Well firstly, thanks Ugo, for talking about solutions to problems, instead of buying into the false dichotomy of problems vs predicaments and solutions vs managed outcomes. I get sooooo tired of this and I go head-to-head with people who buy into this nonsense nearly every day on social media. They make a pronouncement of, "That is not a problem. It is a predicament." Then they stand back and say, "Hah!", as if that simple statement wins the day. Of course they never dive any deeper and when I criticize them, they just keep saying the same thing over and over again. Since you are a real scientist and not a finance guy trying to make money on collapse like Chris Martenson, perhaps that is why you see through it.
On the thick layer of mouse pellets problem, this is not necessarily as bad as you might think. I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, USA, and during the winter it is below zero Fahrenheit much of the time. The cows were in the barn all day except for when they were let out for the daily gutter cleaning. [Side Note: My dad died of his third heart attack in January seventy years ago while cleaning barns one day. He made it to the house before he collapsed though.] The calves were in a pen inside the barn all winter and the accumulated manure and straw got packed down so that - even with high ceilings in the barn - the calves were rubbing their backs on the ceiling by spring. This is when I had to clean the pen. I remember clearly one day when I was 10 or 12 and had to do this. I remember it clearly because this is the very day I learned the secret of manual labor. I took a look at the meter high wall of packed manure/straw in front of me. Then I started at one end and picked and picked and picked at it. By the end of the day I had come to the other end of the pen. I then spread out some clean straw and brought the calves back in. The calves did all right under these conditions and it didn't surprise me that in Calhoun's experiments the space limitation was more detrimental than any toxic contamination due to the excess packed down manure/bedding. The bedding may be the mitigating factor in both these cases. It should be noted that in modern CAFOs in the US, there is no bedding (cost/benefit analysis no doubt) and the cattle are in straight manure up to their flanks all day long, which requires the massive amounts of antibiotics fed to them in their feed and even periodic injections. The point is there are multiple levels of bad husbandry.
I will read The End of Population Growth and I sympathize with your efforts to get it published through what are commonly called "Vanity Publishers." All three of my books are self-published on Amazon through CreateSpace. And I did check out other publishers before then. Yes, Amazon is an evil corporation, but so is Wal-Mart and most of the corporations that provide food and basic necessities for everyone in developed countries. One must do what one can and it is important to get the word out to people so they can develop their own alternatives.
Interesting story, and I didn't know the details about cow barns! And, indeed, stating that "it is not a problem, it is a predicament" is becoming commonplace.
First, I wonder if a problem with the high likelihood of no solution no matter how much (fossil fuel) energy we throw at it, ie, a conundrum, is exactly what we should worry about the most (at a societal scale at least). Can we accept that not every such problem has a solution, at least not one under our complete control?
But in the case of Calhoun vs. Limits to Growth, the degree of apparent acceptance seems to be inherent in the seriousness and relevance of the study, ie, one is non-threatening and the other is not. People can pass off a mouse study as, well, about hapless mice, without rejecting the intuitively comfortable idea that overcrowding can lead to bad outcomes (think of the migrant prisons of the Trump administration or the ease with which disease can spread in large cities). However, The Limits to Growth is about the actual trajectory of human societies and is the work of scientists at one of our most prestigious institutions. It's unavoidable seriousness requires a serious repudiation if it clashes with prevailing mental models of the future and the cherished beliefs (progress through markets and capitalism) of today's high priests of economics. So there is an element of tautology or feedback in which the degree of perceived seriousness begets an equally serious or hostile, if misguided, response from those threatened by the study"s premises or conclusions. Clearly this negative feedback loop does not bode well for our ability to manage complex problems that are not amenable to the types of solutions at which humans excel.
Could be... but for most of the public the complexity of LTG was impossible to perceive. I don't thnk they saw any difference between experiments with mice and "theoretical experiments" on a computer.
With all of the hype about AI, maybe it's time to ride the wave with LTG 2.0. Anyone working on this? The AI versions of the big weather prediction models seem to be getting some respect.
