Today’s Post
Last week we took a cursory look at an aspect of human activity that provides a basis for assessing Teilhard’s forecasts for human evolution. Without going into statistical details, we saw how well Teilhard’s insights are borne out by this cursory look at the topic of ‘Fuel’.
This week we will extend our search to the topic of ‘Food’ but, using Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, this time we’ll include some key statistics that will sharpen the point even finer
Norberg’s Statistics on Food’s impact on Human Evolution
First off, let’s take a look at some of Norberg’s statistics. In this first look at his evolutionary metrics, he cites over thirty-three statistics which quantify how food, its availability and its production and distribution have increased human quality of life over the span of known human history. Obviously, we won’t have room go into details on each, but there’s no question that each one is an example of the exponential rise in human welfare.
Famine Few metrics are more pervasive than the incidence of famine in human history. Norberg notes that in just four years in the fifteenth century, famine claimed the lives of one out of every fifteen people, just in Europe. This wasn’t a unique period, with the incidence of famine averaging ten per year from the 11th to the 18th century. The death toll was horrendous. Between 1870 and 2015 there have been 106 episodes of mass starvation. With the increase in world population and the diminishing availability of arable land, it was not unexpected for Thomas Malthus to predict, early in the 18th century, that in a few short years humanity’s ability to sustain itself would fail. However, statistics show an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20th century until now. 27M died from 1900-1910. Then several million due to wartime famine from 1930 to 1943, then several more in the Communist regimes of Stalin and Mao, with just one major area today, and that is North Korea. Further, the persistence of famine is no longer an issue of inadequate food production, it is now based on poor government. Norberg notes that “No democratic country has ever experienced famine”, because, “Rulers who are dependent on voters to 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. Norberg notes that the discovery that ammonia could be synthesized led to the production of artificial fertilizer which immediately increased crop yield. The invention of automated product extraction added another boost, such as harvesters and milkers:
o 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
o 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 timeframe, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to 260 hours. Further, 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 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 world malnutrition dropping from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.
This has also increased human stature. In both East 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.
From Teilhard’s Perspective
As we did last week, we can look at these statistics in the light of Teilhard’s Projections to see how well they correlate.
Human Invention As we saw last week, humans are capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction. Without increasing crop yields, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now. With the population growth that has occurred, we would by now have run out of arable land to feed ourselves.
Globalization Growing enough food would not suffice if it couldn’t be put in the mouths of the populace. As Norberg points out, innovation is most active in countries where the human person has the freedom to exercise his or her creativity and least active in countries where such activity is undermined by excessive state control. Where the effect of globalization comes in is where such innovation can transfer to other countries where governmental overreach is being reduced by the installation of democratic institutions. In general, this is nearly always occurs in a West-to-East direction.
Inner Pull Such amazing inventions such as automations and fertilizer would not have been possible without the information amassed by globalization and the expertise harvested from the many ‘psychisms’ which came together to perform the many complex studies and tests required to produce them.
Speed. It’s not just that solutions to the problems were effected. Note that most of them found in the above abbreviated set of statistics happened in the past hundred years. In the estimated eight thousand generations thought to have emerged in the two hundred or so thousand years of human existence, the many innovations that Norberg observes have just emerged in the past three. Due to the ‘compression of the noosphere’, these innovations are spreading in the East more quickly than they came to initial fruition in the West. For example, the change in height of Western humans occurred at 1 cm per year over 100 years, but in the East it is proceeding today at twice this rate.
Failures in Forecasting As we saw last week, Malthus’ projections of the end of the times did not occur. While population did increase (but not at his anticipated rate), food production increased exponentially. Even today, there are still writers who predict that we will run out of resources in the next fifty years or so.
Changes of State As Teilhard noted, evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time (eg molecule to cell). The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play inhuman evolution, as the innovations we have seen this week clearly show
Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical resistance. In the yearning for a non-existing but attractive past, the practices of invention and globalism can be undermined. The very fact that a strong majority of well-off Westerners can still consider the future to be dire is an indication of the paucity of faith which can be seen today. In 2015, a poll cited by Norberg showed that a whopping 71% of Britons thought “The world was getting worse” and a miniscule 3% thought it was getting better.
The Next Post
This week we took a look at the first of Norberg’s evolutionary characteristics, that of ‘Food’ to see how his statistics show a general improvement in human condition over a very short time, and how Teilhard’s evolutionary forces can be shown to active in them.
Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Sanitation’ to see some statistics along the same line of improvements in humanity. As we will see, they will show the same resonance with Teilhard’s evolutionary characteristics that we saw this week.