File under unintended consequences:
Forty-five years ago this past Friday, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “More than any other person of (the) age,” the Nobel Committee stated, the Christ follower had “helped to provide bread for a hungry world.”
Indeed, Dr. Borlaug, who grew up on an Iowa farm, who earned a Ph.D in plant pathology, was the father of the “green revolution.” His breakthroughs in breeding high-yielding crops averted the mass famines widely predicted during the 1960s. In so doing, he “alter(ed) the course of history,” the New York Times eulogized in 2009…
When Borlaug arrived in Mexico, he was almost overcome with despair, as the New York Times recounted. The soils were depleted. The crops were disease-ridden. And yields were so low Mexican farmers could hardly feed their own families, much less a hungry nation.
But the Lord was with Borlaug. During his 16 years with the Mexican hunger project, he succeeded in breeding high-yield, disease-resistant, semi-dwarf wheat. And by the early 1960s, Mexican wheat output had increased to six times the levels of the early 1940s.
Then, as his wheat went global, he did the same for rice. I had attributed our current degeneracy to Reagan’s debt-fueled resource boom, and the dopamine offered by magical high-technology. However, would any increase in national debt have had an effect, if there weren’t enough food for everyone?
Regardless, every advance only buys a temporary respite. Sooner or later the population will expand into the breech, and then K-selection will return.
It is interesting that the hippies awarded him the Peace Prize. They knew this was critical to their success.
And now, Apocalypse cometh™
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Hey Anonymous Conservative, have you read “Wheat Belly” by Dr William Davis?
It is interesting that mention a lot of differences between modern dwarf wheat and the ancient wheat. One being the taste and the body reaction to digesting the different wheats. The blood sugar shot up faster and higher in modern dwarf wheat. The modern wheat with the nutrient and protein composition Change has Concentrations of Zinc, Copper, Iron and Magnesium are 19-28% lower in the years 1968-2005, compared to 1845 to 1967. That and it causes more reaction to people who have a Gluten sensitivity then the older wheat such as Einkorn.
Myself I do not eat modern wheat and have not for around 2 years and half. I feel sick in the gut eating foods with wheat in them but surprisingly not to other food witht gluten in them such as oats. I lost Weight giving though.
To me it should not be that surprising that we have people over weight. With a mostly r society the food has become what mostly people are eating less nutritions but cheaper with more buzz (Sweeter and Salter). Also add the fact that many people have been educated in government run schools getting told not to trust themselves and maybe perhaps do research but to reference to experts (like the people who made the food pyramid).
Very interesting, I had not seen that. I have always been surprised the food pyramid was treated as an intelligent way to consume food.
I opine that, notwithstanding all the neo-Malthusian hand-wringing about Earth’s population rising, and rising, and rising, straight-line projections of continuing increases in world population have things exactly backward.
Whatever the population of the planet is now, I consider it far more likely that Earth’s human population will halve before it doubles from here, and that a 90% (or 99%) decline is far from impossible.
Humanity is a funny thing; as individuals we can be wondrous, evil or stupid, but in groups we are uniformly only stupid. As nature’s scourges have been conquered, humans have simply found new ways to threaten their survival, most notably nuclear weapons (followed closely by biological weapons, both overtly man-made and passively so.)
The Four Horsemen will have their day. When they do, the vast population of the planet insures that the resulting pyramids of skulls will be large enough to see from low Earth orbit.
Agreed. Things have been perfect, and they can’t stay like that forever.
Bourlaug’s contribution mainly contributed to the Third Worlds population growth and food of poorer nutritional value. World population really took off with the discovery by Fritz Haber in 1909 of how to make solid nitrates (anhydrous ammonia) from air. Carl Bosch industrialized the process into what is now known as the Haber-Bosch process. http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/haberbosch.html
Rather than regurgitating the site which many commentators don’t read but comment anyhow I will point out a few salient points. The list at the right shows most great discoveries/inventions were made by white males. Haber was born Jewish but became Lutheran. The graphs at the bottom show world population growth both 1st and 3rd world. Other writers attribute over 80% of the worlds population to Haber and Bourlaug.
I believe Malthus and Darwin were right only to be overtaken by events such as Haber and Bourlaug provided. Three minutes without air (oxygen), three days without water and three weeks without food rand you assume ambient air temperature. There are four necessities, oxygen, water, food and protection from the elements and predators. Far and away the most difficult to obtain is protection from the greatest from the greatest predator of all, Government.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. Mother Natures simplest forms of matter are catalogued in the Periodic Chart of the Elements. ( I am aware of nuclear fission/fusion but the neutrons/protons/ electrons still exist in different arrangement). All of Mother Natures energy comes from the sun with an almost infinitesimal amount reaching planet earth. Some of this energy is stored over periods of time ranging from millions of years to almost immediate. There is no such thing as renewable energy or clean energy when considering external costs.
