they are most needed, in the poor countries. I, for one, go on the record to say that I would not mind being taxed to pay poor Indians and South Americans to plant trees that would benefit me as well as them

4 Advocates have to show strongly that increased carbon emissions stay trapped in the atmosphere. There are big doubts expressed in some scientific milieus about this assumption. It’s too technical for this blog. See the Watts reference below. Of course, if CO2 escapes into the ether as we create it, there cannot be global warming according to the advocates’ own religious dogma.

5 It’s the advocates’ burden of proof to perform a serious and evolving cost/benefit analysis of the drawbacks and advantages of global warming if it exists. Carbon is plant food. Warmer weather means bigger crops of the most important plant foods, especially wheat. Think Canada and Siberia. If the northern limit of wheat maturation moved as little as one hundred miles north in each region, the harvest gains would be enormous. Same thing for the southern limit of wheat maturation in Argentina. Climate advocates are, by and large, the same people who tell us that much of the world population is going hungry. You can’t have it both ways. You want to feed the hungry first or second, or third, or not at all. Just make yourselves clear!

6 If there were global warming and it were sure to be deleterious on balance, we would need to establish how urgent the problem is. Let’s take an easy measure proposed for years by climate change advocates: the supposedly rising sea level. According to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, winner of the 2007 (laughable ) Nobel Peace Prize, the maximum rise in sea level is less than three feet in one hundred years. That’s disturbing for many coastal areas but not an emergency. Gives us time to think better solutions. Again, that’s the maximum estimate.

7 Those who buy the whole climate change religion should be strongly in favor of nuclear energy. It’s the surest and quickest way to slow down petroleum and coal consumption. It’s not experimental, it’s well proven. The Japanese and the French have been relying on this form of energy for thirty years. Nevertheless, climate change advocates are not in favor of expanding nuclear energy production. This alone puts their good faith in doubt.

Overall, most of us don’t have time to consider everything in detail. Movements followers are trying to swamp with impossible quantities of info and pseudo-info regular people who need to make a living and to raise their children, I think. There are shortcuts, however. You don’t have to become an expert to form a valid opinion on this attempt to curtail your standard of living. Here is one: Judge a movement by the quality of its leaders.

The undisputed public leader of climate change-based policies is Al Gore. Al Gore is an ignorant moron. He proves it every time he goes on television. He said recently that the center of the earth is several million degrees hot. (It’s 5000 degrees F.) That was in defense of geothermal energy. I heard him with my own ears. This is not an Internet rumor. It’s also not a small mistake on an arcane point. A reasonably good high-school junior would know better.

Here are a couple of things you can do to make yourself informed without turning the endeavor into an unpaid second job. First, visit the eminently readable and scientifically respectful website :Watts Up With That

Second, if you take the trouble occasionally to read carefully reports put out by advocates of global warming themselves, you will often find statements that don’t conform with their views. That’s what I did above with Collapse and with the National Geographic.

Whats’ really going on? As is always the case with left-wing movements, you have a small elite of cynics, supported by religious frenzy, leading an army of dupes.

The cynics want three things:

1 A massive transfer of wealth from relatively civilized areas, like the US, to the poor countries that don’t know how to govern themselves;

2 The foundations of a future world government where we would have to end up having our lives determined in part by bloody and grotesques dictators. (Think of Libya and North Korea as the next Illinois and New Jersey.)

3 As always, more power for themselves. The fastest way to rise to the top is not hard work or initiative but the confiscation of public resources under the guise of government

The dupes are psychologically the same kind of people who believed in Stalin, and who were slaughtered by Stalin and whose lives were ruined by Stalin for several generations. They cried by the tens of thousands at the tyrant’s funeral. Some are genuinely ignorant. Many more are intellectually lazy. They also love to believe the world is going to pot in general. Good people will assent to anything if they are scared enough.

Man up, America! (That goes for you to, Miss.)

In my last post I addressed why I thought we need to return to assuming that poverty is the natural state of man.  From that assumption we could explore wealth, its sources, and its distribution.  This is not to dismiss poverty or to say that nothing can be done about it.  Wealth and poverty are two extremes on the same scale.  You often cannot talk of one without the other.

There is a lot of research done into the causes for both and after my last post I saw more articles in my RSS feeds related to the subject.  One such article was posted by Greg Mankiw on his blog.  It is by Daron Acemoglu who is an MIT economist and he seeks to explain the development gap between the first world and the third world countries.

He gives credit to where its due in the explanations given by Jeffery Sachs who argues for geographical and weather differences and to Jared Diamond who argues for technology.  However, Acemoglu argues for the power of institutions.  His prime example is the city of Nogales on the border between Arizona and Mexico.  This city has the same geography and weather and the same access to technology yet the American side of the city sees 3 times the income per citizen as the Mexican side.  The difference is the institutions found on each side of the border.

I interpret this as meaning that some institutions are better than others.  This can be troubling for those who choose to weigh themselves down with political correctness.  Institutions are born out of the surrounding culture so this must mean that some cultures are better at producing economic success than others.

History has shown this to be true.  The countries that were former British colonies are on average better off than those who were formerly run by other countries such as Spain or France.  Why?  The British often instilled an appreciation for private property and trade as well as a legal system that supported such rights.  Of course the prime example of this is the good ol’ United States.

So institutions matter and I wholeheartedly agree with Acemoglu.  I also agree with him when he says that forcibly transplanting institutions may not always be the right thing to do.  If the argument is true that institutions come from culture then you cannot change culture at the point of a gun like we are trying to do in Afghanistan or Iraq.  As the saying goes you can lead a horse to water but you cannot force him to drink.

Aired 11-15-09

Episode 2 of 3
“Darwin turns his back on scientific celebrity and becomes a virtual recluse, secretly gathering evidence for his theory of evolution. He is almost trumped by a rival book on evolution but finds a steadfast supporter in the young botanist, Joseph Hooker. Darwins faith is shattered by the death of his beloved daughter, Annie, but he is buoyed up by the return from Australasia of one of his greatest allies – the young firebrand, Thomas Huxley. Darwin knows he has found the men he needs to help him when he goes public with his ideas. Hooker and Huxley push Darwin to publish but events overtake everyone when a letter arrives from Indonesia. An obscure collector called Alfred Russell Wallace has come up with an evolutionary theory almost identical to Darwins own. Darwin is shattered and fears that 20 years of his own work
has come to”

(1/6)

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Episode one

 von Fjordman                                                    

Teil 1                                                            

Druckversion (pdf) 

Übersetzung: BeforeDawn

Der Originaltext erschien am 19. 9. 2009 auf Gates of Vienna.

In diesem Essay werde ich die Arbeiten und Theorien Jared Diamonds, vor allem seinen internationalen Bestseller Arm und Reich: Die Schicksale menschlicher Gesellschaften [engl.: Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997 ] und, in geringerem Ausmass, sein 2005 erschienenes Buch Kollaps: Warum Gesellschaften überleben oder untergehen  [engl.: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed], mit dem Buch Understanding Human History  (2005) des amerikanischen Astrophysikers Michael H. Hart vergleichen. Diamonds Arbeit betont in starkem Maße die Wichtigkeit der Geographie, was in einigen Fällen hilfreiche Perspektiven eröffnet, aber nicht in allen. Hart betont die Unterschiede in der Intelligenz verschiedener ethnischer Gruppen und untersucht diese im Licht der Evolutionslehre. Ich werde auch aus den Büchern anderer Autoren zitieren, um die Bedeutung des Rechts, der Religion, des Bildungssystems, des Kapitalismus usw. einzuschätzen.

Hin und wieder stehe ich Diamonds Schriften kritisch gegenüber, besonders seinen verallgemeinernden Schlussfolgerungen, das heißt aber nicht, dass ich glaube, dass alles falsch ist, was er sagt. Er hat recht, wenn er darauf hinweist, dass Umweltzerstörung weit davon entfernt ist, auf die westliche Zivilisation beschränkt zu sein, und er zögert nicht festzustellen, dass viele Gesellschaften in der ganzen Welt brutale Gewalt praktiziert haben.

Wie auch andere mittelamerikanische Zivilisationen hatten die Maya keine Metallwerkzeuge, keine Segelboote, keine Räder und keine Haustiere, die groß genug gewesen wären, Lasten zu tragen oder einen Pflug zu ziehen, sie hatten aber dennoch vor dem sogenannten klassischen Zusammenbruch der Maya-Kultur nach dem Jahr 800 n. Chr., nach vorindustriellen Maßstäben,  eindrucksvoll hohe Bevölkerungsdichten. Nachdem die Entzifferung der Maya-Schriftzeichen am Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts einen entscheidenden Durchbruch erfahren hat, ist jetzt unser Verständnis ihrer Gesellschaft und Kultur weit größer als es noch vor wenigen Generationen war. Diamond führt in seinem Buch Kollaps aus:

“Archäologen haben lange Zeit geglaubt, die alten Maya seien sanfte und friedliche Menschen gewesen. Wir wissen jetzt, dass die Kriegführung der Maya intensiv und dauerhaft war und kein Ende fand, weil begrenzte Nahrungsmittelressourcen und Transportmöglichkeiten es für alle einzelnen Fürstentümer der Maya unmöglich machten, die gesamte Region in einem Reich zusammenzuschließen, in der Art und Weise, wie die Azteken und die Inkas Zentralmexiko, bzw.  die Andenregion, vereint haben. Gefangene wurden in sehr unangenehmer Weise der Folter unterzogen, wie es deutlich auf Monumenten und Wandgemälden dargestellt ist (wie z. B. durch das Herausreißen der Finger aus den Gelenkkapseln, durch das Ziehen von Zähnen, das Abtrennen des Unterkiefers, Abschneiden der Lippen und Fingerspitzen, Herausreißen der Fingernägel und Durchbohren der Lippen mit einem Stift) und die (manchmal Jahre später) in der Opferung der Gefangenen in gleichermaßen unangenehmer Weise gipfelte (wie etwa dadurch, dass die Gefangenen zu einer Kugel zusammengeschnürt und dann als Ball die steilen Steintreppen eines Tempels hinuntergerollt wurden).”

Es ist interessant zu bemerken, dass westliche Beobachter häufig nicht-westlichen Kulturen zu viel guten Willen entgegenbringen und gar nicht, wie oft behauptet wird, “eurozentrisch” urteilen. Als ich jung war, wurde mir einmal gesagt, dass es in keiner Gesellschaft in der frühen Neuzeit regelmäßig praktizierten Kannibalismus gegeben habe, dies sei eine rassistische, kolonialistische Lüge, die von vorurteilsbeladenen Europäern erfunden worden sei, um andere Völker und Kulturen zu dämonisieren. Ein Beispiel dafür sei der “Freitag” genannte Kannibale, der in Daniel Defoes Roman Robinson Crusoe (1719) zum Christentum bekehrt wurde. Als ich älter wurde und begann, selbst Nachforschungen anzustellen, erkannte ich klar, wie falsch diese Behauptung war.

