Fraggle has another go at explaining Ricardo's Law of Rent, using access to a limited supply of water to illustrate the point (as well as explaining why rents in the centre of town go up exponentially when the town expands) and says "... historically just about every settlement ever founded starts near a fresh water supply."
The post is well worth a read, but I'm glad he caveats this with "just about", because it reminds me to mention the cracking TV programme called Guns, Germs And Steel which they showed again on Saturday evening. The author presents the theory, backed up with lots of historic evidence, that part of the reason that the Europeans managed to colonise large parts of the world was because we Europeans had built up an immunity to various animal-borne diseases, which wiped out the natives in central and south America (and probably Australia).
(This doesn't explain why the Indians weren't even better at colonising than we were, as they live in even closer proximity to their domestic animals, but there you go).
When whitey got round to colonising tropical Africa, the tables were turned, because of mosquitoes. To some extent, the native Africans and their livestock had built up an immunity to malaria, but more importantly, they knew perfectly well that there are more mosquitoes near rivers etc, so they tended to settle on higher ground where it is drier and there are fewer mosquitoes. To reduce infection rates further, they lived in smaller isolated settlements (so all the people in one settlement might die, but the people in other settlements were largely unaffected).
Point 1: the next time a charity wails on about people in Africa having to walk for miles to the nearest well, remember that there is a good reason for this - having to waste an hour a day fetching water is the price they pay for reducing the incidence of malaria (and other water-borne diseases).
Point 2: the programme explains that whitey tried farming closer to rivers (and failed badly, wrong crops) and imposed his model of building larger towns and cities closer to rivers, thus condemning disproportionately large numbers of Africans to die of malaria for ever more (as well as not allowing them to use DDT, which they have done in other tropical parts of the world - he mentioned Malaysia/Singapore as good examples).
Monday, 10 January 2011
Guns, Germs And Steel
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16 comments:
I saw another 'theory' somewhere as to how large cities were able to develop in Japan, India and England without having regular plagues of one sort or another.
Esseentially it's all down to tea. Yes, tea.
The investigators worked out that the only common thing between these places, but especially between Japan and England was drinking lots of tea. And tea has 'enzymes'. Which means that rather than drink water with lots of bugs in it, Manchester Mill workers drank cold tea (not because of killing the bugs - they didn't know about those - they just liked it) which killed the bugs by the boiling and the 'enzymes'. And the same effect was observed Japan because of the tea ceremony.
Haven't seen the TV series but I have read Jared Diamond's book of the same name. Thought-provoking stuff and a good read too.
having to waste an hour a day fetching water is the price they pay for reducing the incidence of malaria (and other water-borne diseases)
Good point that.
(This doesn't explain why the Indians weren't even better at colonising than we were, as they live in even closer proximity to their domestic animals, but there you go).
If you mean native Americans its because our smallpox wiped them out.
If you mean indian-indians then its because of the mountains and jungle and deserts that are their borders, and supply lines across such regions being too difficult to maintain.
I read his book. Its very hard going, but informative. . Big Science.
But he does explain, convincingly, that migration has tended to be East-west on all continents. That's because earth's geography gives mighty rivers, but few massive mountain ranges, though plenty of plains on an east-west -west/east trajectory.
From Urals in Asia right into western Europe. Same in the USA.
Africa is a North - South. As is South America. much more varied and difficult terrain. I think it took the Zulu's 300 years to migrate into Southern Africa. Only fractionally ahead of the whites. But not every anthropologist agrees.
There's another way which is being worked on to control malaria which is to genetically modify the mosquitos to be resistant to malaria. And because a mosquito without malaria performs better as a mosquito than one with malaria, they outbreed them.
(scientific research shows that after 9 generations of mosquitos, 70% of the population of mosquitos are malaria-resistant).
Of course, the words "genetically modified" tend to cause the Gaia-worshippers to lose their minds (thankfully, that hadn't taken off when we were making smallpox extinct).
L, that is a splendid theory, I'll add it to my list of 'things everybody ought to know'.
D, the programme was heavy going, I think I'll skip the book.
JH, ta. Had it never puzzled you?
BQ, I meant Indians, not "native Americans' (or whatever they're called this week). He mentioned the North-South thing too (which makes good sense).
JT, I'd heard about that, sounds like a good idea to me. Funny thing is, back in the 1970s when this whole environmental thing kicked off, GM crops were seen as A Good Thing because farmers wouldn;t have to use so many pesticides/chemicals, but at some stage in the past 30 years, Politically Correct Thinking did a 180 degree turn on that.
BQ, thinking on, I suppose the Indians couldn't get far to the East or West because that's all ocean, and to the north is a pretty impassable mountain range.
"D, the programme was heavy going, I think I'll skip the book."
No, do try the book. I've read it and didn't find it heavy going at all. Just don't try to read it all at once.
The "Cargo" is on youtube if you are interested?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnmT-Y_rGQ
M, if I may echo the suggestion to read the book.
From your precis description, the TV version is NOT what the book says, exactly the opposite in some cases. I am no huge fan of Jared Diamond, but he put forward some very interesting and thought provoking propositions in the book.
I agree with Bayard. I bought the book in an airport bookshop and read a fair chunk of it on the flight home from Houston to Calgary. I certainly didn't find it heavy going.
Quite the contrary. Once I had finished it I ordered his book, "Collapse", which looks at societal collapse (or near-collapse) through history, covering the Mayans, the Greenland Norse, Easter Island and a bunch of other societies, ancient and modern. I found it heavier going than GGAS but again well worth the effort with particularly interesting chapters contrasting Haiti and the Dominican Republic (which both occupy the same island and had homicidal dictators in the 1960s but have turned out differently today) and on the long term sustainability of Australia. Not everyone's cup of tea I grant you but even when I didn't agree with him, he made me think hard about the geographical, environmental and economic factors underpinning these societies.
B, OK, I have ordered it.
S, ta.
Ch, this is my precis of a small part of his own precis of his own book which in turn is a simplified version of history, so something may have got lost in translation.
The classic argument about making water safe to drink is that there were two ways. You can boil it - but then it tastes insipid, so you improve the flavour with an enlivening herb. Tea - as in China.
Or you can use alcohol to kill the bugs, thus beer and wine (wine, remember, was classically drunk diluted with water). Booze - as in Europe and west Asia.
The touble with this theory is that it doesn't tell us what the Indians did before the British introduced tea-growing there.
This doesn't explain why the Indians weren't even better at colonising than we were
Have you ever wondered why places like Bali have Hindu culture?
Look up the Chola Empire you euro-centrists ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chola_Dynasty
Held together by the Chola Navy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chola_Navy
Never listen to Indians or Sri Lankans if they bang on about imperialism. They were at it long before we were.
GGS is ok, but Diamond rather pointedly overlooks the evidence that different environments can also favor different behavioural traits (eg. gene-culture co-evolution). There's a lot of evidence of localised adaptation.
For instance, recent papers by the likes of Eric Wang & John Hawks have found that genetic changes accelerated over the past 10,000 years or so with the development of agriculture and population expansions. A fair fraction are neurological and likely to affect behavior in some way. For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DAB1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia. More of these will be identified and understood as the cost of sequencing drops.
More recent books like New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade’s ‘Before the Dawn’ or ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’ fill in the gaps.
M, that's all well and good, but it still the environment which dictates how humans have evolved, and compared to other advantages which westerners have over "primitive" people, that is pretty marginal.
So an Aborigine with a gun would still beat a white man with a spear every time. Whether or not the white man is 1% better advanced in an evolutionary sense, that won't help him.
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