7 ms·

"The greatest human being who ever lived" has died

186 points by kitcar 17y ago

As far as where the title reference comes from - Norman Borlaug on Penn and Teller: BS - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8

drubio 17y ago
Unbelievable, I'll take the 'over the top titles' but false economic statements like: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" I guess that's why Mexico has been a net wheat IMPORTER since the 70's , subsidized and even banned wheat imports to protect the agro industry. Relevant sources without the sensationalist tones: http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3ApHwA9V6vKXgJ%3Awww.californiawheat.org%2FNews_Info%2FCalifornia%2520Wheat%2520Mexico%2520Fact%2520sheet.pdf+mexico+wheat+import&hl=en&gl=mx&pli=1 http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3ApHwA9V6vKXgJ%... http://translate.google.com.mx/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsubsidiosalcampo.org.mx%2F http://translate.google.com.mx/translate?hl=en&sl=es&#38...
- hughprime 17y ago
  Does any of that contradict the statement: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" ? The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.
  - billswift 17y ago
    In fact, since the 1970s, the almost sole cause of poor crop production has been political; there have been droughts, but only a small portion of the poor countries have been affected by them at any given time. The most common causes have been either the gov't cutting off supplies to "rebels" or politicians beholden to poor urban masses holding down food prices so much that farmers can't sell their crops for enough to break even, so they grow only enough for themselves (or both together, with other stupidities thrown in, like current Zimbabwe).
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
req2 17y ago
This has been covered a few times already. Here's one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926
seldo 17y ago
There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction written in the late 1950s which took for granted that in the future there would be wars for food and perpetual famine due to an ongoing population explosion. The green revolution and birth control are the two simple but world-changing inventions that staved off that apocalypse, which seemed so inevitable at the time.
- mynameishere 17y ago
  Staved = Pushed back the date. .... I'm honestly not sure why people are dazzled by this guy. Partly it was...his specific intention to increase yields, which make him seem like a humanitarian. The Fordson tractor did more for agriculture (and, much much much more for the economy and day-to-day existence) than this guy. Is Henry Ford the greatest human being who ever lived?
  - ardit33 17y ago
    Why so negative? It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries. If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change). it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase. So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)? I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population. Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year). So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much. It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it. And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.
ecq 17y ago
voted down for misleading title. i'm still alive.
gcheong 17y ago
Norman Borlaug on Penn and Teller's Bullshit! program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8
skwiddor 17y ago
instead he's killed us all 700 years ago there were two million people in my country, now 60,000,000+
awt 17y ago
This is an honest question: How does creating more food prevent these problems? Won't populations grow enough to consume all available food? Haven't populations in 3rd world countries exploded since the "green revolution"?
- hughprime 17y ago
  I think the assumption is that eventually the world's population will stabilize as third-world folks start breeding at bare replacement levels like rich folks do. If we (as a species) can keep producing enough food right up to that point, then we're fine. The alternative is that we hit the point where a massive worldwide famine (like, hundreds of millions of deaths) is required to get things back in balance. I'd rather avoid this if at all possible. As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
  - immad 17y ago
    Why does it have to be a "massive worldwide famine" rather than a general slow starvation that forces an overall balance? I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
    - hughprime 17y ago
      Well, if the world were a simple mathematical model it might go as follows: there's enough food to feed ten billion people, so one day a baby is born taking us up to ten billion and one and oops -- somebody dies of starvation. From that moment on, the death rate due to starvation is equal to the birth rate minus the death rate due to non-starvation causes, and that's not _too_ bad. In practice, though, that's not the way it's gonna happen. For starters, we have a bunch of food stored up, so the population will overshoot the limit by eating stored food, maybe for a bunch of years, enabling the population to get way above what it should. (I'm not just talking about canned beans here -- living animals are "stored food" too). Secondly, food production varies from year to year -- in a good year we might be able to feed eleven billion, and in a bad year only nine... that's gonna cause some problems when a bad year rolls around. Finally, a world where everybody has _just_ enough food to not die is still a pretty miserable and malnourished world... plus you've got the whole "hungry people with guns vs hungry people without guns" problem which leads to a whole bunch of other bad stuff happening. Anyway, I hope that has been enough to convince you that awful things happen anytime you get a population anywhere near the very fuzzy and variable limit which is the maximum agriculturally sustainable population.
riffer 17y ago
This title made me think Nelson Mandela had passed away
thras 17y ago
Christmas already?
eru 17y ago
Compare the treatment by the Economist at http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14446742 http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...
b1tr0t 17y ago
Ad hominem attack completely unexamined by the article's author: """Of his harshest critics Borlaug stated, "some… are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." """ Logical breakdown: 1) My critics are elitist who have not experienced hunger. 2) Therefore, they are wrong. Relationship to actual argument: nonexistent. As a note, I do think Norman Borlaug was a remarkable person. But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. Asking them doesn't mean they think Norman Borlaug was a bad person either. A few that spring to mind... 1) How many have died from malnutrition after crop yield booms resulted in rapidly expanding populations suddenly constrained when the next yield limit was hit? 2) If education expenditures for the third world matched those given for improving agriculture and food aid starting in the 1960's, what would the "third world" look like today? Better? Worse? What if expenditures had been divvied evenly between the two?
- petercooper 17y ago
  But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. It didn't say anything to the contrary. Note the phrases "of his harshest critics" and "many of them." He claimed that many of his harshest critics were elitists - that does not mean he thought anyone who criticized his ideas was elitist. I would suggest that he believed his harshest critics to be those presenting no reasonable basis (from his POV, at least) for their claims.
- sunir 17y ago
  Easy there. It was an obituary. What argument is there supposed to be here exactly?
petercooper 17y ago
This guy isn't famous because people who complain about GM food, the environment (or whatever) are louder and harder to ignore than scientists quietly solving those problems. Science and technology have provided most of the solutions to our most pressing problems, typically quietly, over a long period of time, and with little fanfare. This noble work will go on even if "eco-warriors" or anti-GM activists only want to whine and make little impact except to make people feel bad.
- lupin_sansei 17y ago
  "people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
- chez17 17y ago
  Did you care about this guy before he died? Or are you just using his death to grandstand on some anti-environmentalist rant?
  - petercooper 17y ago
    No, I hadn't heard of him - that's sorta my point. World changing scientists are not, typically, well known. Famous environmentalists are ten a dollar. So, sure, it's an anti-environmentalist rant because I'm anti-environmentalist but I consider it a pro-science rant at heart.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
weegee 17y ago
here is the bullshit feature Penn and Teller did on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cR2-3Y56U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cR2-3Y56U
kingsley_20 17y ago
If you do believe that his work is worth continuing, I recommend donating to the Borlaugh foundation. My wife & I just did: http://borlaug.tamu.edu/legacy/donors/index.php http://borlaug.tamu.edu/legacy/donors/index.php
tybris 17y ago
Again?