I was aware of Calhouns experiments and its defects. One can quite disregard them. But there remains a fact that there are regions where people kill each other systematically, like Sudan, Gaza etc. In many such regions resources (soil, water) are overexploited and exhausted while populations continue to explode (Gaza doubling in a generation). And then there is the work of Gaston Bouthoul (L'infanticide différé 1972 if I remember correctly), Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilisations, 1993), Gunnar Heinsohn (Söhne und Weltmacht, 2003) each showing that while people can coexist peacefully despite of cultural differences an excess of young men (Youth bulge) can trigger violent conflicts. So there seems to be a role for population density and Calhouns observations may contain a grain of truth. As for the Club of Rome the 1972 report was never disproved, its just that the mainstream media do not read and misrepresent it. It showed that environmental pollution will be the limiting factor and predicted a population collapse starting mid century. Thats exactly whats happening: Sperm and Testosterone decline will impair human reproduction, starting mid century. With luck some of us will die out before burning to death.
The interesting thing about humans is our genetic predisposition to survive. We do this through our adaptive abilities. This in conjunction with our capacity to form complex social structures multiplies our adaptive capacity. Consequently population collapse doesn't necessarily mean extinction, but perhaps more likely a new beginning. If that happens it would be interesting to see whether descendents learned anything from the collapse or if they just start over 🤔
Then again we may achieve technological success and move on to fouling up other planets. 🤣
There are data showing that adaptation has genetic effects over time spans of the order of a few thousand years. I was impressed when I found that human males at the time of the Trojan war had stronger brow ridges than the present males. It is part of males becoming gradually gentler and less aggressive -- an adaptation to living in cities. J. Lawrence Angel, 1945, "Skeletal Material from Attica" (published in Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 14, No. 4)
The "feminization" of males probably goes back 80,000 years well before the advent of towns or cities. But it makes sense that this trend would accelerate with the increased social organization associated with agriculture and detectable, on average within and between populations, over just a few thousand years. Not really the subject of your post, but interesting.
Doesn't the selection of a bigger, more complex brain over several million years, together with a longer childhood and life span, represent physiological adaptations? Using adaptations for learning does not disqualify these features as essentially physiological. I am not saying that Homo sapiens regularly uses these adaptations wisely.
Yes, of course, but human cities have been existing for less than 10 thousand years. Some people find it difficult to believe that natural selection can operate on this relatively short time span. But it does.
Sorry, dear Ugo, but you suffer from a terminal case of "confirmation bias". Get help before it's too late! Your characterization of Calhoun's experiments is flawed and inaccurate. The cause of the population collapse is spelled out clearly in "Death Squared": no more live births. Any demographer can tell you that human populations in "developed" nations are headed in that same direction. You failed to mention that Calhoun ALSO did an experiment in his backyard in Bethesda, in which he fenced a quarter acre and put 4 rat breeding couples into it. Over time, instead of the 2,000+ that could have inhabited that space, only 8 harems led by an alpha male could be found. Have you even taken the time and spent/invested $0.99 to watch the YouTube video of Calhoun's work, "Critical Mass"? No, sad. They had been driven by long evolved gene based programs spacing rat families between one another or the overactive stress responses in crowded mammals that are driving ALL of the human "stress diseases" killing us, as laid out in the 2018 "Stress R Us". Your arrogance is showing and it ain't pretty. Have a blessed day.
First, I don't learn science from YouTube. That's a no-no. Second, I know that Calhoun performed an early experiment in his garden. So what? Why should the "developed nations" behave like mice in Mr. Calhoun's garden? Don't you think you are extrapolating a little too much?
No, sir, I think that you are an arrogant fraud, who knows little of Calhoun or his work, so can’t distinguish a mouse from a rat in the backyard. Calhoun demonstrated that the natural habit for rats is to form into harems, after the dominant males fight out their territories. Calhoun found 8 rat “families” in his ¼ ac. fenced lot in a back field, so, a far more limited reproduction resulted, as the overall population remained steady at under 100, not the potential 2,000. So. it is the establishment of the territories defining population size in wild nature. You know little or nothing of this topic. Calhoun, in whose last lab I had the honor to visit shortly after his death, should have been given a Nobel Prize. He was as far ahead of his time as you sir, are behind yours. Have a blessed day.
Why are you getting so angry? Do you think that insulting me makes you right? Come on, take it easy. I do think Calhoun was a poor scientist, but that's an opinion of mine, just as yours that he deserves the Nobel prize. But if you have time, don't lose time on YouTube but take a look at the scientific literature of the 1950s on experiments on confined mice. It may make you doubt, at least a little, that Calhoun deserved a nobel prize!
