Ranting på TOD

Ikke tilfredsstillende aktivitet her på bloggen fra min side... Men jeg har postet på TOD, her (to lengre innlegg).

Den første spinner videre på kommentaren til Bill Hannahan:

Technology is not the problem

I'm of two minds on this. On the surface I agree completely; technology per se is not a problem.

Scratch the surface a bit though, particularly in the context of Nate's essay, and the picture is suddenly very interesting.

There was an exchange in yesterday's DrumBeat on the malleability of human nature. Brif summry, hopefully not too inaccurate: Darwinian contends human nature is immutable, but has the ability to adapt to its environment.

The problem with that POW is that even small changes in environment can lead to large changes in behaviour... and further, as soon as some individuals start adapting to a new environment, the environment itself changes... other people are the most important parts of people's environments. And large numbers of individuals adapting to a perhaps rapidly changing environment, creating feedbacks left and right... This is a recipe for chaos; there's no telling what kind of society will emerge, no telling what the social norms will end up being.

Point is, there is no meaning without context. No word, no sequence of DNA has any intrinsic meaning; it only has meaning in a context. Change the context - the environment - and the meaning might change, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. The "meaning" of a gene is the phenotype. The exact same sequence of DNA can code for different proteins in different species... and males being mesmerized by female forms have wildly different effects in a hunter-gatherer society and in a context of abundant Internet porn.

Now, a change in technology is obviously a change in environment, and as such it is a problem, because our current individual and collective behaviour is a response to our technological environment. Whether those responses should be called "adaptive" is questionable. Is long nights browsing porn "adaptive"? (for some comic relief: Spent by Joe Matt) It's more like our systems have been hijacked by some superstimulus, like the red gape of the cuckoo chick hijacks the systems of its foster parents.

But we have a chicken and egg problem here. Is technology the prime mover of change, or is it, as you allude (I think?) just a symptom?

There is some evidence (must dig up sources later) that it is: That the prime predictors of technological/cultural/scientific level is population level and density. Which I think makes perfect sense: more people means more forceful feedback to new ideas, more deviant free thinkers producing odd insights (usually useless, but sometimes very useful). Tainter makes the case that the return on investment in R&D is falling in our society, and falling exponentially: I think his point is valid, BUT I think, also, that the rapidly expanding population so far may have countered that effect.

IF this is correct we're in an interesting bind. We have, then, technological development enabling/driving population explosion, and population explosion enabling/driving technology explosion, etc., a dual, mutually reinforcing spiral...

(Of course, population in the high-tech "west" has been rather stagnant these last decades, but I'd argue that the Internet has increased the "virtual population density", thus allowing the explosion to continue).

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I agree very much that the important thing to limit is population. A conspicuos rich-bastard consumer that only has two children may use thousands of times more resources than a poor subsistence farmer, but if that farmer has ten children, and each of those has ten children, etc., the farmer's descendants' resource use will swamp the resource use of the descendants of the rich person within a handful of generations. The sneaky enemy here is exponential growth.

Problem is, lots of individuals feel, and major religions teach, that having lots of children is not only a great joy but a holy duty. Go forth and multiply and all that...

Den andre et svar/utdypning til beatnikess, som mener jeg ikke bør angripe eksponensiell vekst og religiøse incentiver for å avle:

Yes, well, bit of a bee in my bonnet that, I must admit. And I didn't make myself entirely clear - well, not that I think "entirely clear-ness" is achievable, but at least I could be clearer... Longer though, but:

I agree, the global trend seems to be one of slowing growth.

The continued increases in population are almost solely due to the previous higher rates. Our own baby-boomer population has created an echo boom purely on the numbers, not high fertility rates.

Yes, the population momentum effect... Not to be underestimated, that. From the Optimum Population Trust:

The Earth faces the largest generation of young people in its history – a “youthquake” of some 1.2 billion people between the ages of 10 and 19, or three billion under the age of 25, many living in the new mega-city slums of the developing world. The “demographic momentum” they generate means global population will continue to grow for decades, even if replacement fertility is achieved. Their access to family planning services is thus crucial to achieving a sustainable population for the planet.

My emphasis - the OPT, for one, don't seem to take replacement (or lower) fertility rates as given.

In the meantime for whatever reason fertility rates have plummeted.