Most stored energy is in the form of hydrocarbons which are considered a natural resource. Electricity is not a natural resource but is derived from natural resources. Water and wind are part of the solar driven Hydrological cycle but when you consider external costs cannot support a world population of 7+ billion. Electricity can be stored mainly in batteries but will make John Law look like a armature compared to Elon Musk.
We are exchanging stored energy for food. Once hydrocarbons are reduced to carbon dioxide and water it will take Mother Nature and photosynthesis millions of years resynthesize diesel fuel. The whole Industrial Revolution and Industrial Agriculture are totally dependent on diesel power. The largest diesel engine, the Wartsila-Sulzer RTA76-c maritime engine, produces 107390hp. A human produces one twentieth hp so it would take over 2 million microbiologists to produce an equivalent horsepower. And this neglects the external costs of their care and feeding.
We will never run out of anything however reconstituting it into usable form will take awhile.
Excellent comment. For unknown reasons, the blog software threw it in the spam folder. On the bright side, some comments seem to get filtered out before they reach spam, and are lost forever, and I have no idea what the criteria are for any of that.
Thanks for the comment, though. Very interesting.
diesel fuel can be made from plants. We call it bio-diesel. not without it’s problems but very possible to produce, just the one in the ground (crude oil) is cheaper and easier to deal with.
the reason we don’t apply some of the means available right now is because it doesn’t make sense economically at this time.
It reminds me of the articles saying that we will run out of drinking water in 25 years. Well of course if we do nothing! … but why would anyone solve a non existent problem. As the need arises humans have the ability to solve those problems. The will to solve them that is an entirely different issue.
Have you heard of John C Calhoun’s mice experiment? He gave them unlimited food but limited space, and eventually they turned to cannibalism and just stopped reproducing. I’m not sure if they stopped having sex, but the experiment would seem to indicate that r-selection doesn’t necessarily lead to K-selection in nature – instead, it might just lead to all the r’s voluntary extinction because their lives suck so much.
I don’t see r’s being the eaters, but rather the eatees…..
Could be a solution, but I see a lot of them being wiry, and having all sorts of toxic chemicals in them…
I think Nathan did not explain the experiment well. The whole experiments was too make a city for rats in a space that could house mouses or rats (depending on the experiments) with free food, no predators, no disease and no bad weather. He did the experiment many times (the last one to house a population of 5000) changing some thing but all ending with similar results. He would start with only 8 rats in short time they would reach a peak population of between 2200 before dropping very rapidly and dying off more due to infant morality.
The population did very weird things some follow the r selected things males becoming withdrawn, avoiding conflict, spending their days grooming obsessively and dedicating their time solely to eating, drinking, sleeping and no care to reproduce (Just think of the Herbivore men in Japan or MGTOW in America). They would become fat and full of fur. Other male rats would wait until and have a hyper sex drive while still avoiding conflict with other males and even eating the young (this is the cannibalism it is against the young and weak).
The last group of males would often attack each other still for alpha but the changes was it was no longer just for sport at times going berserk at one another. Sometime biting at the tails of other rats (not normal for rats in natural to do) and even targeting females and the young. They would go on to have lot of hyper sex even with other males. It is like the gangs of young men in American cities today and in the prison system.
The females grew to be more promiscuous and more aggressive even attacking their own young. They become more like males often forcing sex on not just men but females and the young. They would even over time eat their own young infants.
The Family nest was drop and the young were being left to fend for themselves.
In the generations of the mouse utopia it would go like this in the first few generations there is a strong family bond and it stay that way and the population only goes up slowly. Some where in the third to fourth the change would take place that the men would start to abandoned the family and go off to others. The population boons to new heights.
Then in the next generations the females do not know how to make nest and the males do not know how to act around one another.
Then by the next generations the females abandon their young and some in the population start to hide from the world, whiles other take advantage.
The craziness starts to cause females to miscarriage and infant morality is on a major rise through the population.
The population starts to slowly die and some of the males rats hide leaving the females to defend themselves. The violence starts to heat and the craziness of some of the rats start to kill each others in groups while the others (r) hided and not continue to reproduce this happens only starts to happen during the population decline and not before.
It ends with the old male and females rats dying with no children and no care to reproduce.
I have put some of the links here. There are other but they are pdfs
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php
http://www.returnofkings.com/36915/what-humans-can-learn-from-the-mice-utopia-experiment#!
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/?no-ist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun
Great, fascinating stuff.
I posted one of your articles on The Burning Platform with the caveat to read the K/r Theory first.
http://www.theburningplatform.com/2015/12/12/social-justice-warriors-are-evil-incarnate/
Read the comments to see how far in the toilet we are. My favorite Mencken quote, “No one has ever underestimated the intelligence of the American public.”
Thank you for the repost.
The thing is much of the stupidity seems attributable in my view to not encountering danger, threat, evil, or anything which forces you to look around and clearly process what you see. Much of society is lemming-like, so if a lot of people grow clueless, the lemmings follow. As the financial system catches up with reality, I’d expect that to change, and with it, the lemmings. But until then, it is frustrating seeing girls hurt and nobody caring, threat building and nobody seeing it, and a collapse coming with nobody caring.
