Today’s Post
Last week we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the movement of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, it is clear that the betterment of humankind is occurring: the slope of the curve of improvement can be seen to rapidly increase in the past few generations, and that this increase is spreading over the surface of the globe from West to East.
This week we will take the same kind of look at another of Norberg’s facets of increasing human evolution, that of ‘Life Expectancy’.
The History of Life Expectancy
As Norberg notes:
“Through most of human history, life was nasty, brutish and short. More than anything, it was short because of disease, lack of food and lack of sanitation. People died early, as infants or children, and mothers often died giving birth. The high mortality rate was not primarily because of the prevalence of violence, but because of infectious disease, unsafe water and bad sanitary conditions.”
Plagues frequently caused massive deaths. The ‘Black Death’ in the fourteenth century is thought to have killed more than a third of Europe’s population. Such plagues continued on a regular basis, and were joined by infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox, in deadly cycles continuing until the nineteenth century. In Eastern Europe, for example, forty occurrences of plague were reported in the two hundred years between 1440 and 1640. Norberg notes,
“Despite an often more stable supply of food, the agricultural revolution did not improve this much, and according to some accounts reduced it, since large, settled groups were more exposed to infectious disease and problems related to sanitation.”
Considering all this, it is not surprising that individual life expectancy was not much different in the West by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.
Neither was it different from Eastern countries.
The ‘Knee in the Curve”
Charts which show the occurrence of data over time are commonly used to illustrate ‘trends’. Most often, extrapolations from recorded to anticipated data are effected by using previous trends to predict those anticipated in the future. This is a very effective method of prediction, except when there is a sharp change in the rate of change that could not be anticipated by past data. These sharp changes are known as ‘knees in the curve’, data points at which past performance no longer serves as a basis to predict the future.
Norberg’s charts show many such points at which past trends in human evolution are significantly interrupted by new paradigms, and his data on life expectancy is no exception.
In the early 1800s, the trend of globalization, in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, such a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg’s statistics quantify the trend and clearly show this ‘knee in the curve’ of human life expectancy:
Time Frame Life Expectancy
Prehistoric times 18-20 YRS
500BC 20-25
1830 30
1910 32
1990 60
2012 70
As we saw last week, in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, these startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations. Life expectancy can be seen to increase by 40 years in the short span of one hundred years, a blink in evolutionary time.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such a ‘knee in the curve’. Things such as improved sanitation led to increased access to clean water which reduced water-borne illnesses, which were further reduced by improved medicine and supplemented by increased food supply and multiplied by increasing globalization which not only ‘spread the wealth’ but ‘concentrated the innovation’. Improved medicine massively reduced diseases such as polio, malaria, measles and leprosy, and as a result lowered such things as mother childbirth death rates and children birth mortality rates.
Further, as Norberg notes, such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been applied to developing countries, such improvements are being seen much more quickly. As Norberg notes, Life expectancy in the ‘developing countries’ has seen such an increase. These figures represent the period of 1950 to 2010:
Asia: Increases from 42 to -70 Years
Latin America: Increases from 50 to 74 Years
Africa: Increases from 37 to 57 Years
We saw an example of this same phenomenon last week in the increase in human stature as measured by human height increase in developing countries to nearly equal to the West in only sixty years.
Putting This Into Perspective
Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, I’ll just summarize:
– Innovation and invention are natural characteristics of human persons, and will occur whenever and wherever the human person’s autonomy is valued by society. Historically, this has mostly happened in the West.
– Innovations and inventions have been shown to rapidly increase human welfare elsewhere than their point of invention when globalization is permitted. Almost every Western invention had been at least imagined elsewhere, such as coal in the ancient Chinese and early empires of Islam, but died still-born because restricted from trade.
– These innovations and inventions arise as they are needed: the ‘compression of the noosphere’ has, as Teilhard notes, ‘The effect of concentrating human effort to increase human welfare”.
The Next Post
This week we took a look at another of Norberg’s measures of evolution, with the topic of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution.
Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.