Today’s Post
Last week we took a detailed look at statistics on ‘Food’ as a metric for assessing the continuation of evolution in the human species. Using the statistics found in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress” three aspects of this movement become clear:
– human evolution can be measured in terms of instantiations of betterment of humankind over time
– the speed of these measures can be seen to be rapidly increasing
– these increases are 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.”
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.
The ‘Knee in the Curve”
As Teilhard noted, the evolving universe can be seen to take many ‘jumps’ in complexity as it rises from one state to another, such as in the appearance of the molecule from combinations of atoms, or cells from combination of molecules. Thus he notes that evolution proceeds in a highly nonlinear fashion, with profound leaps in complexity over short periods of time. The phenomena associated with this insight is clearly still in play with the innovations that Norberg chronicles. In each case, the rise of complexity in the human species, and therefore a metric of its continued evolution, can be seen to suddenly burst forth from a relative quiescent past state. Such a ‘knee in the curve’ of data can be seen in the metric of life expectancy, just as we saw in the metrics of fuel and food.
At the point in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases, threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen. Norberg plots this reversal in the data that shows which, beginning in the early 20th century, life expectancy in the West grew from the historic norm of thirty-three years to seventy years in a span of only one hundred years.
This is yet another example of the trend we saw last week: in the estimated two hundred thousand year history of humankind, some eight thousand generations, startling improvements in human welfare have only taken hold in the past three generations.
As Norberg points out, there are many factors which combine to produce such ‘knees 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.
He further notes that such improvements in the West took about a hundred years to achieve these results. As they have been subsequently applied to developing countries, such improvements there can be seen to take place much more quickly. Some examples of improvements over sixty years outside the West:
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 rapid improvements to food production, and in the previous look at ‘fuel’.
Putting This Into Perspective
Rather than detailing how these statistics prove out Teilhard’s projections, as we did last week, I’ll just summarize:
- Innovation and invention are natural gifts 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.
- Such innovation and invention requires the grouping of human minds into ‘psychisms’ in which these gifts are reinforced and focused
- 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 human evolution, with the metric of ‘Life Expectancy’, and saw how it, too, not only confirms Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution but identifies the critical processes at work in its continued success.
Next week we will take a last look at Norberg’s compilation of statistics, this time on the topic of “Poverty”.