Well firstly, thanks Ugo, for talking about solutions to problems, instead of buying into the false dichotomy of problems vs predicaments and solutions vs managed outcomes. I get sooooo tired of this and I go head-to-head with people who buy into this nonsense nearly every day on social media. They make a pronouncement of, "That is not a problem. It is a predicament." Then they stand back and say, "Hah!", as if that simple statement wins the day. Of course they never dive any deeper and when I criticize them, they just keep saying the same thing over and over again. Since you are a real scientist and not a finance guy trying to make money on collapse like Chris Martenson, perhaps that is why you see through it.
On the thick layer of mouse pellets problem, this is not necessarily as bad as you might think. I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, USA, and during the winter it is below zero Fahrenheit much of the time. The cows were in the barn all day except for when they were let out for the daily gutter cleaning. [Side Note: My dad died of his third heart attack in January seventy years ago while cleaning barns one day. He made it to the house before he collapsed though.] The calves were in a pen inside the barn all winter and the accumulated manure and straw got packed down so that - even with high ceilings in the barn - the calves were rubbing their backs on the ceiling by spring. This is when I had to clean the pen. I remember clearly one day when I was 10 or 12 and had to do this. I remember it clearly because this is the very day I learned the secret of manual labor. I took a look at the meter high wall of packed manure/straw in front of me. Then I started at one end and picked and picked and picked at it. By the end of the day I had come to the other end of the pen. I then spread out some clean straw and brought the calves back in. The calves did all right under these conditions and it didn't surprise me that in Calhoun's experiments the space limitation was more detrimental than any toxic contamination due to the excess packed down manure/bedding. The bedding may be the mitigating factor in both these cases. It should be noted that in modern CAFOs in the US, there is no bedding (cost/benefit analysis no doubt) and the cattle are in straight manure up to their flanks all day long, which requires the massive amounts of antibiotics fed to them in their feed and even periodic injections. The point is there are multiple levels of bad husbandry.
I will read The End of Population Growth and I sympathize with your efforts to get it published through what are commonly called "Vanity Publishers." All three of my books are self-published on Amazon through CreateSpace. And I did check out other publishers before then. Yes, Amazon is an evil corporation, but so is Wal-Mart and most of the corporations that provide food and basic necessities for everyone in developed countries. One must do what one can and it is important to get the word out to people so they can develop their own alternatives.
Interesting story, and I didn't know the details about cow barns! And, indeed, stating that "it is not a problem, it is a predicament" is becoming commonplace.
First, I wonder if a problem with the high likelihood of no solution no matter how much (fossil fuel) energy we throw at it, ie, a conundrum, is exactly what we should worry about the most (at a societal scale at least). Can we accept that not every such problem has a solution, at least not one under our complete control?
But in the case of Calhoun vs. Limits to Growth, the degree of apparent acceptance seems to be inherent in the seriousness and relevance of the study, ie, one is non-threatening and the other is not. People can pass off a mouse study as, well, about hapless mice, without rejecting the intuitively comfortable idea that overcrowding can lead to bad outcomes (think of the migrant prisons of the Trump administration or the ease with which disease can spread in large cities). However, The Limits to Growth is about the actual trajectory of human societies and is the work of scientists at one of our most prestigious institutions. It's unavoidable seriousness requires a serious repudiation if it clashes with prevailing mental models of the future and the cherished beliefs (progress through markets and capitalism) of today's high priests of economics. So there is an element of tautology or feedback in which the degree of perceived seriousness begets an equally serious or hostile, if misguided, response from those threatened by the study"s premises or conclusions. Clearly this negative feedback loop does not bode well for our ability to manage complex problems that are not amenable to the types of solutions at which humans excel.
Could be... but for most of the public the complexity of LTG was impossible to perceive. I don't thnk they saw any difference between experiments with mice and "theoretical experiments" on a computer.
With all of the hype about AI, maybe it's time to ride the wave with LTG 2.0. Anyone working on this? The AI versions of the big weather prediction models seem to be getting some respect.
I was aware of Calhouns experiments and its defects. One can quite disregard them. But there remains a fact that there are regions where people kill each other systematically, like Sudan, Gaza etc. In many such regions resources (soil, water) are overexploited and exhausted while populations continue to explode (Gaza doubling in a generation). And then there is the work of Gaston Bouthoul (L'infanticide différé 1972 if I remember correctly), Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilisations, 1993), Gunnar Heinsohn (Söhne und Weltmacht, 2003) each showing that while people can coexist peacefully despite of cultural differences an excess of young men (Youth bulge) can trigger violent conflicts. So there seems to be a role for population density and Calhouns observations may contain a grain of truth. As for the Club of Rome the 1972 report was never disproved, its just that the mainstream media do not read and misrepresent it. It showed that environmental pollution will be the limiting factor and predicted a population collapse starting mid century. Thats exactly whats happening: Sperm and Testosterone decline will impair human reproduction, starting mid century. With luck some of us will die out before burning to death.