In seinem Buch This Horrid Practice: The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism  beschäftigt sich der Neuseeländer Paul Moon mit der in der generell sehr grausamen Gesellschaft der Maori anzutreffenden Tradition, einander aufzuessen. Moon, ein Professor für Geschichte an der University of Technology in Auckland, sagt, der Kannibalismus habe bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts angedauert. Er verschwand erst nach der Ankunft europäischer christlicher  Missionare. Auch Tötung von Kindern war verbreitet. Die Stämme brauchten Männer als Krieger, und Mütter töteten oft ihre Töchter, indem sie sie erstickten oder einen Finger in den noch weichen Schädel bohrten. Kannibalismus war Teil der Wut nach einer Schlacht. “Ein Argument war, dass den Feind einfach zu töten, um ihn zu bestrafen, zu wenig ist. Wenn man ihn aber zerhackt und ihn isst, um ihn dann zu Exkrementen werden zu lassen, das ist die größte Erniedrigung, die man ihm antun kann”, sagt Moon. Das Beweismaterial hierfür ist so überwältigend, dass es unangebracht wäre, so zu tun, als hätte es das nicht gegeben. Es ist zu wichtig, um es zu ignorieren.” 

Die Leiterin  des Maori Studies Department an der Universität in Auckland, Margaret Mutu, sagt, Kannibalismus sei in Neuseeland weit verbreitet gewesen. “Es hat ihn wirklich gegeben. Er ist in vielfältiger Weise in unseren Geschichten und Traditionen anzutreffen, eine Menge Ortsnamen beziehen sich darauf.” Sie sagt, der Kannibalismus der Maori sei von vielen Historikern nicht erwähnt worden, weil er mit der englischen Kultur nicht vereinbar war.

Man hat uns gesagt, Europäer erfänden negative Stereotype über andere Völker. Man beachte, wie in diesem Fall – und dies ist nicht das einzige Beispiel, das sich hierfür finden lässt – die Europäer in Wirklichkeit die sehr realen Defekte anderer Kulturen herunterspielen, und dies sogar in der Kolonialzeit.

Götzenverehrung und Kannibalismus in Südamerika, 1621

Wir wissen, dass Kannibalismus bei einer Reihe von Völkern Nord- und Südamerikas praktiziert wurde, dazu gehören höchstwahrscheinlich die prähistorischen Anasazi in den heutigen südwestlichen Vereinigten Staaten. Wie Diamond in seinem Buch Kollaps schreibt: “Das Vorkommen von Kannibalismus außerhalb von Notzeiten ist umstritten. Es wurde aber tatsächlich aus Hunderten von nicht-europäischen Gesellschaften zu der Zeit, als sie zuerst Kontakt mit Europäern hatten, berichtet. Die Praxis hatte zwei Formen: entweder wurden die Körper der im Krieg getöteten Feinde gegessen, oder aber die eigenen Verwandten, nachdem sie eines natürlichen Todes gestorben waren. Neuguineer, mit denen ich in den letzten 40 Jahren gearbeitet habe, haben mir ganz sachlich ihre kannibalistischen Praktiken beschrieben, haben ihren Abscheu über unsere westliche Bestattungsweise ausgedrückt, unsere Verwandten zu beerdigen, ohne ihnen die Ehre zu erweisen, sie zu essen, und einer meiner besten neuguineischen Arbeiter hat 1965 seinen Job bei mir gekündigt, um an dem Verzehr seines gerade gestorbenen künftigen Schwiegersohns teilzunehmen. Es gibt auch viele archäologische Funde von alten menschlichen Knochen in Zusammenhängen, die Kannibalismus annehmen lassen.”

Jared Diamond schreibt in Arm und Reich, dass “… das Virus, das die Lachkrankheit (Kuru) im Hochland Neu Guineas verursacht, von einer Person, die verzehrt worden war, auf andere überging. Es wurde also durch Kannibalismus übertragen, wenn dort Babys den fatalen Fehler machten, sich die Finger abzulecken, nachdem sie mit der rohen Gehirnmasse gespielt hatten, die ihre Mütter gerade aus den toten Kuru-Opfern herausgeschnitten hatten, die aber noch nicht gekocht worden war.”

Diamond, ein Evolutionsbiologe, weist keineswegs die Möglichkeit zurück, dass sich unter den verschiedenen ethnischen Gruppen im Laufe von Tausenden von Jahren ungleiche Intelligenzniveaus entwickelt haben könnten, aber er besteht darauf, dass, wenn es solche Unterschiede gibt, dann die Europäer weniger intelligent seien als andere, da “die natürliche Auslese, soweit sie Intelligenz fördert, wahrscheinlich in Neuguinea weitaus strenger ist als in Gesellschaften mit dichterer Bevölkerung und komplexerer politischer Struktur, in denen die natürliche Auslese stattdessen in stärkerem Maße auf die Körperchemie eingewirkt hat…. Es gibt auch noch einen weiteren Grund, warum die Neuguineer vielleicht cleverer als die Westler sind. Moderne europäische und amerikanische Kinder verbringen einen großen Teil ihrer Zeit damit, sich passiv von Fernsehen, Radio und Kino unterhalten zu lassen…. Dies wirkt sich sicherlich als ein zusätzlicher, nicht-genetischer Faktor aus, der die durchschnittlichen mentalen Fähigkeiten der Neuguineer überlegen sein lässt. Das bedeutet also, dass hinsichtlich ihrer geistigen Leistungsfähigkeit die Neuguineer wahrscheinlich den Westlern genetisch überlegen sind.”

Mr. Diamond hat nun  gerade festgestellt, dass bei den Neuguineern bis in die jüngste Zeit  Kannibalismus eine weitverbreitete Praxis war. Es formuliert dies als eine nüchterne Tatsachenfeststellung und gibt nicht klar zu erkennen, dass er dies missbilligt. Vielmehr scheint es, dass er in seinen Schriften dem Fernsehen kritischer als dem Kannibalismus gegenübersteht. Überdies denkt er, dass es moralisch abzulehnen ist, wenn jene, die gemeinhin als “weiße Suprematisten” bezeichnet werden, glauben, dass Menschen europäischer Abstammung eine höhere Intelligenz haben könnten als, sagen wir mal, australische Ureinwohner, aber offensichtlich hält er es für in Ordnung zu sagen, dass Neuguineer eine höhere Intelligenz haben als Europäer. Macht ihn das nun zum neuguineischen Suprematisten?

Man kann Spuren des Konzepts “Kannibalismus” in der heutigen europäischen Kultur finden, zum Beispiel in der Geschichte von Hänsel und Gretel, einem der vielen traditionellen Märchen und volkstümlichen Erzählungen wie Schneewittchen, Dornröschen und Aschenputtel, die im 19. Jahrhundert von den einflussreichen deutschen Gelehrten und Sprachwissenschaftlern Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) und Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) gesammelt und verbreitet wurden. Allerdings wird in diesem von den Gebrüdern Grimm adaptierten Märchen die Vorstellung vom Menschenessen dem Bösewicht der Geschichte zugeschrieben, der bösen Hexe, und die Praxis wird als selbstverständlich unmoralisch und nicht hinnehmbar gesehen.

Diamond deutet an, dass er in der Absicht schreibt, den “Eurozentrismus” aufzulösen, und er behauptet, dass Intelligenztests nur kulturelles Lernen messen, nicht aber angeborene Intelligenz. Untersuchungen haben jedoch zum Beispiel gezeigt, dass Leute mit höherem IQ klügere ökonomische Entscheidungen treffen. Richard Lynn und Tatu Vanhanen argumentieren in ihrem Buch IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002), dass ein signifikanter Anteil an dem Unterschied im Wohlstand zwischen reichen und armen Ländern auf Unterschiede im nationalen Intelligenzquotienten zurückzuführen sind.

Nach der schwedischen Professorin Annica Dahlström, einer Expertin in den Neurowissenschaften, finden sich Männer häufiger als Frauen an den extremen Enden der Intelligenzskala. Weibliche Genies kommen vor, aber sie sind viel weniger häufig als männliche. Das feministische Establishment behauptet, dass sie ihren Status als Wissenschaftlerin missbraucht habe, um “Geschlechtsstereotypen” zu bestärken; Dahlström sagt jedoch: “Der Unterschied zwischen Jungen und Mädchen, hinsichtlich ihrer Biologie und ihres Gehirns,  ist größer als wie uns je vorgestellt haben.” Wir sind jetzt in der Lage, die Gehirnaktivitäten in Echtzeit zu erfassen und zu verfolgen. Unterschiede zwischen den Geschlechtern sind schon im Alter von drei Jahren klar erkennbar, wenn nicht noch früher. Die Gehirnzentren für verbale Kommunikation, für die Deutung von Mimik und Gestik, sind bei Mädchen schon in diesem frühen Alter weiter entwickelt. Nichtsdestoweniger wurde Larry Summers, Wirtschaftswissenschaftler und Präsident der renommierten Harvard-Universität in den USA, nach einer Rede zum Rücktritt gezwungen, in der er die Annahme nahelegte, dass die Tatsache, dass Frauen in den obersten Rängen der Naturwissenschaftler unterrepresentiert sind, auf “ein unterschiedlich häufiges Vorkommen von Spitzenbegabung” zurückzuführen sei.

Professor Helmuth Nyborgs Forschungen an der Universität in Århus (Dänemark) haben gezeigt, dass es Unterschiede zwischen den Geschlechtern in ihrer Intelligenzstruktur gibt. Dies hat massiven Widerstand seitens seiner Kollegen ausgelöst. Er stellt fest, dass “es im Reich der psychologischen Wissenschaft nicht erlaubt ist, über Intelligenz zu reden. Es ist hier praktisch nicht möglich,  Intelligenz zu messen, und es ist nicht möglich, Menschen nach ihrem Intelligenzquotienten einzustufen. Das ganze Feld der Intelligenz ist eine sogenannte ´No-go-area´.” Wenn man sich dennoch weigert, umzukehren, ist man ein böser Mensch. Wenn man auch noch Unterschiede zwischen anderen Kategorien von Menschen, nicht nur zwischen den Geschlechtern, untersucht, ist man unmoralisch und ein “Nazi”. Mit Sicherheit ist dies der Fall für weiße Wissenschaftler, jedoch interessanterweise nicht unbedingt für asiatische.

Das Problem ist nun, dass diese Sichtweise logisch inkonsistent ist. Wenn man glaubt, dass Gott, oder irgendein göttliches Wesen oder eine göttliche Kraft, alle Menschen als gleiche geschaffen hat, dann macht es Sinn, über Rassismus zu reden. Wenn man hingegen glaubt, dass die Menschen das Resultat der Evolution sind, dann ist das ganze Konzept des “Rassismus” wissenschaftlich bedeutungslos. Der Westen am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts wird von Darwinisten beherrscht, die nicht an die Evolutionslehre glauben. Wer glaubt, dass dies ein Widerspruch in sich selbst ist, der möge die Aussage von Reich und Arm betrachten. Der Kern von Diamonds Glaubenssätzen ist, dass die Evolution seit Milliarden von Jahren im Gang ist, von einzelligen Organismen zu Elefanten und Walen geführt hat, dann aber wunderbarerweise vor 50.000 Jahren gestoppt hat; und man ist ein Böser, wenn man suggeriert, dass die Menschen auch danach noch evolutionären Prozessen unterworfen gewesen seien. Dies ist, logisch gesehen, völlig absurd, es ist aber dennoch heutzutage die nicht in Frage gestellte herrschende Ideologie in der Wissenschaft und den Medien des Westens.

