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The First Shall be Last
Plantains in Ghana by Flixtey.
If you’ll forgive a very rough gloss, Homo sapiens originated in sub-Saharan Africa about 200,000 years ago, spread out across Eurasia and, eventually, into the Americas. In the last two centuries, the cultural and technological changes brought by the Industrial, Green, and Information Revolutions flowed back to the corners of the globe where humanity first arose. It’s been a long trip, but we seem to be approaching the end of this particular journey.
The bad news is that Africa is still a basket case. By almost any quality-of-life measure, it ranks at the bottom of the list. And while some of these problems are political or endemic to the place due to its geography, the good news is that the continent may finally have reached the point where the things that have brought much of the rest of the world out of its natural squalor can finally be applied there as well.
Via The Economist, one of the biggest opportunities for improvement is by modernizing African agriculture. Mechanization might be part of that, but the biggest gains will likely come from applying the technology of the Green Revolution, particularly through hybrid and (very likely) GMO versions of the staples that constitute Africans’ diet. The reason this hasn’t happened already is simple:
[C]rops and diets differ a lot across the continent. In Rwanda, white maize and beans are the staple foods. In other places millet, teff, sorghum, cassava or sweet potatoes are more important. Asia’s green revolution was a comparatively simple matter, says Donald Larson of the World Bank, because Asia has only two crucial crops: rice and wheat. Provide high-yield varieties of both and much of the technical work is done. African agriculture is so heterogeneous that no leap forward in the farming of a single crop could transform it. The continent needs a dozen green revolutions.
This is actually beginning to happen, both in terms of the adoption of better farming techniques and through improved crops. Unfortunately, activists are busy protesting these very things, including human trials of a new strain of GMO cooking bananas that contain additional beta carotene, which metabolizes into Vitamin A. (Millions of people who eat such bananas suffer from Vitamin A deficiency; if you’re familiar with Golden Rice, this is essentially the plantain equivalent.) There’s little reason to suppose this would do anything but provide millions of people the ability to earn a living by feeding many millions more. But activists are treating it as the banana-based version of the Tuskegee Experiment, even if the first human trials are being conducted on (overwhelmingly white) students at Iowa State University.
If you couple this with the slow social improvements in the continent, as well as the spectacular improvements we’ve made against some of its natural scourges (even while holding back our heaviest weapons against the biggest killers), millions more Africans might be able to have the stability and resources to build better, more just, and more prosperous societies.
It’s not a total solution, but you have to start somewhere.
Published in Science & Technology
That doesn’t appear to be the case. The modern causes of disability at the end of life, diabetes and Alzheimer’s for instance, are new at their current levels of incidence.
If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d be interested to see it.
Think about what you are doing there. The people with the genes to live the longest by staying healthy the longest were the ones that stayed healthy the longest.
Today, we keep unhealthy people alive far past when they would have died in 1800. It is not just a decrease in child mortality, but the fact that folks now can live a long time with chronic illnesses that used to kill them. But, they tend to age worse.
The biggest reasons we live longer today are because we have clean drinking water, we have antibiotics, and we have vaccines. Stuff that would have killed off less robust members of the species now does not. So they get something else when they are older.
Genes are the bugaboo of modern medicine. Genes interact with the environment. The reductio ad absurdam of this argument is to blame the death of a man jumping off a building on his genes: he hadn’t evolved wings, after all. Hearing a doctor say, “It’s your genes” is like hearing “Inshallah”. It’s meaningless, in most cases, with our current knowledge of genetics.
The chronic illnesses that kill people today didn’t exist for the most part 100 years ago. One can argue why they’re so much higher today, but the fact remains.
Vaccines and sanitation reduced child mortality, but didn’t do much for the lifespan of those who survive past childhood. Going from an 80% mortality rate in children to a 2% rate does wonders to increase the average lifespan. This is how we got from 30 years to 75.
OK, you are right, there are lots of horrible, unexplained illnesses that plague us today, and modern medicine does not know what is is doing in 90% of cases. As part of big medicine, I am spilling the beans! It is all fake, and we know nothing.
I’d stop eating any food you did not grow yourself, drink only water you had distilled, and never take any medication.
May you live to be 117 being natural.
Boy, that was a compelling rebuttal.
It’s called “evolutionary medicine”, Bryan. Reading about it might help you understand what’s wrong with modern medicine. You can start with Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body, which looks at the etiology of the mismatch diseases which plague us.
He’s one of the leading researchers into human evolutionary biology. He teaches it to the med students at Harvard.
Uh huh.
I have no doubt there are things we do now, that in the future will be looked at like leeches (wait, we use those now). Ulcers are a great example of a change in thinking.
However, your approach is that we are all wrong, medical science is full of greedy quacks, and nothing we know is right. That is insulting, to start with, and wrong too boot. We know more than we did. In the future we will no more than we do now. But you make lack of perfect knowledge the enemy of the knowledge we do have.