Lest any one here lose all hope there’s plenty of growth left.
1st. A new genetic engineering technique called CRISPR will dramatically increase the rate of genetic engineering of plants and animals. It is entirely possible to have fields of wheat nut trees with shells like pecans or meat melons with pesticides only in the shells. This will come much faster than you think. They’re already planning gene therapy of kids using this technique.
2nd. There’s lots of oil left and a huge vast amount of nuclear material that can be used in molten salt reactors. MSR can burn nuclear waste that we have piled up. We have hundreds of years worth of WORLD capacity just sitting in storage cask. This doesn’t even take into account all the uranium and the massive amounts of Thorium that can be burned. Thorium is more plentiful than lead.
3rd. We can grow lots of crops in places where we aren’t now. They’re using new tech to grow food in the desert and in saline water.
4th. There are several small nuclear fusion teams that look like they will be successful. There’s also cold fusion or Low Energy Nuclear Reactions that while not completely understood work beyond any doubt. They can turn cheap nickel powder into heat and copper. Very low cost.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/seawater.html
http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/saltwater-saviors/30923
Fishing can me improved by very large amounts by fertilizing the oceans. Proven tech.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean-with-iron-to-save-salmon-and-earn-money/
We can harness the temperature difference in the tropical sea with a vortex power plant. After one plant is built it can be used to create floating islands with the power plants electricity. The electricity can be used to make concrete (actually Carbocrete) to make more vortex islands. It’s a exponential function. Getting bigger and bigger faster and faster so that theoretically you could make enough islands with greater than first world power consumption and living standards for every person on the planet in fifteen years.
http://www.powermag.com/harnessing-energy-from-upward-heat-convection/
http://vortexengine.ca/index.shtml
You really should read this by James Bowery it’s terribly interesting and shows the power of exponential function processes and what they can do.
http://jimbowery.blogspot.com/2014/05/introduction-extinction-of-human-race.html
Well, that ruined my night, thank you very much.
Good stuff though, thanks for the links. We need to get one of those Islands to make mini-islands outside of all national jurisdictions.
you should go back and read the predictions from the 50’s and 60’s.
it is naive to think we will conquer the construction of genes and their functions in a few years.
there is amazing progress while at the same time huge setbacks. no one announces the setbacks so it always looks good going forward.
the old adage “the more we learn the less we know………… ” is very applicable.
as I have gained years and knowledge I am amazed at how little we have improved on the knowledge of our predecessors.
we can do more faster and better with our advance technology but all the while it is the old things that still work best. we just do them faster now and with less human input.
a good example is in medicine. studies show that it wasn’t vaccines that saved us from diseases but cleanliness and nutrition.
for a “knowledge society” we sure have forgotten a lot of things as we constantly bump up against the law of unintended consequences.
So all those people who invented things in order to reduce human suffering and improve the standard of living were inadvertently making the world a worse place?
That’s actually quite depressing.
It isn’t good or bad, but rather both together. When the fox kills a sick rabbit, it is sad, but it strengthens the genes of the species. When you solve diseases, it si nice, but it also has a cost on the other side.
In the end, genetic evolution will be a one way path, because we live in a limited world. It just sucks if you are in a period of degeneracy.
I respectfully disagree. I’m in my fifties and I’ve seen enormous change in my lifetime. Even your example of things not working is incorrect. People are now surviving to such an age that diseases of old age kill people instead of infection. I remember when all stores had the March of Dimes displays you put a dime in to fight polio. Medical advances are increasing rapidly. The internet is allowing correlation of scientific facts so all kinds of people can do impressive research. And it will just get faster. The stuff that Elon Musk is doing will have world wide consequences. He’s working to make all cars electric, make housing electric power solar and move to Mars. Independent power for housing will be a huge step forward for freedom of the individual. If the “r” idiots are troublesome just move away. They won’t be able to follow. The internet allows culture, if you want it you can find it, without being crammed in the cities with the Orks.
I don’t know about you but I like air conditioning. I like lots of radio stations. I don’t watch much TV but there’s lots of decent series you can download. Electric cars means the oil giants can just go pound sand. Instant 3D manufacturing is just getting started. It will pick up and it will decentralize and bring down a lot of the monopolist. I know there’s lots of bad things that come with new tech but you can use new tech to leverage an extremely good life in some cases.
I think the real challenge is the mass of destroyers, violent criminals and etc. We just have to say NO to them. We must control them. If you’re on welfare you should be on birth control. We’re going to have to demand people who are problematic are brought under control. I think this can happen. People are sick of not being able to just live their lives without others attacking them and at some point they will just demand, racist or not, that this be stopped. When they start screaming oppression, triggers, racism, micro-agressions or whatever people will just tell them,”I don’t care I just want this madness to stop”.