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 11^th to the 18^th 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 18^th 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 20^th 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.

Today’s Post

Over the past several weeks we have been looking into Teilhard’s assessment of the future of human evolution . We have also seen how conventional wisdom, well harvested from the weedy fields of daily news, suggests that things are going downhill.

As we have seen over the course of this blog, Teilhard, in spite of writing in a time at which our future was anything but rosy, managed a world view which was quite opposite from that prevalent at the time. Having looking into how his audaciously optimistic (and counter-intuitive) conclusions have been formed, we can now look into how they are being played out today in human evolution..

Last week we boiled down Teilhard’s observations and projections of the noosphere, into several characteristics that he believed to constitute the ‘structure of the noosphere’.

This week we will begin a survey of this noosphere as it appears today to see how contemporary objective data can be brought to bear on his insights. As we will see over the next few weeks, by looking at quantifiable data from reliable sources his case for optimism is stronger today than at any time in the whole of human history

Human Evolution Metrics

With all that said, how do we go about quantifying human evolution? One very relevant approach can be found in “Progress”, a book by Johan Norberg, which 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.”

   In doing so he alludes to the existence of an ‘energy of evolution’:

“It is a kind of progress that no leader or institution or government can impose from the top down.”

   Norberg doesn’t reference Teilhard or cite religious beliefs. Instead he refers to findings from public surveys, Government data, International media and global institutions.

His approach is to parse the ‘metrics of human evolution’ into nine categories. They are:

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                   Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

For each of these categories he provides, as the noted international news magazine The Economist notes, “a tornado of evidence” for the “slow, steady, spontaneous development” of the human species. He compares these statistics across the planet, from Western societies, to near- and mid- Eastern Asia, to China and India, and to super-and sub-Saharan Africa. And, to the extent possible, he extends trends from antiquity to the current day.

Norberg is well aware that his findings, all showing improvements in the areas of human life listed above, are profoundly contrary to conventional wisdom, and he acknowledges the human tendency toward pessimism. He quotes Franklin Pierce Adams on one source of this skepticism:

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”

   His prodigious statistics clearly, and to considerable depth, offer a look quite different from the nostalgic, sepia-tinged memories the ‘good old days’.

As Jeanette Walworth wrote:

“My grandpa notes the world’s worn cogs
And says we are going to the dogs!
…

The cave man in his queer skin togs
Said things were going to the dogs.
But this is what I wish to state
The dogs have had an awful wait.”

Our Approach

Over the next few weeks, we will address some of Norberg’s categories, summarize his key statistics, and show how Teilhard’s insights on and projections for human evolution are borne out by Norberg’s data.

This look at objective and verifiable historical data will serve to put Teilhard’s highly optimistic vision of the future to the test. Does the data show that we humans are continuing to evolve? If so, in what ways, how fast, and is the trend positive or negative?

This week we will take a simple example, one not listed by Norberg but simple enough to illustrate the process that we will use: that of ‘fuel’

A Brief History of Fuel

Few issues are closer to our everyday lives than that of fuel. Every person on the planet uses fuel every day for such things as heating or cooling their homes, cooking their meals, transporting themselves and communicating.   As the issue of fuel is so ubiquitous, its history provides a great metric for putting our evolution in an objective perspective.

The discovery of fire a few hundred thousand years ago was a monumental moment in human history. The availability of cooked, rather than raw, food led to improved health, and the ability to heat habitats led to an increase in habitable area. It is obvious that both led to general improvements in human life.

Following the many thousands of years in which wood was the only fuel, coal began to take its place, increasing in use as the Bronze age led to the Iron age, and continuing a key role to this day.

Today other types of fuel, principally gas but including nuclear, wind and solar extraction, provide fuel for the many applications of the modern era.

While fuel offers an example of how human evolution can be seen to continue, how can it be seen to support Teilhard’s many assertions?

