How can the history of food be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s evolutionary insights?
Today’s Post
Last week we considered whether the immense volume of data available today from such resources as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, the World Economy Historical Statistics, The US Food Administration, and many others, reflects Teilhard’s optimistic insights on human evolution or does this data support the common and ubiquitous pessimism that seems to pervade our society. Using the example of ‘fuel’ last week, we saw not only how the data seems to substantiate Teilhard’s optimistic projections, contradictory to ‘conventional wisdom’, but agrees with Teilhard’s eight insights into how this data can be seen from his ‘evolutionary lens’.
This week we will go into more detail, summarizing the similarly optimistic insights of Johan Norberg, in his recent book, “Progress” in which he seeks to show
“..the amazing accomplishments that resulted from the slow, steady, spontaneous development of millions of people who were given the freedom to improve their own lives, and in doing so improved the world.”
We will begin with a look at three of Norberg’s nine metrics of evolution, introduced last week, and see as we did last week how Teilhard’s insights play out in all of them.
Food
Famine Few metrics are more pervasive in human history than famine. Norberg cites the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century. Between 1870 and 2015 this has fallen to 106 episodes of mass starvation on our planet.
With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, Thomas Malthus, reflecting conventional wisdom, predicted early in the 18th century that in a very few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail, dooming humanity to extinction.
The data, however, shows an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now. 27M died from 1900 to 1910. Several million more due to wartime and communist state mismanagement from 1930 to 1943. Today famine persists in just one major area, and that is North Korea.
Today, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, and now more often results from poor government. Norberg notes that
“No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because “Rulers who are dependent on voters do everything to avoid starvation and a free press makes the public aware of the problems”.
Product Yield So, it’s obvious that something is going on to result in such a startling statistic. One factor is improvements in crops and extraction methods. Another is the invention of automated product extraction such as harvesters and milkers:
- In 1850 it took 25 men, 24 hours to harvest 1,000 pounds of grain. In 1950 one man could do it in in six minutes
- In that time frame, it took one person 30 min to milk 10 cows. By 1950 it was down to one minute.
As a result, in the same time frame, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours. From 1920 to 2015 the cost of this supply was reduced by fifty percent.
Better strains of wheat have also led to increased yield. In the last fifty years the production of Indian crops has increased by 700%; in Mexico by 600%, moving these countries from importers to exporters of wheat.
The combination of better crops and improved extraction has also led to a slower increase of land dedicated to growing crops.
Malnutrition Not surprisingly, increased production has led to decreased malnutrition. The average Western caloric intake per person increased by 50% in the last hundred years; in the world by 27% in the past fifty years. This has resulted in a reduction in world malnutrition from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.
This has also increased human stature. In both Eastern and Western countries, average height was about the same until about 1870, when it began increasing in the West by 1cm per year to the present day. The same level of increase did not begin in Asia until the forties and is still continuing to this day. However, in countries with poor governments, such as in Sub Saharan Africa and North Korea, it has slightly decreased.
The Next Post
This week we began our search for Teilhard’s ‘cogent experimental grounds’ which would enable us to better focus his ‘evolutionary lens’ on our own evolution of ‘food’.
Next week we will relook at Norberg’s data from Teilhard’s perspective to see how it substantiates his eight insights into human evolution.
I have to confess I did not read the entire post, but I noticed it began with “arable land.” I wonder how this observation (assuming I understand it) would hold up if one considers that “arable land” could become irrelevant if the atmosphere itself would render growing crops a sustainable process. I. E., would land be “arable” if there was too much heat or not enough water to grow crops either in the form of edible fruit and vegetation or in the form of vegetation for either herds or wild animals to eat.