186 points by kitcar 17y ago

As far as where the title reference comes from - Norman Borlaug on Penn and Teller: BS - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8

drubio 17y ago

Unbelievable, I'll take the 'over the top titles' but false economic statements like: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" I guess that's why Mexico has been a net wheat IMPORTER since the 70's , subsidized and even banned wheat imports to protect the agro industry. Relevant sources without the sensationalist tones: http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3ApHwA9V6vKXgJ%3Awww.californiawheat.org%2FNews_Info%2FCalifornia%2520Wheat%2520Mexico%2520Fact%2520sheet.pdf+mexico+wheat+import&hl=en&gl=mx&pli=1 http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache%3ApHwA9V6vKXgJ%... http://translate.google.com.mx/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsubsidiosalcampo.org.mx%2F http://translate.google.com.mx/translate?hl=en&sl=es&#38...

hughprime 17y ago
Does any of that contradict the statement: "When his seeds were used widely in 1963, Mexico instantly went from famine-prone to a wheat-exporter. Their wheat harvest was six times greater after" ? The seeds may have been capable of increasing the Mexican wheat crop by a factor of six, but not capable of making Mexican wheat production price-competitive with producing it elsewhere and shipping it to Mexico. They may have been a net importer since the 1970s, but presumably that means they were in fact a net exporter in the 1960s.
- billswift 17y ago
  In fact, since the 1970s, the almost sole cause of poor crop production has been political; there have been droughts, but only a small portion of the poor countries have been affected by them at any given time. The most common causes have been either the gov't cutting off supplies to "rebels" or politicians beholden to poor urban masses holding down food prices so much that farmers can't sell their crops for enough to break even, so they grow only enough for themselves (or both together, with other stupidities thrown in, like current Zimbabwe).
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

req2 17y ago

This has been covered a few times already. Here's one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=819926

seldo 17y ago

There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction written in the late 1950s which took for granted that in the future there would be wars for food and perpetual famine due to an ongoing population explosion. The green revolution and birth control are the two simple but world-changing inventions that staved off that apocalypse, which seemed so inevitable at the time.