Diamond selbst versucht, eine Zusammenfassung seines gesamten Buches in einem Satz zu geben: “Die Geschichte hat für verschiedene Völker verschiedene Verläufe genommen wegen der Unterschiede in der Umwelt dieser Völker, nicht wegen biologischer Unterschiede zwischen den Völkern selbst.”

Ja, aber was ist, wenn Unterschiede in der natürlichen Umwelt auch die Biologie verschiedener menschlicher Gruppen in einer mehr als oberflächlichen Weise verändert haben, also etwas, was anzunehmen die Evolutionslehre auch eigentlich nahelegt?

Der Nahe Osten hat einen Reichtum an nützlichen lokalen Pflanzen und Tieren beherbergt. Vier Arten von großen Säugetieren – Ziege, Schaf, Schwein und Rind – wurden sehr früh im Fruchtbaren Halbmond domestiziert, möglicherweise früher als irgendein anderes Tier irgendwo sonst in der Welt außer dem Hund. Die Landwirtschaft wurde im Fruchtbaren Halbmond durch die Domestizierung von acht “Gründerarten” von Nahrungspflanzen begonnen, die Getreidearten Emmer, Einkorn, Gerste, die Hülsenfrüchte Linse, Erbse, Kichererbse, Linsenwicke und die Faserpflanze Flachs. Dank dieses Vorhandenseins von brauchbaren wilden Säugetieren und Pflanzen konnten die Menschen in dieser Region sich schnell ein kräftiges und ausgewogenes biologisches Sortiment für eine intensive Nahrungsmittelproduktion zusammenstellen, was wiederum zu komplexen, sozial gestuften Gesellschaften führte, die ein Aufzeichnungs- oder Registrierungssystem und damit eine Bürokratie erforderten. Nach Diamond wurden unabhängig voneinander im Nahen Osten (Mesopotamien), Mexiko und möglicherweise in China Schriftsysteme entwickelt, weil diese die Gegenden waren, in denen sich zuerst landwirtschaftliche Nahrungsmittelproduktion entwickelte, eine Theorie, die plausibel erscheint. Dieser Teil ist auch der überzeugendste in seinem Werk.                             

Mahlstein aus dem Neolithikum

Eurasische Infektionskrankheiten haben bei der europäischen Eroberung beider Amerikas eine enorme Rolle gespielt. Cortez und Pizarro hatten überlegene Waffen und Rüstungen aus Eisen gegenüber Keulen und Wurfschlingen, aber noch vor der militärischen Eroberung der Reiche der Inka und Azteken haben eurasische Krankheiten wie z. B. die Pocken, die zum Teil schon vor der Ankunft der Europäer dort  hingelangt waren, die dortigen Bevölkerungen erheblich dezimiert. Diamonds Feststellung ist richtig, dass berittene Soldaten einen enormen militärischen Vorteil über die haben, die ohne Pferde sind. Erst mit der Einführung von motorisierten Fahrzeugen und Panzern im Ersten Weltkrieg wurden Pferde als wichtigstes Hilfsmittel beim Angriff und zum Transport ersetzt.

Schädel von Homo sapiens und Homo neanderthalensis

In dem Zeitraum zwischen 100.000 und 50.000 Jahren vor der Gegenwart hat sich hinsichtlich der geistigen Fähigkeiten der Frühmenschen eine bedeutende Veränderung vollzogen. Diamond nennt dies den “Großen Sprung vorwärts”. Ob dies durch eine Vervollkommnung der sprachlichen Fähigkeiten oder durch eine generelle Veränderung der Organisation des Gehirns verursacht war, ist immer noch eine ungelöste Frage. Vor 40.000 Jahren zog der Cro-Magnon-Mensch in Europa ein und verdrängte nach einigen Jahrtausenden der Koexistenz den Neandertaler. Ungefähr zur gleichen Zeit finden wir die ersten Beweise menschlicher Besiedlung  Neuguineas und Australiens  über die südostasische Landbrücke. Diamond schreibt:

“Die Entwicklung war zunächst von praktisch nicht wahrnehmbarer Langsamkeit, wenn nämlich Hunderttausende von Jahren vergingen ohne irgendeine feststellbare Veränderung bei den Steinwerkzeugen und ohne eine nachweisbare Verwendung anderer Materialien. Heute geht technologischer Fortschritt so schnell vonstatten, dass in der Tageszeitung über ihn berichtet wird. In dieser langen Geschichte sich beschleunigender Entwicklung lassen sich zwei besonders signifikante Sprünge erkennen. Der erste, der zwischen 100.000 und 50.000 Jahren vor unserer Zeit stattgefunden hat, wurde wahrscheinlich durch genetische Veränderungen in unserem Körperbau verursacht: nämlich durch die Entwicklung hin zur modernen Anatomie, die Sprache und/oder die jetztzeitigen Hirnfunktionen ermöglichte. Dieser Entwicklungssprung führte zu Werkzeugen aus Knochen, spezialisierten Steinwerkzeugen und Vielzweckwerkzeugen. Der zweite Sprung war das Resultat des Übergangs zu einer sesshaften Lebensweise, der in verschiedenen Teilen der Welt zu verschiedenen Zeiten stattfand, schon vor 13.000 Jahren in einigen Gegenden und in anderen heute noch immer nicht. Meistenteils war dieser Übergang verbunden mit dem Beginn der Landwirtschaft, die von den Menschen verlangte, dass sie nahe bei ihren Feldern, Obstgärten und Vorräten blieben. Eine sesshafte Lebensweise war entscheidend für die technologische Entwicklung, denn sie ermöglichte es, nicht transportierbare Besitztümer anzuhäufen.

Jared Diamond hält die Annahme, dass größere genetische Veränderungen bis 50.000 v. Chr. stattgefunden haben, für möglich, aber betrachtet es als “abscheulich” und “rassistisch”, anzunehmen, es könnten sich auch nach diesem Zeitpunkt noch genetische Unterschiede bei verschiedenen menschlichen Gruppen ergeben haben. Die ist nicht aufrechtzuerhalten, wenn man sich die historischen Realitäten ansieht. Verschiedene frühmenschliche Populationen haben Tausende und Zehntausende von Jahren in Afrika, Europa, in verschiedenen Teilen Asiens, in Australien und schließlich in Nord- und Südamerika unter verschiedenen natürlichen Bedingungen gelebt und sich an diese unterschiedlichen lokalen Gegebenheiten angepasst.

Tatsächlich deuten neueste Forschungen an, dass die menschliche Evolution nicht nur weiterging, sondern sich auch beschleunigte und während der letzten 10.000 Jahre nach dem Beginn der Landwirtschaft und dann städtischer Zivilisationen zu noch größeren Veränderungen führte, als sich nämlich unser Körper neuen Lebensbedingungen, neuen Infektionskrankheiten und einer veränderten Nahrung anpassen musste. Dies ist der theoretische Hintergrund des von Gregory Cochran und Henry Harpending verfassten Titels  The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (2009), das ich bislang noch nicht die Gelegenheit hatte zu lesen.

Die Haupttheorie in Michael Hart´s Buch Understanding Human History ist, dass der durchschnittliche IQ der Frühmenschen, als sie Afrika um etwa 60.000 v. Chr. verließen und andere Kontinente besiedelten (er benutzt die Out-of-Africa-Theorie als Ausgangspunkt für seine Hypothesen; die Geschichte der frühen menschlichen Evolution ist jedoch hochkomplex und stark umstritten), etwa um 70 oder niedriger lag, mit Sicherheit aber nicht höher. Es gibt heute Menschen in Afrika, die einen durchschnittlichen IQ von weniger als 70 haben, und es gibt keinen wirklichen Grund anzunehmen, dass die Intelligenz der dortigen Menschen in den letzten 60.000 Jahren abgenommen hat. Dieses Niveau ist in Zehntausenden von Jahren unter dem Auslesedruck allmählich gestiegen (nicht mehr als 1 IQ-Punkt pro Jahrtausend), jedoch in einigen Gegenden schneller als in anderen. Hart unterstützt die “Kalt-Wetter-Hypothese”, die sagt, dass, als das Klima kälter wurde, die Menschen eine höhere Intelligenz entwickelten, um in einer Umgebung zu überleben, die größere Herausforderungen stellt, was im wesentlichen bedeutet, dass der durchschnittliche IQ um so mehr anwächst, je nördlicher man kommt.

Theoretisch sollte es möglich sein, in der Südhemisphäre denselben Trend zu sehen, je südlicher man kommt; jedoch war die Antarktis bis vor kurzem unbewohnt und die einzigen Menschen, die dort heute für eine längere Zeit leben, sind Wissenschaftler. Deswegen lässt sich dieses Prinzip praktisch nur auf die Nordhemisphäre anwenden. Menschen aus Schweden oder Russland sollten dementsprechend höhere Intelligenzquotienten haben als Menschen aus dem Niltal. In ähnlicher Weise sollten Koreaner oder Japaner höhere IQs haben als Menschen aus Südindien. Beide  Beispiele entsprechen in etwa der festgestellten Realität.

Veränderungen der menschlichen Anatomie und Physiologie, die zu höherer Intelligenz führen, sind aber nicht umsonst zu haben, denn größere Gehirne erfordern größere Mengen an Energie sowie auch größere Schädel, was wiederum die Muskeln und das Knochengerüst belastet.

Das Altpaläolithikum ist das früheste Stadium der Altsteinzeit, ungefähr 40.000 bis 10.000 vor unserer Zeit. Die sogenannte Altsteinzeitliche Revolution ist der Name für das Phänomen, dass nach 50.000 v. Chr. Homo Sapiens begann, Anzeichen eines neuen Niveaus der geistigen Differenziertheit und des abstrakten Denkens zu zeigen. Die ersten Steinwerkzeuge, die im Zeitraum von mehreren Millionen bis zu einigen Hunderttausenden von Jahren vor der Jetztzeit von den frühen Humanoiden hergestellt wurden, waren sehr grob und sind kaum als menschliche Artefakte zu erkennen. Im Kontrast zu dieser schmerzlich langsamen Fortschrittsrate haben während des Altpaläolithikums schnelle Veränderungen stattgefunden, wie z. B. die Einführung von solchen Neuerungen wie Nähnadeln, frühe Keramik, Pfeil und Bogen, Harpunen, Angelhaken, und als Musikinstrument Flöten. Archäologische Funde deuten bislang an, dass nur wenige oder gar keine dieser Erfindungen von in tropischen Gegenden lebenden Menschengruppen gemacht wurden; sie sind die Erfindungen von Menschen in kühleren Klimata. Michael H. Hart schreibt in Understanding Human History:

Zu welchem genauen Zeitpunkt auch immer die aufgelisteten Erfindungen gemacht sein mögen, es ist offensichtlich, dass die Geschwindigkeit des technologischen Fortschritts im Altpaläolithikum viel, viel höher war als in den vorangegangenen Zeitaltern. Was war der Grund für diesen großen Zuwachs an Geschwindigkeit des technologischen Fortschritts (die “altsteinzeitliche Revolution”)?