From Teilhard’s Perspective

The first is that of Human Invention. The history of fuel offers an articulation of the steps of human evolution: first ‘discovery’, then ‘extraction’, then ‘application’ and finally ‘dissemination’. Some early humans discovered that certain stones would burn, and over time developed methods of extraction and dissemination that made it possible to use coal as an improved method of heat (more BTU per volume). This required improved methods of extraction and dissemination, such as mining coal vs gathering wood.

The second is that of the Human Psychism. Each of these steps required an increase in complexity not only of the technology but more importantly an increasing development of what Teilhard refers to as ‘human psychisms’. By this he is referring to the aspects of human society which are the core of the Inner Pull addressed last week. By psychism Teilhard refers to the human groups which effect the

“increase in mental interiority and hence of inventive power”

required to find and employ

“new ways of arranging its elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space.”

   This does not only pertain to the management of fuel, but to the exponential rise in the uses of fuel: from cooking and heating, to such things as the smelting of ores and the powering of engines. Each such step required yet another ‘new way’ of thinking, an increase in the organization and the depth of knowledge of the ‘psychism’ and the need to draw on external resources (such as education) for their success.

The third example can be seen in the proliferation of the resulting “new ways” over the face of planet. While coal, for example, was ‘discovered’ in China approximately in 4000 BC, it wasn’t until the advent of expanding empires before, for example, the discoveries of the Romans could spread far and wide, hence the third example of Globalization.

The fourth of Teilhard’s insights is his observation that compression of the noosphere not only results in globalization, but also in the increase in the speed of the spread of invention.   Hundreds of thousands of years of wood burning, followed by a few thousand years of coal dependency followed by a few hundred years of transition to other sources of fuel. Not only can evolution be seen to rise, but to converge, and the increasing convergence can be seen to stimulate its increasing speed.

The fifth Teilhard insight is the Timeliness of Invention, the recognition that humans invent as necessary to insure their continuing evolution. Had humans not discovered the advantages of coal, the dependency upon wood would have left our planet by now denuded and bereft of oxygen. We would be extinct. Had not new sources of fuel come available in the Eighteenth century, the exclusive use of coal would have doomed us to asphyxiation, choking on the effluvia of civilization. (A poignant example can be seen in the ‘Great Smog’ of London which killed over twelve thousand people in 1952.)

The sixth Teilhard insight is the recognition of the failure of forecasts that do not take into account the six above phenomena. Such an example is Thomas Malthus, whose dire predictions from the early 1800’s are still read today. Malthus depended on historical data for his end-of-times predictions (increase in population outstripping production of resources) but failed to recognize the basic human capability of invention, by which production would rise exponentially and unwanted side effects mitigated. Malthus provides an example of the failure of any forecast which uses past history to predict the future without taking human invention into account.

The seventh insight is that of Change of State. As Teilhard notes, the journey of evolution from the big bang is not a linear one. At key points, not only does the “stuff of the universe” change, but it changes radically. The transition from energy to matter, from simple to complex atoms, from molecules to cells and from neurons to conscious entities, are profound. Further, the energies through which they continue to the next step are profoundly different as well. In our simple example of ‘fuel’, this can be seen to be happening literally before our eyes. The result of each step from wood to coal to gas and onto future sources could not have been be predicted from evidence of the past. The changes are highly nonlinear.

The eighth and last Teilhard insight is that of Risk. Human evolution is not guaranteed to continue. Continued innovation and invention, deepening insight into the structure of the noosphere provided by new human ‘psychisms’ and improvements in globalization which tighten communications all require closer cooperation. None of these will happen unless humans continue to have faith in their future.

The Next Post

This week we began a two-pronged look at how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species: The first of which is to look objectively at what we know about our history so far, and the second to see how in this view such data bears out Teilhard’s insights into human evolution. This week we looked at a rather simple example, ‘fuel’ to illustrate this approach.

Next week we will begin a much more detailed look at the data from Norberg’s book, “Progress” to see how it, too, supports Teilhard’s optimistic worldview.