How Norberg’s wealth of data can be seen to substantiate Teilhard’s Insights on Human Evolution 

Today’s Post

After exploring the genetic and cultural insights of Richard Dawkins and their resonance with Teilhard’s mapping of the human journey to the future, we turned to those of Johan Norbert, interpretive historian, whose detailed data illustrates Dawkins’ perspective on the continuation of human evolution as well as substantiates Teilhard’s universal perspective.

How Does the Data Show We’re Evolving?

While Norberg addresses nine distinct and measurable metrics of human evolution, four of them will be addressed here: food, life expectancy, poverty and violence.   While summarized here, more data can be seen with citations in the blog series addressed earlier.

Food

Norberg presents some thirty detailed statistics which show how improvements in food, its availability, production, and distribution have increased global human quality of life over the span of recorded history.  Some examples.

• Famine Thomas Malthus, reflecting conventional wisdom, predicted early in the 18^th century that in a very few years population growth would undermine humanity’s ability to sustain itself, dooming humanity to extinction.  (This is not uncommon today.)

The data, however, shows an exponential decline in famine-related deaths from the start of the 20^th century until now, from the 27 million then to today’s persistence in just one major area: North Korea.

• 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.   In the past two hundred years, for example, the amount of labor to produce a year’s supply of food for a single family went from 1,700 to today’s 130 hours.
• Malnutrition Not surprisingly, these improvements in food production have 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 trend has spread across the globe, resulting in a reduction in world malnutrition from 50% to 13% in the last 60 years.

Life Expectancy

Norberg notes that individual life expectancy was not much different across the globe by the early 1800s than it had been since antiquity, which was approximately thirty-three years.

   At this point, the trend of globalization, in which city population increases were exacerbating the spread of diseases and threatening the continuation of human evolution, a startling reversal began to happen: the average global life expectancy of thirty years, extent for all recorded history (some eight thousand generations) more than doubled to seventy years in the short span of only the past three generations.

Poverty

In 1820, the average percent of Europeans in poverty, consistent with the rest of the world, was about 50%, relatively unchanged throughout history.  At this rate, it would have taken the average person two thousand years to double their income, but in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the average Briton did this in thirty years.  By 1950, continuing this trend, extreme poverty was virtually eradicated in nearly all Western Europe, which had seen a fifteen-fold increase in per capita income.

Consistent with the trend that Norberg documents in the other evolutionary metrics that he addressed, this trend, while starting in the West, increased even more quickly when introduced to the East.  As The United Nations Development Program describes, and Norberg comments:

“Starting in East Asia, countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore integrated into the global economy and proved to the world that progress was possible for ‘developing countries’”.

   Norberg cites the World Bank:

 “Global Poverty initially can be seen to decrease by 10% over the forty years from 1820 to 1920, by another 10% by 1950, another 20% by 1981, then another 40% by 2015.“

   Putting this data together into a global trend shows a decrease in extreme global poverty from ninety four percent in 1820 to eight percent today.

Considering that the world population increased by two billion during this time, this data reflects an exponential decrease in the number of people living in extreme poverty by 1.2 billion people in 200 years.

Violence

Norberg addresses violence in three categories: War, Homicide and Terrorism.

• War Norberg notes the deep disturbance that has manifested itself throughout our history   as humans have attempted to resist the expansion of one group into the space claimed by another.   State boundaries had been contested for ages, reaching a fevered pitch only a few generations ago that saw the entire globe engulfed by conflagration.  Teilhard sees in this abysmal state the slow human learning curve to balance the ‘outer push’ of compression with the development of an ‘inner pull’ which balances it peacefully.  Norberg agrees, and articulates four facets of the ‘inner pull’ which has resulted in an abrupt and unprecedented decline in interstate large scale warfare in just fifty years.

• • A general ridicule of war that begins to emerge with the Enlightenment
  • The calming of religious fundamentalism in the West
  • The emergence of a globalization which requires stable relations in which it becomes cheaper to buy resources than to take them by force
  • The possibility of war after several generations of warfare becomes less acceptable as personal wealth and education increased and poverty decreased.

• Homicides Norberg reports the significant reductions in homicide rates that can be seen in European history from 1400 to the present as they have fallen from forty percent to approximately one percent.
• Terrorism He notes that the decrease of warfare and homicide has not been accompanied by a decline in terrorism, although the degree of violence is smaller.  However, putting terrorism into perspective, he notes that it

 “.. is not on the scale of other acts of violence, like war or criminality, and it is not even close to traffic deaths.  Since 2000, around 400 people have died from Terrorism in the OECD countries every year, mostly in Turkey and Israel.  More Europeans drown in their bathtubs and ten times more die falling down the stairs.”

    We have seen how four of Norberg’s nine measures of ‘Progress’ all provide examples of how Teilhard’s optimistic forecast for the future of human evolution is being played out.  In each of Norberg’s examples, Teilhard’s insight that while the ‘compression’ phase of humanity’s evolution leads to many levels of conflict and tension, at the same time this compression also increases humanity’s understanding of itself.   This understanding in turn leads to the increases in human freedom which then result in tactics better disposed to deal with humanity’s ills.

Norberg’s detailed look at human progress offers in-depth statistics that quantify not only how evolution can be seen to continue through the human species and how this evolution is contributing to human welfare, but how quickly the rate of ‘complexification’ is increasing.  Even the most cursory scan of his other topics (Sanitation, Environment, Literacy, Freedom and Equality) reveals the same trends as ones we have examined.

Next Week

This week we began to look at the huge trove of data which Johan Norberg culls to quantify how evolution can be seen to increase human welfare.

Next week we will see another facet of how his data clearly substantiates Teilhard’s insights on human evolution.