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>> "Cultures would reject them until a famine struck." Ironic considering the devastating effects of the reliance on potatoes during the Irish potato famine.

>> "Cultures would reject them until a famine struck." Ironic considering the devastating effects of the reliance on potatoes during the Irish potato famine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
Not ironic. The Irish lower class became overly dependent on cheap/easy potatoes b/c the English had taken their land so they couldn't do better. The famine then forced many of them to migrate to America, and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since. This is a somewhat amazing claim. It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013. Census records [1] tell a very interesting story: Ireland's population apparently peaked in the 1840s at 8.2 million people. By 1851, that had crashed to 6.6 million, and by 1861, 5.8 million. By then it seems safe to assume that the famine was over (for one thing, it's supposed to have ended in 1852), but Ireland's population kept declining into the 1920s and then stayed flat for another 30-40 years (population in 1961: 4.2 million), whereafter it started growing at a fairly quick (indeed, accelerating) pace. The 2011 census shows 6.4 million people. I can't think of a reason for a famine in the 1840s to cause the population to fall from 4.7 million in 1891 to 4.2 million in 1926. I have to wonder if what drove the numbers wasn't the famine but the demographic transition. Any idea when that took hold in Ireland? My other guess would be that the mass emigration of the 1840s-50s created a long-lasting easy pathway for Irish to emigrate to the US, and that this proved so attractive that the population stayed low even in the face of high birthrates. But I wouldn't call that a misfortune for the people of Ireland. [1] http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%281841-2011%29_NI_and_RoI.pdf http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%2... EDIT: It's probably worth noting here that 30 million people recorded their ethnicity as "Irish" in the 2000 US census.
  - simias 13y ago
    This is a very interesting comment but I feel the need to point out that your comparing the Irish population to mosquitoes could be perceived as a bit harsh! Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      Harshness is definitely not intended. I was hoping to evoke people's direct lived experience of (1) killing lots and lots of mosquitoes, and then (2) failing to notice any impact at all on the prevalence of mosquitoes. Unfortunately, choosing something with a reproductive cycle that humans can have gut-feeling level experience with restricted my analogical options to, um, "undesirables". The point I'm trying to make is that they're both living systems, and living systems of all types grow incredibly quickly. Look at this another way: over the last 50 years, the population of Ireland grew by 50%. Over the 50 years before that, it grew by negative three percent. And the famine happened 50 years before that. It seems very difficult to explain the 1911-1961 performance in terms of the famine. > Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years. I honestly wouldn't expect that impact to last more than two years, if that. But that's a guess. (Consider again: in 50 years (roughly 2 human generations), Ireland's population grew 50%. If the mosquito generation length is one year, then at the same rate they could recover fully from losing 33% of their population in... two years. But insects generally follow a strategy of laying many, many more eggs than the environment can ever support as adults, so I'd kind of expect the effects to wash out in a single generation.)
      - simias 13y ago
        Maybe because mosquitoes don't have a culture? The trauma of the famine spreads across generations, it can have changed the mentality of the Irish people durably, made them have fewer children on average.
mathattack 13y ago
From the wiki, perhaps it wasn't as much of a general food shortage as popularly claimed. The usage of the word famine is a misnomer. Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago

Not ironic. The Irish lower class became overly dependent on cheap/easy potatoes b/c the English had taken their land so they couldn't do better. The famine then forced many of them to migrate to America, and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since.

thaumasiotes 13y ago
> and Ireland's population hasn't recovered since. This is a somewhat amazing claim. It's bizarre for a population bottleneck in 1852 to have lasting effects (on the size of the population) over 150 years after the cause of the bottleneck ended, much as I don't expect the number of mosquitoes in 2014 to go down no matter how many I manage to kill in 2013. Census records [1] tell a very interesting story: Ireland's population apparently peaked in the 1840s at 8.2 million people. By 1851, that had crashed to 6.6 million, and by 1861, 5.8 million. By then it seems safe to assume that the famine was over (for one thing, it's supposed to have ended in 1852), but Ireland's population kept declining into the 1920s and then stayed flat for another 30-40 years (population in 1961: 4.2 million), whereafter it started growing at a fairly quick (indeed, accelerating) pace. The 2011 census shows 6.4 million people. I can't think of a reason for a famine in the 1840s to cause the population to fall from 4.7 million in 1891 to 4.2 million in 1926. I have to wonder if what drove the numbers wasn't the famine but the demographic transition. Any idea when that took hold in Ireland? My other guess would be that the mass emigration of the 1840s-50s created a long-lasting easy pathway for Irish to emigrate to the US, and that this proved so attractive that the population stayed low even in the face of high birthrates. But I wouldn't call that a misfortune for the people of Ireland. [1] http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%281841-2011%29_NI_and_RoI.pdf http://www.nisra.gov.uk/Census/Historic_Population_Trends_%2... EDIT: It's probably worth noting here that 30 million people recorded their ethnicity as "Irish" in the 2000 US census.
- simias 13y ago
  This is a very interesting comment but I feel the need to point out that your comparing the Irish population to mosquitoes could be perceived as a bit harsh! Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Harshness is definitely not intended. I was hoping to evoke people's direct lived experience of (1) killing lots and lots of mosquitoes, and then (2) failing to notice any impact at all on the prevalence of mosquitoes. Unfortunately, choosing something with a reproductive cycle that humans can have gut-feeling level experience with restricted my analogical options to, um, "undesirables". The point I'm trying to make is that they're both living systems, and living systems of all types grow incredibly quickly. Look at this another way: over the last 50 years, the population of Ireland grew by 50%. Over the 50 years before that, it grew by negative three percent. And the famine happened 50 years before that. It seems very difficult to explain the 1911-1961 performance in terms of the famine. > Not to mention that if you actually manage to reduce the mosquito population by 20 to 25% (as the Great Famine did in ireland) I'm sure you'll see an impact on the following years. I honestly wouldn't expect that impact to last more than two years, if that. But that's a guess. (Consider again: in 50 years (roughly 2 human generations), Ireland's population grew 50%. If the mosquito generation length is one year, then at the same rate they could recover fully from losing 33% of their population in... two years. But insects generally follow a strategy of laying many, many more eggs than the environment can ever support as adults, so I'd kind of expect the effects to wash out in a single generation.)
    - simias 13y ago
      Maybe because mosquitoes don't have a culture? The trauma of the famine spreads across generations, it can have changed the mentality of the Irish people durably, made them have fewer children on average.

mathattack 13y ago

From the wiki, perhaps it wasn't as much of a general food shortage as popularly claimed. The usage of the word famine is a misnomer. Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. Records show during the period Ireland was exporting approximately thirty to fifty shiploads per day of food produce. As a consequence of these exports and a number other factors such as land acquisition, absentee landlords and the effect of the 1690 penal laws, the Great Famine today is viewed by a number of historical academics as a form of either direct or indirect genocide.