Es wird manchmal gesagt, dass der enorme intellektuelle und technologische Fortschritt in den letzten Jahrhunderten hauptsächlich aus der Tatsache resultiert, dass wir auf den Grundlagen aufbauen, die unsere Vorfahren gelegt haben. Während dies vielleicht ein Faktor ist, ist es sicherlich nicht die ganze Wahrheit. Schließlich haben die Menschen die meiste Zeit in der fernen Vergangenheit keinen Fortschritt im Vergleich zu den Errungenschaften früherer Generationen gemacht. Der Hauptgrund für die Beschleunigung der Fortschrittsrate im Altpaläolithikum war einfach, dass die zu der Zeit lebenden Menschen intelligenter waren als es ihre Vorfahren in weit früheren Zeiten gewesen waren. (Ein Aspekt dieser größeren Intelligenz war natürlich ihre größere sprachliche Fähigkeit.) In ähnlicher Weise ist ein wichtiger Grund, warum die Fortschrittsrate in den letzten Jahrtausenden noch größer als im Altpaläolithikum war, das fortdauernde Anwachsen der menschlichen Intelligenz, dass sie also heute größer ist als damals.”

Der technologische Fortschritt beschleunigte sich während des Neolithikums, der Jungsteinzeit. In der neolithischen Revolution entwickelte sich der Ackerbau mehr oder weniger unabhängig voneinander in wenigstens  einem halben Dutzend verschiedener Regionen in unterschiedlichen Teilen der Welt, was uns vor eine Reihe schwieriger Fragen stellt: Warum begann diese Entwicklung erst nach 10.000 v. Chr.,  und warum fand sie damals in mehreren weit voneinander entfernten Orten innerhalb von nur wenigen tausend Jahren statt? Warum wurde die Landwirtschaft nicht schon um 30.000 oder 40.000 v. Chr. erfunden, obwohl doch für die Domestikation geeignete Pflanzen und Tiere auch zu der Zeit schon zur Verfügung standen und Menschen schon, außer in Amerika, in allen größeren Landgebieten lebten?

Für Michael Hart sind nutzbare Pflanzen und Tiere eine notwendiger Faktor für die Entstehung der Landwirtschaft, aber nicht ein hinreichender: ein Mindestniveau an Intelligenz war ebenfalls nötig. Der Grund, warum die Landwirtschaft nicht schon von den Frühmenschen vor 40.000 Jahren erfunden wurde, ist, dass sie noch nicht die notwendige Intelligenz besaßen, um mit Erfolg den begrifflichen Sprung zu machen, der nötig ist, um mit der Produktion von Nahrungsmitteln zu beginnen. Hart glaubt, dass das “Schwellenniveau”, das zur Entwicklung des Ackerbaus  selbst in einer Region mit günstigem Klima und entsprechendem Angebot an Pflanzen und Tieren nötig ist, ein durchschnittlicher IQ von fast 90 ist. In der Folge eines Zehntausende von Jahren andauernden Evolutionsdrucks war die durchschnittliche Intelligenz einiger menschlicher Populationen schließlich groß genug, aber der Ackerbau war trotzdem zunächst nicht in weiter nördlich gelegenen, die Intelligenz mehr herausfordernden Klimata eingeführt worden.

Hart beschäftigt sich auch mit der alternativen, sich hinsichtlich der Entwicklung der Zivilisation  auf die Geographie konzentrierenden Hypothese, die Prof. Jared Diamond in Die Schicksale menschlicher Gesellschaften vorstellt. Er legt die Annahme nahe, dass die relative Rückständigkeit des präkolonialen Australiens und von Teilen Amerikas im Verhältnis zu den bedeutenderen eurasischen Zivilisationen ausschließlich auf geographische Faktoren, auf das Klima und einen Mangel an brauchbaren Pflanzen und Tieren zurückzuführen ist. Überraschend ist nun, dass er bereit ist, die Möglichkeit in Betracht zu ziehen, dass es eine genetische Komponente bei der Entwicklung der Intelligenz geben könnte, allerdings nur, wenn die Weißen schlecht dabei wegkommen, was in meiner Sicht so intellektuell unaufrichtig ist, dass es seine Schlussfolgerungen ernsthaft unterminiert.

Frühe Keilschrift der Sumerer (2600 v. Chr.)

Michael Hart ist darauf bedacht – und ich denke, zu Recht – nicht pauschal alles von der Hand zu weisen, was Mr. Diamond sagt.  Der Nahe Osten hatte zu jener Zeit tatsächlich ein günstiges Klima und auch einen weit größeren lokalen Vorrat an nutzbaren und leicht zu domestizierenden Pflanzen und Tieren als irgendeine andere Region, was aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nach ein sehr wichtiger Grund dafür ist, dass Ackerbau und eine städtische Zivilisation dort so früh sich entwickelten; sowohl Australien als auch das Gebiet der heutigen USA hatten tatsächlich einen erheblichen Mangel an solchen Spezies. Jedoch unterstützen nach Hart diese Tatsachen  Diamonds Theorie nicht, wenn sie auf einen Vergleich zwischen dem subsaharischen Afrika (ssA) und Mittelamerika angewendet werden. Was die Fauna betrifft, hatte das ssA einen großen Vorteil über Mittelamerika insofern, als es nicht völlig von den Zivilisationen Eurasiens abgeschnitten war. Einige wichtige Aspekte eurasischer Technologie wie die Töpferei und die Bearbeitung von Bronze und Eisen erreichten das ssA vom Mittleren Osten her, genau so wie die Nutzbarmachung domestizierter Kamele, Schafe und Ziegen:

“Wenn man seine Kriterien berücksichtigt, dann wäre anzunehmen, dass die Zivilisation im ssA eher begonnen hätte als in Mittelamerika und sie dort auch schnellere Fortschritte (noch vor der europäischen Expansion) gemacht hätte. Tatsächlich aber war Mittelamerika um das Jahr 1000 n. Chr. sehr viel weiter entwickelt als das ssA zu der Zeit oder irgendeiner Zeit zuvor. Zum Beispiel hatten die Bewohner Mittelamerikas von anderen unabhängig eine Schrift entwickelt, hatten viele sehr große Steinstrukturen konstruiert und hatten große Städte gebaut (die allem, was es in Europa gab, gleichkamen und weit größer waren als alle Städte im subsaharischen Afrika). Des weiteren stellen die Leistungen der Maya in Mathematik und Astronomie alle intellektuellen Leistungen im ssA in den Schatten. Daraus müssen wir den Schluss ziehen, dass ungeachtet der Tatsache, dass Die Schicksale der menschlichen Gesellschaften ein informatives Buch ist, die unabweisbare Überlegenheit der mittelamerikanischen über die subsaharische Technologie als ein entscheidender Schlag gegen die dort vorgebrachten Argumente erscheint.”

                                                                                                              (Bilder hinzugefügt v. Ü.)

(Teile 2, 3 und 4 folgen.)

The phrase “guns, germs and steel” comes from Jared Diamond’s 1997 book of that name. He calls it “a short history of everyone for the last 13,000 years”. It answers the question of how whites got on top. He says our destiny is written not in our genes but in our geography.

Diamond went to New Guinea to see its birds. He made friends there and one of them, Yali, asked him why whites were so rich:

Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?

Diamond ruled out intelligence: New Guineans were “more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.”

He also ruled out culture and politics: those things are always changing and have little long-term effect across thousands of years.

That leaves him with geography and biology: with the lands and seas, the plants and animals that make up the world.

Not all places are created equal:

• Of the 13 kinds of large animals that are easy for man to tame and control, 12 live in Eurasia: cows, pigs, goats, horses, camels, etc. Only the llama is missing. Men do not ride zebras, for example, because they are too wild to be tamed. Places like Australia, New Guinea and North America had no large animals that could be tamed – just dogs.
• Of the grains that are easy to plant and store, again most are found in Eurasia. Australia had none at all!
• Eurasia goes mainly from east to west. So plants and animals that work in one part of Eurasia work well elsewhere. That is way less true for Africa and the Americas which run from north to south.

This meant that civilization could spread more widely and deeply in Eurasia than elsewhere. Civilization is based on being able to produce more food than you need, freeing up human labour for other things.

So the world’s four largest civilizations are found in Eurasia in a chain that stretches from east to west: China, India, the Middle East and Europe.

It was just a matter of time before one of these invented gunpowder and ocean-going ships and be able to take over the world. It was China that invented those things, yet it was Europe that took over. Why?

Because Europe’s geography makes empires rare. There are just too many mountains and rivers. So while in China the emperor could (and did) outlaw building ocean-going ships and not suffer in the short term, no country in Europe could get away with that.

But genes do matter in one way: disease. From living with cows for so long  most whites had built-in defences against smallpox - but not against malaria. That made it easy for them to take over and stay in North America (where smallpox played a big part in wiping out the American Indians), but not in most of Africa.

See also:

• The white inventor argument
• sexual selection and race – also based on Jared Diamond’s views
• white people
• Steve Sailer

Il TED (Technology Entertainment Design) è un’organizzazione senza scopo di lucro il cui obiettivo è “la diffusione delle idee che meritano di essere diffuse” allo scopo di “cambiare le abitudini, le vite, e, in ultima analisi, il mondo”.

Una delle sue iniziative più importanti è la cosiddetta TED Conference, che si tiene una volta all’anno in California e una ogni 2 in giro per il mondo (TED global), e si tratta di una conferenza alla quale partecipa una sfilza di cervelloni esperti complessivamente nella più vasta quantità di argomenti: dalla scienza alla pedagogia, dalla politica all’arte, dalla matematica all’economia, non c’è materia di cui questa comitiva di geniacci non s’intenda e discuta.

Molte registrazioni degli interventi tenutisi alle conferenze sono liberamente visionabili nel sito del TED, parecchie delle quali sottotitolate in italiano.
Ognuno di noi viene incoraggiato a diffondere i video ai 4 venti con una licenza creative commons.

Ogni conferenziere ha a sua disposizione in media 18 minuti per illustrare la propria scoperta o idea: un requisito essenziale per parlare al TED è quindi quello di saper spiegare con chiarezza e sintesi argomenti a volte anche molto complessi. Se non lo sai fare, non vai a parlare al TED.

Sguazzare fra i video del TED è uno dei miei passatempi preferiti: ultimamente mi è capitato di vedere un video sulla “matematica della guerra“, un altro in cui un simpatico surfista che vive in un camper con la propria compagna mostra la sua personale e complicatissima “Teoria del Tutto” (una “ipotetica teoria di fisica teorica che spiega interamente e collega assieme tutti i fenomeni fisici conosciuti” [fonte: wikipedia]), un altro ancora in cui una meravigliosa vecchietta spiega perché probabilmente l’uomo non derivi da semplici scimmie, bensì da scimmie acquatiche.
Anche il video di Ken Robinson presente nella mia “sidebar” qui a fianco (nello scomparto “È CALDAMENTE CONSIGLIATO PERMETTERSI DI FARE ERRORI!”) viene dal TED 2006.

Non vi nascondo che mi piacerebbe che in un futuro invitassero anche me alla TED Conference per parlargli di una qualche mia scoperta o invenzione.

Parlo di tutto questo perché oggi pubblico nel mio blog 2 video del TED che credo si inseriscano piuttosto bene nel discorso “progettazione di una società”.

