Read Online Tomorrowland by Steven Kotler - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Steven Kotler
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Engerman detailed in their now famous
Time on the Cross: An Economic Analysis of American Negro Slavery
, was that Conrad and Meyer were correct: slavery, while still morally repugnant, was neither as inefficient nor as unprofitable as most historians assumed.
“As it turns out,” recounts Fogel, “most slaves, especially those on smaller plantations, were fed better and lived in better conditions than free men in the North. This meant they lived longer, healthier lives and thus produced more work. Certainly, it’s an odious conclusion, but it’s right there in the data.”
And then things got even stranger.
Around 1988, Fogel began to notice another trend in the data: Over the past three hundred years, but predominantly in the past century, Americans have been growing taller. They have also been getting thicker, living longer, and growing richer. In 1850, for example, the average American male was 5´7˝ and 146 lbs. By 1980, those numbers had jumped to 5´10˝ and 174 lbs. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t just Americans. Working with a team of economists, Fogel expanded this inquiry internationally, and the trends turned out to be global. “Over the past 300 years,” he says, “humans have increased their average body size by over 50percent, average longevity by more than 100 percent, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.”
From an evolutionary perspective, three hundred years is an eye-blink. A sneeze. Not nearly enough time for these sorts of radical improvements. In fact, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, none of these developments should even be possible.
2.
To understand what should be possible, it helps to understand a little more about Darwin’s theory. For starters, evolution is a search engine, but not a very good one. We’re not talking Google. We might be talking Google drunk, blindfolded, on crutches, and with a frontal lobotomy. This is why the Nobel laureate Francis Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer. Engineers know where they’re going — they have a plan, an aim, an end result in mind. Tinkerers are just fastening parts together, glomming this bit on to that in an exploration of functionality that is both goalless and relentless.
The realization that evolution’s search engine proceeds blindly, thus gradually, came from Darwin. Before he came along, the assumption was that the process proceeded by huge leaps — which was the only way anyone could explain the sudden appearance of new species. Darwin saw things differently. He had been thinking long and hard about scarcity. He realized that because resources are often scarce, organisms are always in competition with one another. In this endless battle, those individuals who happen to possess some slight innate advantage will flourish, and pass along that advantage to their descendants. By this method, new species could be created — one imperfect change at a time. But this certainly wasn’t going to happen quickly.
In fact, historically, massive geological shifts — like a meteor impact or an ice age — turn out to be the only way to speed up theprocess. What these shifts provide is a wedge that opens up novel ecological niches, new possibilities for the search engine of evolution to explore. This fits-and-starts hypothesis — what in 1972 evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge dubbed “punctuated equilibrium” — helps explain the sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record. But really, there’s nothing all that sudden about it — according to Gould, those periods of punctuation span roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years.
The point is this: Natural selection is a plodder’s game. It dithers. It wanders. Mildly beneficial mutations do not become radical steps forward overnight. Sure, one individual might be significantly taller or smarter or more long-lived than his peers, but no matter how beneficial the change, extremely long
Time on the Cross: An Economic Analysis of American Negro Slavery
, was that Conrad and Meyer were correct: slavery, while still morally repugnant, was neither as inefficient nor as unprofitable as most historians assumed.
“As it turns out,” recounts Fogel, “most slaves, especially those on smaller plantations, were fed better and lived in better conditions than free men in the North. This meant they lived longer, healthier lives and thus produced more work. Certainly, it’s an odious conclusion, but it’s right there in the data.”
And then things got even stranger.
Around 1988, Fogel began to notice another trend in the data: Over the past three hundred years, but predominantly in the past century, Americans have been growing taller. They have also been getting thicker, living longer, and growing richer. In 1850, for example, the average American male was 5´7˝ and 146 lbs. By 1980, those numbers had jumped to 5´10˝ and 174 lbs. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t just Americans. Working with a team of economists, Fogel expanded this inquiry internationally, and the trends turned out to be global. “Over the past 300 years,” he says, “humans have increased their average body size by over 50percent, average longevity by more than 100 percent, and greatly improved the robustness and capacity of vital organ systems.”
From an evolutionary perspective, three hundred years is an eye-blink. A sneeze. Not nearly enough time for these sorts of radical improvements. In fact, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, none of these developments should even be possible.
2.
To understand what should be possible, it helps to understand a little more about Darwin’s theory. For starters, evolution is a search engine, but not a very good one. We’re not talking Google. We might be talking Google drunk, blindfolded, on crutches, and with a frontal lobotomy. This is why the Nobel laureate Francis Jacob described evolution as a tinkerer, not an engineer. Engineers know where they’re going — they have a plan, an aim, an end result in mind. Tinkerers are just fastening parts together, glomming this bit on to that in an exploration of functionality that is both goalless and relentless.
The realization that evolution’s search engine proceeds blindly, thus gradually, came from Darwin. Before he came along, the assumption was that the process proceeded by huge leaps — which was the only way anyone could explain the sudden appearance of new species. Darwin saw things differently. He had been thinking long and hard about scarcity. He realized that because resources are often scarce, organisms are always in competition with one another. In this endless battle, those individuals who happen to possess some slight innate advantage will flourish, and pass along that advantage to their descendants. By this method, new species could be created — one imperfect change at a time. But this certainly wasn’t going to happen quickly.
In fact, historically, massive geological shifts — like a meteor impact or an ice age — turn out to be the only way to speed up theprocess. What these shifts provide is a wedge that opens up novel ecological niches, new possibilities for the search engine of evolution to explore. This fits-and-starts hypothesis — what in 1972 evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge dubbed “punctuated equilibrium” — helps explain the sudden appearance of new species in the fossil record. But really, there’s nothing all that sudden about it — according to Gould, those periods of punctuation span roughly 50,000 to 100,000 years.
The point is this: Natural selection is a plodder’s game. It dithers. It wanders. Mildly beneficial mutations do not become radical steps forward overnight. Sure, one individual might be significantly taller or smarter or more long-lived than his peers, but no matter how beneficial the change, extremely long
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