Seeing Food as a Metric for Human Evolution
Today’s Post
Last week we considered whether the immense volume of data available today from such resources as the Food and Agriculture Org of the UN, the World Economy Historical Statistics, The US Food Administration and many others, reflects Teilhard’s optimistic insights on human evolution or do they support the common and ubiquitous pessimism that seems to pervade our society. Using the example of ‘fuel’ last week, we were able to see not only how the data seems to be on Teilhard’s side, contradictory to ‘conventional wisdom’, but agrees with Teilhard’s eight insights (last week) into how this data can be put into his evolutionary context.
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 a look at four 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 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 1900-1910. 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, now more 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 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 only 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, history shows humans as capable of inventing what they need to forestall extinction. Without increasing crop yield, for example, Malthus’ predictions would have been borne out by now. With the population growth that has occurred, we would have by now required nearly all 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. The effect of globalization appears as the transfer of innovation to other countries where ineffective government is being replaced by democratic institutions. In general, this is nearly always has occured in a West-to-East direction.
Inner Pull Innovations and 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’ (human groups free to innovate) 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 to 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 in the West, but in the East it is proceeding 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. The phenomenon associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations we have seen this week.
Risk Each of these innovations has occurred in the face of political, religious and philosophical pushback. 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 how much little faith (well-justified faith if Norberg’s statistics and Teilhard’s insights are to be believed) is manifested in today’s ‘conventional wisdom’. 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.
Many politicians today sow the seeds of pessimism to effect the fear thought to insure their election. As Teilhard notes in several places, in a future in which we do not believe, we will not be able to exist.
The Next Post
This week we took a look at the first of Norberg’s evolutionary metrics, that of ‘Food’ to see how his statistics show a general but undeniable improvement in human condition over a very short time, and how Teilhard’s evolutionary forces can be shown to be active in them.
Next week we’ll move on to the second Norberg topic, that of ‘Life Expectancy’ 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.