Il primo è il video della simpatica vecchietta (Elaine Morgan) e delle sue scimmie acquatiche che ho già citato poco fa. Lo posto qui per la spiegazione che la cara signora dà al perché la comunità scientifica tardi a riconoscere la teoria che lei sostiene nonostante sia oggigiorno la più sensata: tale spiegazione è a mio avviso assolutamente valida anche per spiegare il motivo per cui spesso e volentieri l’uomo si dimostra incapace di cambiare le proprie abitudini in favore di soluzioni migliori e forse – a questo punto – necessarie per la propria stessa sopravvivenza.

A tutti piace la teoria acquatica. Certo, non ci credono, ma gli piace. E allora chiedo: “Perché pensate che sia una sciocchezza?” Rispondono: “Beh… tutti quanti dicono che lo sia. E non possono sbagliarsi tutti, giusto?” La risposta, chiara e sonora, è: “Sì! sì possono sbagliarsi tutti.”
La storia è piena di casi in cui si sbagliavano tutti.

Guardatelo.

Il secondo è il video di un biologo-fisiologo-antropologo-ecologo-quant’altro statunitense (Jared Diamond, lo stesso che ha scritto l’interessantissimo libro Armi acciaio e malattie – breve storia degli ultimi 13.000 anni) che ci parla dei prodromi che anticipano il collasso di una società, indagando sul pericolo di collasso della nostra rapportandola con quelle già collassate in passato. Ci sono circa 12 questioni che devono essere tutte quante inevitabilmente risolte entro i prossimi 50 anni, ciascuna delle quali è capace da sola di portarci al collasso, sostiene Jared. Le soluzioni che verranno trovate lui non le conosce, ma è sicuro che molti di noi le vedranno attuate coi propri occhi. Pena la scomparsa della nostra società.

Eccovi qua i 2 video:

Elaine Morgan è una tenace sostenitrice dell’ipotesi della scimmia acquatica: l’idea che gli umani si siano evoluti da primati che vivevano in habitat acquosi. Sentite la sua vivace difesa di quest’idea, e la sua teoria sul perché la scienza tradizionale non la prenda sul serio.
Dal TED
video riprodotto con licenza creative commons

Perché le società falliscono? Attraverso gli esempi dei Vichinghi nella Groenlandia dell’età del ferro, la deforestazione dell’Isola di Pasqua e l’attuale situazione del Montana, Jared Diamond ci parla di come i segni del collasso siano vicini, e di come – riconoscendoli in tempo – possiamo evitarlo.
Dal TED
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Conservatives often affirm that creating alarm over alleged global warming is meant to lead to another attempt at collectivist control of our lives. They say that radical environmentalism is the new communism. This makes sense but I think it misses two marks. First, it makes it sound as if the attempt would be innocent enough if only it failed. Second, it implies a certain conscious cynicism on the part of proponents of the climate change view of the world. I think both assumptions are wrong and that it matters that they are wrong.

The religious cult of climate change generates fervent belief in its followers and it will have done our society much damage even if they fail utterly to impose on us the massive socio-economic transformations toward global poverty they pursue. Its applications are ridden with large, crude errors: Today’s Wall Street Journal (10/29/09) mentions an article in the current issue of Science . The article explains how tax-subsidized ethanol turns out more carbon than gasoline.

My judgment that the climate change movement is a religious cult is based on common, ordinary observations: The forceful denial of contrary evidence, the demonization of non-believers, the attempt to shut up effective contradictors by having them fired, the apocalyptic beliefs, are all religious hallmarks of fanatical religiosity. Accordingly, most of the believers are completely sincere, I think, and all the more dangerous for that reason. It’s a strategic mistake to think they are corrupt. It’s easier to change the minds of the corrupt than of the religiously stupefied.

Secondly, much damage will have been done even if they fail utterly Curiously, reading a second book by an intelligent, calm, collected environmental advocate brought to my mind the damage the current “environmental hysteria” is causing, even if the hysterical ones never reach any of their goals. The first book was Bjorn Lomborg’s 2001 Skeptical Environmentalist in which the author uses hard facts and tight logic to destroy just about every single militant belief. Lomborg has done more than anyone, more than silly Al Gore himself, to expose the religious nature of the movement. Believers cannot read any part of the book without experiencing salutary doubt. That’s why it’s banned by the church of environmentalism. Yet, Lomborg insists he is fighting to improve mankind’s use of the physical environment. He is an environmentalist but one who prefers facts to wild myths of monsters under the bed.

The second book, published in 2005, is titled Collapse , with blinding clarity of purpose. The book systematically warns us of eventual (not eminent) societal disaster if we don’t collectively change our ways, a standard message from green and assorted doomsday sayers. The author, Jared Diamond however is difficult to dismiss out of hand. He has real scientific training, in the form of a doctorate in Physiology from Cambridge University. He possesses all the good academic credentials one wishes for (I, for one, take such things seriously.) Then, he is enormously well read in addition to having amassed much field experience, all by choice. Finally, Diamond gave us before Collapse, the luminous and commercially very successful 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel. (It’s rare that thick books written with scholarly care become commercial successes.)

I found myself reading Collapse reluctantly because of its announced objective of warning us of coming environmentally-caused disaster. I have heard so much tripe, so much non-sense, so many lies, I have witnessed so many exercises in stubborn stupidity about the environment than my mind is more than half-shut to anything that sounds “environmental.” It’s become so bad, I actively avoid “organic” produce at the supermarket. I tell myself that I may not be able to stop the tide but that, as a man of conscience, I don’t have to swim with it, an imbecilic smile painted on my face. And yet, Diamond is fairly persuasive. He is no threatening us with hundred-foot waves crashing over New York City. Instead, he carefully lays out several scenarios based on the continuation of current practices. I am left with the impression, even after close critical scrutiny, that one or more of his scenarios are plausible. It seems to me we might be preparing ourselves for a non-cataclysmic descent into serious poverty because, collectively, we mismanage the physical environment, all in concrete, measurable ways.

The damage the climate change jihadists will have done is to have closed through their excesses the minds and hearts of rational people to possible improvements on current practice. Some, many, of these improvements are possible without grievous assault on conservative consciences or on rationality.

First, what I don’t believe. I don’t give a rat’s ass about my carbon footprints (or about Silly Al’s hundred times larger footprint).Let me repeat what I have said several times on this blog: The Norse inhabitants of Greenland (so-called “Vikings”) were eating home-raised beef around the year 1100, something you could not do now, after “global warming.” It was warmer then, before cars, before the Industrial Revolution, before anything, when mankind’s numbers were very small. End of idea of man-made global warming! By the way, Jared Diamond has a beautifully detailed account of the Norse Greenland settlements in Collapse. If you want to learn more about the un-going causes of my unbelief, follow the “Climate change” link on the front page of this blog.

Yet, I would not be surprised if unprecedented large numbers of people, acting mostly with ideas and ethics derived from a time when people were few and technologically weak, managed to do real damage. The idea is not absurd but it has almost escaped our attention because of our need to protect ourselves from the shrill, irrational mendacity of mainstream environmentalists. And then, precisely because I am a conservative, I like good resource management. That’s one of the reasons I put my faith in the market in the first place. (Another reason to dislike all socialism is that it’s inherently wasteful.) As a conservative, I am bound to dislike waste. It’s apparent to me that some of our everyday habits are wasteful and that they could be improved without reducing the area of legitimate individual liberty. Below are three examples.

Every durable good I buy from a store seems to me obviously over-packaged, not a little but a lot. It may well be that I am misunderstanding some of the functions of elaborate packaging but it should not be impossible to explain them to me. Consumers should encourage wholesalers and retailers alike to justify their packaging practices on the package itself. I am not calling for more regulation of manufacturing or of retail, but for greater transparency sanctioned by consumer choice alone. That would economize on transport costs and yes, save trees. (I like trees; shoot me!)

I drive a medium-size pick-up truck. I have my own reasons for this, one of which is the arms race on the highways. It’s a moderate gas guzzler. I estimate that about one third or the mileage I put on this vehicle is on flat ground, within a shortish distance of my house. I wouldn’t mind bicycling there when the weather is good (most of the year). I wouldn’t mind saving gas money and depriving the government of some tax revenue and it would not be bad for my health. Except that it might be terminally bad for my health. Motor vehicles are mixed too closely with bikes for safety and many drivers are mindless road-hogs. It seems to me it should be possible better to separate the two kinds of traffic, at least in many places, at minimum cost and by steps. And, by the way, since the laws are already on the books, I wouldn’t mind draconian enforcement of stop signs regulations. Jumping one just cost one of my friends $500. He is not likely to do it again soon.

I have priced solar heating options for my house. Even in sunny California they take too long to pay for themselves to be economically attractive, in the narrow meaning of “economic.” Yet, as a luxury choice, some of them make sense. Think of it this way: Solar heating is no more extravagant than gambling, whoring, or owning some fancy cars. It’s comparable to a sturdy beer habit. ($30/week= $1600/year= $25,000 over fifteen years.) If I ever take the step, it will be because it separates me to a significant extent from government-regulated and government-colluding big corporations. It will be a positive step toward personal autonomy, with the additional merit of taking revenue away from government. (It’s devilishly difficult to tax sunlight though I am sure they will try.) In addition, taking energy from the sun is technologically elegant. It would give me the kind of aesthetic satisfaction that others get from a fancy car, precisely.

And, of course, there are powerful reasons of national security why we should wish to extract less and less of our energy from the bad neighborhoods where we undoubtedly finance those who want to slaughter us.

Those are just three small examples above of how one can be a conservative environmentalist. I am sure there are many more. We must just resist the green crazies’ ability to annoy us until we can’t think straight anymore.

Easter Island: Rapa Nui déjà vu | The Economist.

Have you read Jared Diamond’s Collapse? If not, you should. There’s a brilliant chapter on these guys:

That’s the Rapa Nui, the big (well, they come in different sizes) stone statues in Easter Island. No, it wasn’t a bunch of assorted Spielberg paraphernalia that raised them, but the islanders themselves – in a process so destructive and inefficient in terms of resource use, that it played a part in bringing about the ecological and population collapse of the island.

Since Chile took over and globalization picked up, life there has improved, especially because of tourism. Everyone wants to see the statues; and I mean everyone. And his dog. Here’s a spot-the-difference exercise to show the point: what’s different between the following image and the previous one?

Tip: it’s not the different colour of moss.

But that’s good, right? Tourists increase economic activity, improving the livelihood of local population. Well, this is Easter Islad, poster-child for anyone arguing that the environmental carrying capacity is limited and determined a priori.

Today Easter Island once again faces environmental threats. Food comes from Chile, either by ship or on the seven weekly flights from Santiago (there are also two from Tahiti). The visitors “all pull the chain,” Luz Zasso, the mayoress, notes acidly. The absence of a sewage system is threatening the cleanliness of the island’s underground water sources. But it would be hard to install one without damaging archaeological sites. Electricity comes from diesel-powered generators. Power cuts are frequent. Rubbish is piling up.

As with many environmental, social and cultural goods, Easter Island’s tourist-pulling resources are public goods. That makes them susceptible to undersupply. The island has had the first problem of public goods (non-excludability) solved by the fact that it is far away, and people face a steep price to reach the island – that is essentially what a Travel Cost methodology does, anyway.

