3 ms·

Fifty generations of grains from 0AD to 50AD would have been an indiscernible difference. Those genetics were changing, mostly at random, by tiny percentage poi

Fifty generations of grains from 0AD to 50AD would have been an indiscernible difference. Those genetics were changing, mostly at random, by tiny percentage points. I don't think they'd have been able to tell without scientific equipment that the average yield per acre had gone up by 0.1% in their lifetime. But today, over my lifetime, genetically modified crops are everywhere. Yields are up by ~25% and pesticide use is down by 33%. Had exponential growth been happening at that rate for a thousand generations, then if our paleolithic ancestors got 1 bushel of grain, we'd harvest something like 10^18 times the mass of the entire observable universe. Technology accelerates the rate of change. That rate is not consistent.

hinkley 3y ago
It feels like you are assuming that plant domestication was a process of collecting new gene mutations, instead of aggregating existing ones. You can do a lot with selective breeding, but whether you’re creating something new or something that has been done fifty times before depends on where you are in history. We don’t have a monopoly on innovation and the history of it is not uniformly distributed. We talk about innovation in terms of evolutionary versus revolutionary, but quality of life changes from a friendlier pig or a better hunting dog affect individual lives quite a bit. And if those are quiet lives, those changes may matter as much as the things historians tell us are important. If you weren’t there for the rise of Julius Caesar or the Fall of Rome then whether your son marries the neighbor girl and the family farm thereby gets access to a better water source, matters a lot more than what Galileo has been up to in his lab. Yes, introduction of corn and cassava to Africa had massive impacts to world politics and especially human rights (for the worse). But those same crops already revolutionized South America millennia before that.
- mc32 3y ago
  An innovation in Wolvehamton would not be experienced in even Marathon and vice versa. Sometimes trade did import improvements, but it was not usually experienced by the majority of people. Things were expensive for 95% of the pop. In most instances change would have been slow. Occasionally you had major changes like a crossbow, or paper making. I think those changes were not the norm. Now, across the world, if you followed spots, you could retrospectively see changes, sure. But for a single person, no, not so much.
  - herval 3y ago
    Technologu obviously accelerates change, but you might be overcycling on it and underestimating how much society changed all the time, especially compared to today’s standards. There’s big swaths of the world where you quite literally see a new empire taking over every few decades, from different peoples, different customs, different everything Couple that to the average lifetime being much shorter and you get the feeling that everything is always changing

hinkley 3y ago

It feels like you are assuming that plant domestication was a process of collecting new gene mutations, instead of aggregating existing ones. You can do a lot with selective breeding, but whether you’re creating something new or something that has been done fifty times before depends on where you are in history. We don’t have a monopoly on innovation and the history of it is not uniformly distributed. We talk about innovation in terms of evolutionary versus revolutionary, but quality of life changes from a friendlier pig or a better hunting dog affect individual lives quite a bit. And if those are quiet lives, those changes may matter as much as the things historians tell us are important. If you weren’t there for the rise of Julius Caesar or the Fall of Rome then whether your son marries the neighbor girl and the family farm thereby gets access to a better water source, matters a lot more than what Galileo has been up to in his lab. Yes, introduction of corn and cassava to Africa had massive impacts to world politics and especially human rights (for the worse). But those same crops already revolutionized South America millennia before that.

mc32 3y ago
An innovation in Wolvehamton would not be experienced in even Marathon and vice versa. Sometimes trade did import improvements, but it was not usually experienced by the majority of people. Things were expensive for 95% of the pop. In most instances change would have been slow. Occasionally you had major changes like a crossbow, or paper making. I think those changes were not the norm. Now, across the world, if you followed spots, you could retrospectively see changes, sure. But for a single person, no, not so much.
- herval 3y ago
  Technologu obviously accelerates change, but you might be overcycling on it and underestimating how much society changed all the time, especially compared to today’s standards. There’s big swaths of the world where you quite literally see a new empire taking over every few decades, from different peoples, different customs, different everything Couple that to the average lifetime being much shorter and you get the feeling that everything is always changing