X-Message-Number: 21995 Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2003 16:17:49 -0400 From: Keith Henson <> Subject: Appropriate experts and related First, I should mention that I highly appreciate the SARS reports Christine Gaspar has been making. On the comments of Mark Plus, Kevin Spoering and Michael C Price re Simon vs Malthus, I think history clearly shows Malthus was right--given his assumptions--and that Julian Simon might be right given his. But there is no guarantee. The unspoken assumption Malthus made was *constant technology*. History shows he was dead on target. Look up what happened to Easter Island, where the population peaked and then was reduced to about 5% of its high point through warriors fighting over the severely ecologically degraded island. http://www.superscript.co.uk/gazette/easter/easter-island.html I just finished reading an account of a similar but much larger event, _Prehistoric Warfare in the American Southwest_ by Steven A. LeBlanc. The landscape in the Southwest of North America filled up with corn farmers, then a cold snap (the Little Ice Age) came along. Warfare became endemic, the people moved into large defensive clusters that were very poorly suited for farming--fields too far away became useless. Some migrated out of the area, but most of them seemed to have died in place (failed to reproduce) by the time the Spaniards reached the area. (24 of 27 groups on the Colorado Plateau vanished between the time they formed and a hundred years later.) I highly recommend this book, though if you want the less detailed version of it, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Steven LeBlanc & Katherine E. Register (2003) might be better. http://www.athenapub.com/8prewar.htm Simon and Co. make the case that advancing technology will deal with resource depletion by endless substitution. They also expect population to stabilize at some point, though they are not too concerned about it. The end of oil is not the end of civilization. We were darned lucky to have this legacy to get technology rolling, but we can and will have to get along without it eventually. Serious thought is being given to this area. http://www.peakoil.net/iwood2003/iwood2003.html A good fraction of the papers here are about what will be the transport energy source post oil. Nanotechnology machines could turn garbage or plant clippings into liquid fuels. Current industrial processing might be able to accomplish much the same. http://www.discover.com/may_03/featoil.html What is *more* of a potential worry is a major jump in the climate prior to nanotechnology. http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/BrainForAllSeasons/ A jump to ice age conditions, with attendant world wide crop failures, is likely to set off warfare over food. I would expect no less dire results than the last one did in the American Southwest. A related worry is that anticipation of looming privation (the situation almost everywhere in the Islamic world) may set off resource driven wars. I make a strong case on evolutionary grounds that humans have mechanisms that induce them to go to war with neighboring tribes when resources get tight. Those mechanisms were honed by millions of years of periodic droughts and over population of an environment. It paid your genes to go to war rather than starve because--even if your tribe lost--your genes in the form of your children (especially female children) stood a decent chance of being incorporated into the victorious (and better fed) tribe. "Looming privation" is the mechanism I think lies behind the rise of Ben Ladin. It certainly applies to Saudi Arabia where the income per capita has fallen from $28,000 to $7,000 in a generation. http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/09/Whoisourenemy.shtml is somewhat related, going more into why the Islamic world has stagnant or falling income per capita. Unfortunately, psychological mechanisms honed in tribal times of hunting/gathering are often very poorly adapted to the world we live in. I can make the point that they were poorly suited even to the corn farmers in the Southwest who were trapped in continuing warfare that prevented them from using the environment efficiently even when the weather improved. Keith Henson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21995