However, it hasn’t can’t quite solved the problem of the resources being rivalrous: Easter Island is a congestible public good, which means that after a threshold of visitors is reached, everyone’s utility is diminished. That’s what’s going on there, now. And it’s getting nasty, by the sound of things:

Tourists should be limited to 50,000 a year and be preferably well-heeled, argues Marcelo Pont, the vice-president of the Council of Elders, an advisory body. Visitors from the Chilean mainland attract particular resentment. “They’re interested in sun, sand and swimming pools, not the island,” says Edgard Herevi of the local chamber of tourism.

…

The Rapa Nui Parliament, a radical group that split from the Council of Elders, is calling for independence. Its supporters blocked the airport’s runway for two days in August. It wants to expel Chileans, even those who have lived much of their life on the island, unless they have a longstanding relationship with a Rapa Nui or are the parent of a child with Rapa Nui blood. The group also dreams of ditching Chile’s peso and forming a Polynesian currency union, including Australia and New Zealand.

None of those options (except, perhaps, the capping of tourist numbers) is sensible. The general economic advice would be raise prices. And that’s what the government is doing anyway:

It also plans to raise the entrance fee to the Rapa Nui National Park, where most of the main sights are, from $10 to $60 for foreigners.

The recipe is good, but I’m not sure it is enough. Somehow, I still feel the price hike (six-fold, a lot!) will leave the price in an area of the demand curve where the Price Elasticity of Demand is pretty much indifferent, especially when compared to the other expenditures of getting to the Island and staying for a few days. The extra $50 are essentially a drop in the ocean for one person (a family of 5, however, may disagree).

Time for an environmental tax, anyone?

Punchline: resource management – even paradise needs a price these days.

Douglas Adams ha moderato nel 1998 una discussione tra Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker e Jared Diamond a proposito della possibilità di adottare principi evoluzionistici e spiegazioni darwiniane in ambiti differenti dalla biologia, quali ad esempio cosmologia, linguistica e psicologia.

Trovate dettagli sui singoli partecipanti qui:

Douglas Adams: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msAF_MDYWNE

Richard Dawkins: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdBOb9tQjNU

Daniel Dennett: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBwnE0ByUw

Stephen Pinker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVrb5ClvDho

Jared Diamond: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV_P1VGqMBo

De voorbije weken heb ik me verdiept in ‘Ondergang’, het bekende boek van Jared Diamond. In dit boek gaat hij op zoek naar de vraag waarom een aantal beschavingen in het verleden zijn verdwenen, en waarom anderen hebben kunnen standhouden.

Het is niet echt een boek over het klimaat of het milieu, maar uit zijn zeer goed gedocumenteerde verhalen blijkt dat de manier waarop de mens met het milieu omgaat vaak een belangrijke reden is geweest van het einde van beschavingen. Het wegkappen van alle bossen op Paaseiland (onder andere om de grote beelden te kunnen vervoeren) heeft geleid tot het ineenstorten van een bloeiende beschaving. Op andere plaatsen gaat het om verkeerd watergebruik, erosie en uitputten van landbouwgronden, overbevissing, introductie van uitheemse dieren of planten (zoals konijnen in Australië) die voor grote problemen te zorgen.

In zijn boek ziet hij vijf belangrijke factoren, die meestal met elkaar in verband staan en verantwoordelijk zijn voor de ondergang.

1. Milieuschade door de mens aangebracht,
2. Klimaatverandering, (al of niet door de mens veroorzaakt)
3. Vijandige buurlanden.
4. Het wegvallen van handelspartners.
5. De reacties op milieuproblemen.

Er zijn heel wat voorbeelden van samenleving die ten onder gingen omdat de belangen van de elite, de leiding, tegenovergesteld waren in de lange termijn belangen van de gemeenschap. Zo investeerden de stamhoofden op Paaseiland vooral in het laten bouwen van beelden om hun macht en prestige te versterken. Op die manier hebben ze het eigen leefmilieu om zeep geholpen. Interessant om eens te kijken hoe het zit met onze huidige elite, de politieke leiders, de ceo’s van grote bedrijven. Wat zijn hun belangen, en komen die overeen met de belangen van de (wereld)gemeenschap?

Ondanks de vele rampverhalen in het boek noemt Jared zich toch “voorzichtig optimistisch”. Hij stelt dat we de ernst van de situatie onder ogen moeten zien, maar tegelijk dat er oplossingen voor handen zijn. We hebben geen nieuwe technologie nodig, maar vooral politieke wil en verandering in het gedrag van elk van ons. Met de bestaande kennis en technologie kunnen we de ondergang vermijden.

Er staat nog heel veel interessants in dit boek (van 700 pagina’s), misschien schrijf ik er een andere keer nog iets over. Het is in elk geval een aanrader voor de komende wintermaanden. In een zetel uit de kringwinkel, onder een Led-lamp, met een deken op de schoot en een glaasje zelfgebrouwen notenwijn bij de hand lezen over hoe we onze ondergang kunnen voorkomen. Een aantrekkelijk vooruitzicht toch…

There’s a documentary series on at the moment (check the history channel) that does a fairly good job of distilling Jared Diamond’s masterpiece into hour-long segments.

You are ordered to check it out now, or else buy old JD (or at least his estate) another limo or two by buying his book.

One of my favorite essays by Jared Diamond on societal collapse on Easter Island.  From Discover magazine, August 1, 1995:

Easter’s End

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

by Jared Diamond

An essay by Jared Diamond, from Time magazine, August 26, 2oo2:

Lessons from Lost Worlds

Children have a wonderful ability to focus their parents’ attention on the essentials. Before our twin sons were born in 1987, I had often heard about all the environmental problems projected to come to a head toward the middle of this century. But I was born in 1937, so I would surely be dead before 2050. Hence I couldn’t think of 2050 as a real date, and I couldn’t grasp that the environmental risks were real.

After the birth of our kids, my wife and I proceeded to obsess about the things most parents obsess about–schools, our wills, life insurance. Then I realized with a jolt: my kids will reach my present age of 65 in 2052. That’s a real date, not an unimaginable one! My kids’ lives will depend on the state of the world in 2052, not just on our decisions about life insurance and schools.

I should have known that. Having lived in Europe for years, I saw that the lives of my friends also born in 1937 had been affected greatly by the state of the world around them. For many of those overseas contemporaries growing up during World War II, that state of the world left them orphaned or homeless. Their parents may have thought wisely about life insurance, but their parents’ generation had not thought wisely about world conditions. Over the heads of our own children now hang other threats from world conditions, different from the threats of 1939-45.

While the risk of nuclear war between major powers still exists, it’s less acute now than 15 years ago, thank God. Many people worry about terrorists, and so do I, but then I reflect that terrorists could at worst kill “only” a few tens of millions of us. The even graver environmental problems that could do in all our children are environmental ones, such as global warming and land and water degradation.

These threats interact with terrorism by breeding the desperation that drives some individuals to become terrorists and others to support terrorists. Sept. 11 made us realize that we are not immune from the environmental problems of any country, no matter how remote–not even those of Somalia and Afghanistan. Of course, in reality, that was true before Sept. 11, but we didn’t think much about it then. We and the Somalis breathe and pollute the same atmosphere, are bathed by the same oceans and compete for the same global pie of shrinking resources. Before Sept. 11, though, we thought of globalization as mainly meaning “us” sending “them” good things, like the Internet and Coca-Cola. Now we understand that globalization also means “them” being in a position to send “us” bad things, like terrorist attacks, emerging diseases, illegal immigrants and situations requiring the dispatch of U.S. troops.

A historical perspective can help us, because ours is not the first society to face environmental challenges. Many past societies collapsed partly from their failure to solve problems similar to those we face today–especially problems of deforestation, water management, topsoil loss and climate change. The long list of victims includes the Anasazi in the U.S. Southwest, the Maya, Easter Islanders, the Greenland Norse, Mycenaean Greeks and inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley, Great Zimbabwe and Angkor Wat. The outcomes ranged from “just” a collapse of society, to the deaths of most people, to (in some cases) everyone’s ending up dead. What can we learn from these events? I see four main sets of lessons.

First, environmental problems can indeed cause societies to collapse, even societies assaulting their environments with stone tools and far lower population densities than we have today.

Second, some environments are more fragile than others, making some societies more prone to collapse than others. Fragility varies even within the same country: for instance, some parts of the U.S., including Southern California, where I live, are especially at risk from low rainfall and salinization of soil from agriculture that is dependent on irrigation–the same problems that overwhelmed the Anasazi. Some nations occupy more fragile environments than do others. It’s no accident that a list of the world’s most environmentally devastated and/or overpopulated countries resembles a list of the world’s current political tinderboxes. Both lists include Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Nepal, Rwanda and Somalia.

Third, otherwise robust societies can be dragged down by the environmental problems of their trade partners. About 500 years ago, two Polynesian societies, on Henderson Island and Pitcairn Island, vanished because they depended for vital imports on the Polynesian society of Mangareva Island, which collapsed from deforestation. We Americans can well understand that outcome, having seen how vulnerable we are to instability in oil-exporting countries of the Middle East.

Fourth, we wonder, Why didn’t those peoples see the problems developing around them and do something to avoid disaster? (Future generations may ask that question about us.) One explanation is the conflicts between the short-term interests of those in power and the long-term interests of everybody: chiefs were becoming rich from processes that ultimately undermined society. That too is an acute issue today, as wealthy Americans do things that enrich themselves in the short run and harm everyone in the long run. As the Anasazi chiefs found, they could get away with those policies for a while, but ultimately they bought themselves the privilege of being merely the last to starve.

Of course, there are differences between our situation and those of past societies. Our problems are more dangerous than those of the Anasazi. Today there are far more humans alive, packing far greater destructive power, than ever before. Unlike the Anasazi, a society today can’t collapse without affecting societies far away. Because of globalization, the risk we face today is of a worldwide collapse, not just a local tragedy.

People often ask if I am an optimist or a pessimist about our future. I answer that I’m cautiously optimistic. We face big problems that will do us in if we don’t solve them. But we are capable of solving them. The risk we face isn’t that of an asteroid collision beyond our ability to avoid. Instead our problems are of our own making, and so we can stop making them. The only thing lacking is the necessary political will.

The other reason for my optimism is the big advantage we enjoy over the Anasazi and other past societies: the power of the media. When the Anasazi were collapsing in the U.S. Southwest, they had no idea that Easter Island was also on a downward spiral thousands of miles away, or that Mycenaean Greece had collapsed 2,400 years earlier. But we know from the media what is happening all around the world, and we know from archaeologists what happened in the past. We can learn from that understanding of remote places and times; the Anasazi didn’t have that option. Knowing history, we are not doomed to repeat it.

Jared Diamond is a UCLA professor of geography and public health, a director of the World Wildlife Fund and author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

So I had a Hawaian fish called “Opah” while in Idaho at the Cottonwood Grille restaurant. First have to say that this was a great place to eat if you are ever in Boise, ID. Great atmosphere and food. I generally have no use for beef or red meat selections. There are cows everywhere and I don’t have to travel 500 miles to eat prime rib. So I tend to go local or seafood.

