The problems are clear though: create something that will make the variations you speak of (whatever their causes) rarer, slower and of lower magnitude. We have

The problems are clear though: create something that will make the variations you speak of (whatever their causes) rarer, slower and of lower magnitude. We have done it before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) and we will do it time and time again, hopefully. The solutions, as usual, are hard to see. But if we do not work on the big problems, the hard problems, do we do valuable work?