One of the salient points of the linked OPT article is that access to contraceptives seems to be the key to lower fertility rates, not greater affluence:

Many developing countries have reduced their total fertility rate (TFR) - their “average family size” - to close to two – and have done so about as quickly as China, but without the coercion that exists in China. They include Costa Rica, Cuba, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, Vietnam and - surprisingly, perhaps - South India. These low-fertility “success stories” often involve vastly different developing countries or regions but have one factor in common. Their governments recognised the population-poverty connection and took steps to remove the barriers to fertility planning.

Studies of such very different locations which have successfully lowered their TFR show that whatever else applies, including changes in prosperity, the key requirement - which can also be implemented much more quickly - is the removal of barriers to contraception. These barriers are widespread and include simple lack of access to the contraceptive methods themselves, ignorance and misinformation, some of it deliberate - for example, exaggerating the risks of a method. When these barriers are removed, through education and good use of the media, and contraceptives become easy to obtain, education and per capita wealth have virtually no extra impact on the use of contraception or family size. The chances of per-person prosperity increasing are also much improved, since there are fewer persons to share in the country’s wealth.

So yes, there are examples of countries, even rather poor countries, successfully lowering their fertility rate. But, if what the OPT states here is accurate, the key success factor is education on family planning and availability of contraception.

And openness and lack of disinformation are prerequisites to those.

Obama rescinded the Global Gag Rule, which is a huge step in the right direction; but the Pope is not exactly helping:

He also warned them that African life was under threat from a number of factors, including condoms.

"It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking and a contraception mentality," he added.

...but, of course,

Africa is the fastest-growing region for the Roman Catholic church

This is the core of the problem, and the reason I'm ranting, and will go on ranting:

In my home town, there are several christian-fundamentalist societies. At present, they constitute a pretty small percentage of the population... but, a very BIG but, they have a much larger than average number of children. This IS an artefact of their religious beliefs, their dogmas; and they DO pass those beliefs on to (the vast majority of) their children.

(These people are also ardent missionaries...

The 50 poorest countries in the world will more than double in size, from 0. 8 billion in 2007 to 1. 7 billion in 2050, according to UN projections published in March 2007.

and they are active in excactly these countries. They are not helping, not people at any rate: They are helping their selfish ideology. And they have real political power - the Global Gag Rule was put in place to help their missionary efforts).

This means that, while the overall fertility rate in my country is just above replacement rate, there are people pursuing exponential-growth reproductive practices whose children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on will almost certainly continue the same practices... Which means that the number of people following those practices will increase, exponentially, and much faster than the number of people not so indoctrinated. Which means the proportion of people following those practices will increase. Which means the low fertility rates in the west is likely a transient phenomenon...

(Some academic support: Demographic Projections Predict Fundamentalist Populations Surpassing Secular Counterparts)

The most striking and well documented example (quick search brings up this and this) of fundamentalist outreproduction is the ultra-orthodox jews of Israel, who are now up to about 25% of the Israeli population and increasing fast - fertility rate increasing.

This is not evolution in the strict Darwinian/biological sense, but it definitely is a selection effect, something closely related to evolution... Something in between pure memetic evolution and biological evolution; a breed of humans that "use" a symbiotic memeplex to out-reproduce the competition.

Some other commenters on this thread raise the point that to avoid being hijacked by the temptations of our techno-consumerist environment you must distance yourself from it. That is excactly what the fundamentalists do; they live behind memetic walls...

I propose that evolution is happening, right now, before our eyes, at breakneck speed. The people who let themselves be seduced by the sweet consumerist life, who pursue careers instead of children, who become addicted to internet poker (and by extension spend less time and energy on sex), who use contraception when they do have sex... are being out-reproduced. Their fitness in this environment is quite simply low.

Evolution will make religious fundamentalism triumph in the end. Isn't that a lovely piece of irony?

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To sum up, efforts to stop further population explosion is under a two-pronged attack from various religious groups:

Firstly, they are actively sabotaging the most effective brake on fertility rates.

Secondly, they are out-reproducing the people who lower their fertility rates, effectively torpedoing any hope of any long-term solution.

Still time to rail against them, I think, though you may be right that 50 years ago was the last chance to stop them.

Så kan man jo spørre seg om standpunktet i det andre innlegget egentlig er kompatibelt med det første. Uansett, jeg er helt med Hannahan når han sier at det å få barn bør være et privilegium...