Well, on the menu were a couple of intruiging seafood choices, Opah, and something else–a fish described as a deep Pacific fish. Let’s just say I’m not going to run into these options back in DC on regular basis. So I went for the Opah. 

So here’s the general deal with Opah. It was really moist and the flavor was very good. The problem with eating a fish once is that you can’t easily separate its flavor from the sauce. So I would need a couple more tries to ferret out its distinctiveness. But it was a delicious meal. 

Here’s what they look like:

According to the linked website, these things range in weight from 60-200 lbs. Now my initial question when I see something that looks like this is, who came up with the idea that this would be delicious to eat?  Pretty gross, but I’m glad someone stepped up.

BTW, sometimes we think of fish eating as pretty obvious, but I note that Jared Diamond, in his book, Collapse, talks of the Greenland Viking population that died out of starvation in a couple of centuries becuase they had a taboo against eating fish.

Dando continuidade ao post anterior, o autor propõe logo de início, depois das diversas análises que serão apresentadas, que “os processos através dos quais as sociedades do passado minaram a si mesmas danificando o meio ambiente dividem-se em oito categorias” (p.18 – 4ª Edição). Adicionadas às 8 anteriores existem outras quatro mais que a sociedade atual enfrenta, contabilizando 12 ameaças que podem diferir de importância, mas muitas vezes se completam: (i) desmatamento e (ii) destruição do habitat; (iii) problemas com solo (tais como erosão, salinização e perda da fertilidade); (iv) problemas com administração dos recursos hídricos; (v) atividade excessiva da caça e (vi) atividade excessiva da pesca; (vii) consequências de introdução de espécies não-nativas dentro de um ambiente; (viii) impacto do crescimento populacional; (ixi) mudanças climáticas fruto da ação do homem; (x) acumulo de produtos químicos tóxicos no ambiente; (xi) carência de energia; e (xii) utilização total da capacidade fotossintética do planeta.

Quais são os erros que já foram cometidos no passado que estamos repetindo no mundo de hoje? Como poderemos superar as ameaças? Jared não propõe que a humanidade irá se extinguir, mas que no atual caminho que trilhamos acabaremos por ter que nos adequar no futuro à um padrão de vida mais baixo. Podemos usar a tecnologia (que era mais primitiva nos povos do passado) para resolver muito mais problemas, como a atual medicina pode curar doenças mais rapidamente do que no passado, a globalização potencializa a transação de recursos naturais para todo canto do mundo, a ciência permite produzir mais alimentos e bens de consumo de maneira mais eficiente. Apesar disso a população também cresce e demanda mais e mais bens, explora mais os recusros e o comércio internacional ainda tem a limitação de, uma vez esgotados os recursos em um país, ele pode adquirir em outro, mas uma vez esgotado os recursos no mundo, não teremos a quem recorrer.

Essas ameaças não significam que estamos fadados ao colapso devido ao dano ambiental (apesar de muitos danos ambientais estarem prejudicando a vida de milhares de pessoas), mas elas nos podem fragilizar nossa sociedade e ai, como nos comportaremos? Dos exemplos a serem analisados, nenhuma sociedade colapsou de maneira que o dano ambiental tenha sido causa integral do colapso.  Jared considera uma estrutura de cinco pontos de possíveis fatores  que ajudam a entender o colapso ambiental: “(1) dano ambiental, (2) mudança climática, (3) vizinhança hostil e (4) parceiros comerciais amistosos – podem ou não se mostrar significativos para uma sociedade em particular. O quinto fator – as respostas da sociedade aos seus problemas ambientais – sempre se mostrou significativo“.

Sem necessariamente expor mais sobre esses fatores já é possível ter uma idéia de que, independentemente do que aconteça, o mais importante são as nossas reações e mudanças de comportamento para resolver problemas.  Por exemplo, já é um fato obvio que a poluição é uma das causa aquecimento global, a emissão de CO2, principalmente devido à queima de combustíveis fósseis, contribui para intensificar o efeito estufa. Segundo o IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ou Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas), a temperatura mundial média aumentou 0,74ºC entre 1906 e 2005. O gráfico abaixo mostra a evolução da temperatura média na superfície planeta, o aumento do nível do mar e cobertura de áreas com neve no hemisfério norte. Não é preciso saber inglês nem ser cientista para  entender os gráficos e perceber que alguma coisa está acontecendo.

Será que saberemos responder a tempo à essas mudanças?

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I had another post in mind today at the Neighborhood, but this news was sent to me by my fellow alumni and its getting my blood up.

In an earlier post on geography, I mentioned a course I took at Georgetown called “Map of the Modern World”, a 1-credit boot camp of world geography and geopolitics.   As a student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) I had to take this course as a graduation requirement–since the qualification exam rendered me, in Professor Pirtle’s thundrous voice, “geographically ignorant.”  Even though it was a killer for a one-credit course, it was one of the most rewarding courses I took.  I know of no other university that has a geography course that even comes close.

Yet, just as it does in the world of education, the “boutique” theories seem to be adopted by administrators as if they were flavors of the month.  Such is the case at SFS, where the new dean, James Reardon-Anderson, wants to take over the course personally.  Instead of the classic geopolitical survey that each student in the SFS has received (gratefully) for decades, Reardon-Anderson plans to restructure the course as a study of geographic forces and human interactions.  The grit-and-grind of the Mercator map is replaced by the soft Venn diagrams of interactions, encounters and relationships.

The scholarship behind this change shouldn’t be new to many people–the work of Jared Diamond, professor at UCLA and author of the popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel.  Diamond’s work postulates that the driving forces behind human interaction, as well as human inequality, are the geographic forces that have shaped the development of Earth’s multitude of societies.

Diamond’s work is not at issue.  What is at issue is using his theories in a course that was never designed as an anthropological or sociological survey.  To really see the difference, here’s the old course description:

Map of the Modern World – 1 Credit

This one-credit-hour course is designed to provide you with regional overviews of the evolution of the world political map since 1800. The objective of this course is to enhance your basic working knowledge of the political map of the modern world as a first step in understanding world events and international relations. The method of instruction
will be lectures supported by a heavy dose of maps and short outside readings. The lectures will focus on the evolution of the modern political map of each region and on major nationalist, ethnic, boundary, and territorial conflicts and tension areas.

Here is the new course description:

Map of the Modern World – 1 Credit

This one-credit course is designed to provide basic knowledge of the physical and political geography of the world. Weekly lectures cover the fundamental forces that shape the physical geography and the effects of physical geography on human behavior in ten regions of the world. The final exam covers information presented in the lectures, the location and capitals of contemporary states, and the identification of major geographical features. The final examination is multiple choice and graded pass-fail. The course is required for graduation from the School of Foreign Service.

As a point of clarification, ths course was always a requirement to graduate and was always graded pass-fail.  Yet the differences are obvious.  Map of the Modern World was a course designed for future diplomats and international leaders in order to establish a baseline knowledge of the world and its machinations.  Period.  Since the SFS was designed as a school for training future diplomats, this makes perfect sense.

Reardon-Anderson’s version is cute.  It’s too cute.  In fact, it’s more like an elective course than a requirement for a school of international relations.  Because of the new dean’s penchant for the theory du jour, students at Georgetown will be less than adequately prepared for the roles they aspire to after graduation.  No 1-credit course can do justice to Diamond’s theories while preserving the original goal of establishing background knowledge of the political world to students of international affairs. 

It’s embarrassing that such a change is even considered, let alone approved.  Climate change, human interactions, geographic forces–these are all worthy of study.  But not in Map.

This leads to my last point.   Map of the Modern World was a rite of passage for students in the SFS program at Georgetown, the oldest school for international studies dating back to 1919.  Every year, each spring, freshman entered the large lecture hall in the Reiss Science Building for 45 minutes of backbreaking maps, charts, definitions, treaties, Latin terms such as “uti possidetes” (one of my old classmates please correct my spelling), and the logjam of minutia that make the modern international system. 

Damnit, that boot camp did a body good, and no boutique theories or Johnny-come-lately techniques should mess up a good thing.

I’m calling on all my former SFS alumni, alumni from other Georgetown schools, even non-alumni that visit the Neighborhood to take action and stop Reardon-Anderson’s quest to sink the SFS into “geographic ignorance.”

A Facebook group has been made for those who want to join, linked here.  Those wishing to express their opinions directly to the school can e-mail Dean Reardon-Anderson at  reardonj@georgetown.edu.  Be sure to CC Dean Lancaster at lancastc@georgetown.edu. 

Lets save at least one piece of our education that actually worked.  Show the administration at SFS that some cows are too damned sacred to make into hamburger.

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies on the evolution of religion:

Your Thoughts?

Room for Debate at the New York Times today has one of a series of ‘conversations’ about the state of education in the US. Today’s discussion centers on the first draft of a set of national standards for all students to achieve in English and math by the end of high school. The Washington Post has a story, too.

As an English teacher by training and for the first eight years of my working life, I read the English Language Arts (ELA) standards (.pdf) with interest. I found little to disagree with in the document, and was even slightly gratified to note that most my lessons over eight years could have been taken for a model of how to implement those standards. (Of course, my students and supervisors might beg to differ.)

Aside from the content of the standards, though, I was interested in two aspects of the process through which they are being developed. First, the federal government is not involved in the drafting process, nor will it be involved in accepting them once they are developed. Instead, the several states are leading the charge in development, and adoption will happen (if it does) state by state. Second, the drafters have referred to the best standards they can find, not only among the several states, but also in the rest of the world. These two elements of the process represent, as I understand it, federalism at its best. Each state maintains its independence but uses innovations and best practice in other states (and, in the modern world, countries) to inform its own choices.

As ‘Abdu’l-Baha noted in a talk he gave in New York in 1912, this federated arrangement has no small consequences:

It is very evident that in the future there shall be no centralization in the countries of the world, be they constitutional in government, republican or democratic in form. The United States may be held up as the example of future government—that is to say, each province will be independent in itself, but there will be federal union protecting the interests of the various independent states. It may not be a republican or a democratic form. To cast aside centralization which promotes despotism is the exigency of the time. This will be productive of international peace.

Such a federal approach to developing educational standards is not confined to the U.S., either. A similar process in underway in Australia, as seen in national Statements of Learning. Viewed more broadly, developing common education standards across national boundaries can be seen as one step in the process of defining the standards of what ‘Abdu’l-Baha labels “human education”, which “signifies civilization and progress—that is to say, government, administration, charitable works, trades, arts and handicrafts, sciences, great inventions and discoveries and elaborate institutions, which are the activities essential to man as distinguished from the animal.”

Of course, the trend toward and necessity of training people to think across the boundaries of traditional bodies of knowledge, which I noted in Saturday’s post, plays a crucial role in developing our sense of what human education is, too. How can we have government, administration, sciences, great inventions, and elaborate institutions adequate to the world today if we cannot analyze broad trends and bring together information from a wide variety of fields? To take two recent examples, Jeffrey Sachs’s Common Wealth and Jared Diamond’s Collapse indicate just how much we can benefit from such an approach to thinking.

Of course, without divine education, the acquisition of human perfections which will allow us to use that way of thinking for our mutual progress, no amount of purely human education will do us much good. Perhaps we’re not quite ready for public schools to take on that subject matter yet.