The interesting thing about humans is our genetic predisposition to survive. We do this through our adaptive abilities. This in conjunction with our capacity to form complex social structures multiplies our adaptive capacity. Consequently population collapse doesn't necessarily mean extinction, but perhaps more likely a new beginning. If that happens it would be interesting to see whether descendents learned anything from the collapse or if they just start over 🤔
Then again we may achieve technological success and move on to fouling up other planets. 🤣
Limits to Growth wasn't wrong, we're following the curves of the "doubled resources" model very closely.
“ We humans have had thousands of years to develop psychological and physiological adaptations to crowded cities.”
And praytell what would those be?
For instance, accepting to stop when you see a red light.
That is learned. What would a physiological adaptation look like.
There are data showing that adaptation has genetic effects over time spans of the order of a few thousand years. I was impressed when I found that human males at the time of the Trojan war had stronger brow ridges than the present males. It is part of males becoming gradually gentler and less aggressive -- an adaptation to living in cities. J. Lawrence Angel, 1945, "Skeletal Material from Attica" (published in Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Vol. 14, No. 4)
The "feminization" of males probably goes back 80,000 years well before the advent of towns or cities. But it makes sense that this trend would accelerate with the increased social organization associated with agriculture and detectable, on average within and between populations, over just a few thousand years. Not really the subject of your post, but interesting.
Doesn't the selection of a bigger, more complex brain over several million years, together with a longer childhood and life span, represent physiological adaptations? Using adaptations for learning does not disqualify these features as essentially physiological. I am not saying that Homo sapiens regularly uses these adaptations wisely.
Yes, of course, but human cities have been existing for less than 10 thousand years. Some people find it difficult to believe that natural selection can operate on this relatively short time span. But it does.
Sorry, dear Ugo, but you suffer from a terminal case of "confirmation bias". Get help before it's too late! Your characterization of Calhoun's experiments is flawed and inaccurate. The cause of the population collapse is spelled out clearly in "Death Squared": no more live births. Any demographer can tell you that human populations in "developed" nations are headed in that same direction. You failed to mention that Calhoun ALSO did an experiment in his backyard in Bethesda, in which he fenced a quarter acre and put 4 rat breeding couples into it. Over time, instead of the 2,000+ that could have inhabited that space, only 8 harems led by an alpha male could be found. Have you even taken the time and spent/invested $0.99 to watch the YouTube video of Calhoun's work, "Critical Mass"? No, sad. They had been driven by long evolved gene based programs spacing rat families between one another or the overactive stress responses in crowded mammals that are driving ALL of the human "stress diseases" killing us, as laid out in the 2018 "Stress R Us". Your arrogance is showing and it ain't pretty. Have a blessed day.
First, I don't learn science from YouTube. That's a no-no. Second, I know that Calhoun performed an early experiment in his garden. So what? Why should the "developed nations" behave like mice in Mr. Calhoun's garden? Don't you think you are extrapolating a little too much?
No, sir, I think that you are an arrogant fraud, who knows little of Calhoun or his work, so can’t distinguish a mouse from a rat in the backyard. Calhoun demonstrated that the natural habit for rats is to form into harems, after the dominant males fight out their territories. Calhoun found 8 rat “families” in his ¼ ac. fenced lot in a back field, so, a far more limited reproduction resulted, as the overall population remained steady at under 100, not the potential 2,000. So. it is the establishment of the territories defining population size in wild nature. You know little or nothing of this topic. Calhoun, in whose last lab I had the honor to visit shortly after his death, should have been given a Nobel Prize. He was as far ahead of his time as you sir, are behind yours. Have a blessed day.
Why are you getting so angry? Do you think that insulting me makes you right? Come on, take it easy. I do think Calhoun was a poor scientist, but that's an opinion of mine, just as yours that he deserves the Nobel prize. But if you have time, don't lose time on YouTube but take a look at the scientific literature of the 1950s on experiments on confined mice. It may make you doubt, at least a little, that Calhoun deserved a nobel prize!
You, sir, are just an arrogant pissant and I’ll waste no more time on your drivel.
The fun things about scientific discussions!
I have ordered your book from amazon and will hopefully get it within two weeks - and then I will read it.
Inevitable. Epstein Files Release proves immovable force.