“O que podemos fazer para evitar a destruição de nosso mundo?“

O Colapso

Em 2005 foi publicado pela primeira vez “O Colapso: Como as sociedades escolhem o fracasso ou o sucesso” de Jared Diamond, que, com diversos exemplos, analisa como algumas importantes e intrigantes civilizações do passado e algumas sociedades atuais foram conduzidas à sua extinção ou estão em uma situação que se não superarem as adversidades terão o mesmo fim. Os fatores decisivos para modelar o futuro de uma sociedade são os mesmos, problemas de administração dos recursos, meio ambiente, crescimento populacional, todos elementos que também temos que nos preocupar nos dias de hoje.

Os exemplos abordados no livro (que pretendo expor no blog, em diversos posts, sendo esse apenas uma introdução), agregam bastante no entendimento da sustentabilidade e, dentro do panorama histórico, temos também um entendimento concreto das consequencias da não-sustentabilidade em povos que foram extintos. A idéia é, além da exposição da tese do livro, adicionar comentários relacionando os temas abordados com a economia do dia-a-dia e situações dos dias atuais.

As perguntas que o livro nos faz vão na linha de “Como pode uma sociedade outrora tão pujante acabar entrando em colapso? Qual foi o destino de seus indivíduos? Foram embora e (…) por quê? Ou será que morreram ali mesmo, de modo miserável? (…) Será que nossa próspera sociedade acabará tendo o mesmo destino? Que escolhas econômicas, sociais e políticas ainda podemos fazer para não termos o mesmo fim?“. Essas sãoapenas algumas perguntas que servem como base para uma reflaxão durante todo o livro.

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Edward Gibbon made a famous claim in chapter 3 of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that

“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

Not many people these days would be able to do this kind of thing ‘without hesitation’ (“ Oh, yes, 96 to 180AD, I remember it well…”), but Gibbon makes a good point: we organise our lives around a concept of human happiness and prosperity. It’s very important to us both within our national economies and or household economies to know whether things are getting better or worse, and whether this trajectory, once identified, is ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’.

Gibbon’s intuitive opinion, ‘without hesitation’ was not only that happiness and prosperity were getting worse but that this had been the normal state of the world for a period of roughly 1600 years since the end of the Roman Empire. The former view was somewhat tempered by the latter. Since decline amounted to a long-term trend, it was nothing much to get excited about.

The industrial revolution made Gibbon’s historical reconstruction with its mood of nostaligia seem ‘ridiculous’ (J.C. Stobart). Not at first, since the dark satanic mills actually produced a decline in life expectancy, at least until roughly the middle of the 19th century. But it transformed the way people in England regarded the Golden Age. Now, with new and wondrous inventions appearing seemingly every year, it was increasingly obvious that the best was yet to come, not in the afterlife, as previously, but in the here-and-now or, to be precise, the here-and-soon. We are still living in this brave new world of constant progress and the pace of fabulous change continues to increase.

These two conflicting positions on the Golden Age were impressed upon me as a child by the popular culture I imbibed through the medium of television. I avidly tuned in every Thursday evening to watch a show called ‘Tomorrow’s World’. Each episode showcased a new or developing technology that was just about to transform our lives for the better and for ever. I vividly remember the episode which revealed for the first time a music CD. The presenter made a hole in it with an electric drill, yet it still played without skipping a beat. Amazing! (and not entirely honest, we might suspect, with the benefit of hindsight). The world of tomorrow, emphatically, was destined to be better in every way than that of today. At the same time as this futuristic stuff, my parents liked to watch shows presented by the poet John Betjemen. These would typically involve the great man visiting old village churches or branch line railway stations and declaiming on their faded, passing beauty, as though everything worthwhile in this life was about to be turned into a car park – the eclipse of ‘our lost Elysium’ by an ‘age without a soul’. So these diametrically opposed views of progress seemed to coexist and it was up to me to negotiate as best I could.

But perhaps there are more options than simply progress or decline…

Why should this matter? Historian Bryan Ward-Perkins claims that historians’ views of the decline of the Roman Empire tie in very neatly with their more modern concerns. In the 1940s, he points out, French historians had a strongly ‘decline’ centred view, depicting the northern Germanic ‘invaders’ as barbarous and cruel. Hardly surprising, that,  given the time these historians were writing in. Similarly he connects the more recent revisionist view of Rome’s decline as a relatively gentle assimilation of the northern tribes with the contemporary climate of European Union (especially Franco-German)  rapprochement.

Bryan Ward-Perkins, 2005: 182 The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

“I have… become increasingly puzzled that the word ‘decline’ should be so contested in historical writing when ‘rise’ is used all the time, without anyone ever batting an eyelid.”

“Present-day historians seem to feel more comfortable discussing the ‘rise’ of this or that, because there is absolutely no risk in this vocabulary of anyone being criticized or any negative value judgement being made; rather the reverse – everybody is being awarded a reassuring pat on the back. This is I think the main problem with the new way of looking at the end of the ancient world: all difficulty and awkwardness are smoothed out into a steady and essentially positive transformation of society.”

“there is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and decline’ (p. 183)

What we have here is a claim that the concepts of ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ in history are constructed in relation to the historian’s own intellectual environment. It’s as though we can’t help inventing an overall assessment of the state of things, which operates in the background and conditions our thinking, linking our descriptive thinking about ancient empires (the ‘facts of the past’) with our normative thinking about present social arrangements.

I note that around the same time Ward-Perkins wrote this in 2005 there was something of a popular return to decline – especially in the form of Jared Diamond’s widely read book, Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), followed by Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization (2006).

These writers are not historians. They are relying on the work of earlier decline-focused historians and the message they are promoting is the Egalitarian message that great empires are fragile and they fall and that  if we don’t change our own civilization’s values it will fall too. Note the assumptions in the subtitles: that it’s possible somehow to choose not to collapse, that civilization is in need of and capable of renewal. At the end of his book, Homer-Dixon recounts a visit to the Hajar el Hibla at Baalbek in modern Lebanon. This is a collossal stone plinth weighing 1,000 tonnes, quarried by the Romans in order to extend an already enormous temple. The point is, of course, that they never managed it. The rock lies in the quarry, never to be erected. Homer-Dixon writes:

If my supposition was right, the rock before me – the last rock – was a powerful symbol of the exhaustion of an enormous social and political enterprise. It was enduring evidence of overreach. The Romans had oaught to cut and move a stone unlike anything they’d ever moved before. And they couldn’t do it. In the end, Rome’s existential values – values that said, among other things, that life’s meaning could be found partly in monumental efforts of engineering – led the empire into a dead end from which it couldn’t escape. (p.307f.)

Just in case we haven’t got the message yet, he continues:

Will our civilization have its last rock too… Or maybe, just maybe, before we’ve exhausted nature and ourselves in a futile effort to produce meaning from material things, we’ll reconsider our values and recognise that we can choose another path into the future. (p. 308)

This is all very stirring, but it doesn’t necessarily tell us much about either the past or the present – except that we construct them the way we want them to be – declining or rising, according to how we believe the world in general must be shifting.Grid-Group Cultural theory would connect these views to the four cultures it describes.

Egalitarianism is committed to a world of decline – just as Rome fell, so will we if we don’t treat one another and nature properly.

Individualism is committed to a world of increase. It’s nonsense to see Rome as a high point. The real high point is the immediate future, in which things will be even better than they are now. Civilizational collapse is for losers!

But there are two more views available.

The Hierarchical approach sees order and management not just as bulwarks against collapse but as denials of its very possibility (or more precisely, collapse could theoretically happen if order were to break down, but in practice it just isn’t going to, so collapse is only ever a threat rather than an actuality). Think of the rulers of the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted another thousand years after the so-called collapse of Rome. Or of Mehmet II who conquered Byzantium in 1453 and named himself Kayzer-i Rum (Caesar of Rome), then attempted to ‘reunite the Roman Empire’ by invading Italy in 1480. Or of Charlemaigne, who had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 (Karolus serenissimus Augustus a Deo coronatus magnus pacificus imperator Romanum gubernans imperium it said on his charters) . For such leaders and their courts, the Roman Empire never went away- it is simply and forever under new management.
Finally there is the Fatalist view of history: everything rises and falls and, crucially, there’s not a thing we can do about it. It’s an outlook summed up by The Consolation of Philosophy (524) by Boethius, one of several figures named ‘the last of the Romans’.

I turn my wheel that spins its circle fairly; I delight to make the lowest turn to the top, the highest to the bottom. Come you to the top if you will, but on this condition, that you think it no unfairness to sink when the rule of my game demands it.

This work has been seen as a bridge between classical literature and the changed sensibilities of the Middle Ages. It popularised the rota fortunae, the  image of the wheel of fortune, depicted in the medieval Carmina Burana as a king travelling up, over and back down a wheel. I will reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without a reign, the captions read. It is also well illustrated by the words of a song from that collection, Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi (Fortune, empress of the world).

So when is/was/will/will not be the golden age? And are things getting better, or worse? The answers to these questions are not merely of historical interest. They are what our culture uses to teach us what it would take for us to be, in Gibbon’s words, ‘happy and prosperous’. So it is worth taking stock of how these four alternative visions of decline and fall make use of us, perennially, as their mouthpieces.

R.Dawkins C.Venter M.Brockman

Al ritorno da Venezia Vi racconterò tutto ciò che sarà rilevante, eclatante, il nuovo che stupisce, i paradigmi, le idee, ipotesi e tentativi, ignoto da colonizzare, la vasta steppa del DNA .

Sappiate comunque subito:
Quando Vi raccontano che il genoma è stato decifrato, si tratta di un “falso ”.
Sappiamo qualcosa su un 40/60 % del DNA, non sufficientemente per comprendere cosa veramente mette in atto e come; un restante 20% è conosciuto in buona parte, il restante diciamo conosciuto.
Cosi : Gorge M. Church

Ogni notizia scientifica, ma non solo, deve esser presa cautamente.

A conferma, Vi voglio riportare o portare sulle tracce di Thomas Kuhn, da quando ha pubblicato “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962), sappiamo che i scienziati rimangono impantanati (probabilmente non solo loro) in idee errate (paradigmi) per una serie di ragioni che vanno dal orgoglio, al prestigio, a interesse e fede religiosa.
(Anche questo va ben considerato in un paese come l’Italia col Vaticano cosi invadente nella vita politica e scientifica, non che l’America se la passi meglio con la Tempelton Foundation ed altri congregazioni religiosi sparsi nel mondo, sempre disponibili ad utilizzare antibiotici o computer o …. No: il preservativo no … è pericoloso? o non é scientifico? sicuramente non è religioso – il preservativo… o armi micidiali, rinnegando l’obiettivo valore della ricerca scientifica).

Un’altra notizia, di questi giorni, a fare da fondamento all’auspicata cautela, coinvolge Jared Diamond,
geografo di fama, vincitore premio Pulitzer 1998,(armi, acciaio e malattie) che viene querelato da due aborigeni della Papua Nuova Guinea per aver raccontato fatti non attinenti la realtà, chiedono un risarcimento milionario.
Le relazioni sono come sempre complesse, l’antropologia un affare da fabbrica di gomma.

Leggete e acquisite fatti nuovi, paradigmi nuovi, vita nuova, create dimensioni mentali individuali.
Cosi mi piace.