mynameishere 17y ago
Staved = Pushed back the date. .... I'm honestly not sure why people are dazzled by this guy. Partly it was...his specific intention to increase yields, which make him seem like a humanitarian. The Fordson tractor did more for agriculture (and, much much much more for the economy and day-to-day existence) than this guy. Is Henry Ford the greatest human being who ever lived?
- ardit33 17y ago
  Why so negative? It seems that Europe's population is actually declining, so is japan's, and a lot of advanced countries. If they keep feed themselves right now, they should be so even 100 years from now, given the same condition (unless we have some drastic global climatic change). it is the poor countries, whose economies are based in subsistence agriculture, that are having a huge population increase. So, the other question is, do you have to bring all these countries up to the level of western europe/japan/us in order to stop the population boom? if we have to, then there will certainly not be enough resources for everybody (especially if everybody has to live like american do)? I have a good counter example for this. You don't have to be super developed in order to have a clear stabilization of the population. Even my country's Albania (which has about 6kUSD gpd), population growth has halted (from 2.2 children per woman in 1990, to 1.7 last year). So, you don't have to get super developed to have a decline of 'overfertility'. It seems that bringing economies out of rural ones, and into more mixed (agriculture/services/technology), will help the population not to increase so much. It seems that this is a noble goal to achieve for the rest of the world, and this guy helped on it. And making crops more durable, and farmers more productive, will make people move out of villages and go to cities, and redirect economies to towards services/manufacturing/technologies, where education is more advantage, and having more kids is very expenvie.

ecq 17y ago

voted down for misleading title. i'm still alive.

gcheong 17y ago

Norman Borlaug on Penn and Teller's Bullshit! program: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8

skwiddor 17y ago

instead he's killed us all 700 years ago there were two million people in my country, now 60,000,000+

awt 17y ago

This is an honest question: How does creating more food prevent these problems? Won't populations grow enough to consume all available food? Haven't populations in 3rd world countries exploded since the "green revolution"?

hughprime 17y ago
I think the assumption is that eventually the world's population will stabilize as third-world folks start breeding at bare replacement levels like rich folks do. If we (as a species) can keep producing enough food right up to that point, then we're fine. The alternative is that we hit the point where a massive worldwide famine (like, hundreds of millions of deaths) is required to get things back in balance. I'd rather avoid this if at all possible. As far as I know, ever since the discovery of agriculture we as a species have never really been at the point (except on local and temporary scales) where the population was limited by available food. Reaching that point would get extremely ugly.
- immad 17y ago
  Why does it have to be a "massive worldwide famine" rather than a general slow starvation that forces an overall balance? I get why some human issues lead to catastrophe like, global warming, but I never get why all issues will lead to catastrophes rather than gradual equilibrium.
  - hughprime 17y ago
    Well, if the world were a simple mathematical model it might go as follows: there's enough food to feed ten billion people, so one day a baby is born taking us up to ten billion and one and oops -- somebody dies of starvation. From that moment on, the death rate due to starvation is equal to the birth rate minus the death rate due to non-starvation causes, and that's not _too_ bad. In practice, though, that's not the way it's gonna happen. For starters, we have a bunch of food stored up, so the population will overshoot the limit by eating stored food, maybe for a bunch of years, enabling the population to get way above what it should. (I'm not just talking about canned beans here -- living animals are "stored food" too). Secondly, food production varies from year to year -- in a good year we might be able to feed eleven billion, and in a bad year only nine... that's gonna cause some problems when a bad year rolls around. Finally, a world where everybody has _just_ enough food to not die is still a pretty miserable and malnourished world... plus you've got the whole "hungry people with guns vs hungry people without guns" problem which leads to a whole bunch of other bad stuff happening. Anyway, I hope that has been enough to convince you that awful things happen anytime you get a population anywhere near the very fuzzy and variable limit which is the maximum agriculturally sustainable population.

riffer 17y ago

This title made me think Nelson Mandela had passed away

thras 17y ago

Christmas already?

eru 17y ago

Compare the treatment by the Economist at http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14446742 http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=...

b1tr0t 17y ago

Ad hominem attack completely unexamined by the article's author: """Of his harshest critics Borlaug stated, "some… are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." """ Logical breakdown: 1) My critics are elitist who have not experienced hunger. 2) Therefore, they are wrong. Relationship to actual argument: nonexistent. As a note, I do think Norman Borlaug was a remarkable person. But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. Asking them doesn't mean they think Norman Borlaug was a bad person either. A few that spring to mind... 1) How many have died from malnutrition after crop yield booms resulted in rapidly expanding populations suddenly constrained when the next yield limit was hit? 2) If education expenditures for the third world matched those given for improving agriculture and food aid starting in the 1960's, what would the "third world" look like today? Better? Worse? What if expenditures had been divvied evenly between the two?

petercooper 17y ago
But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them. It didn't say anything to the contrary. Note the phrases "of his harshest critics" and "many of them." He claimed that many of his harshest critics were elitists - that does not mean he thought anyone who criticized his ideas was elitist. I would suggest that he believed his harshest critics to be those presenting no reasonable basis (from his POV, at least) for their claims.
sunir 17y ago
Easy there. It was an obituary. What argument is there supposed to be here exactly?

petercooper 17y ago

This guy isn't famous because people who complain about GM food, the environment (or whatever) are louder and harder to ignore than scientists quietly solving those problems. Science and technology have provided most of the solutions to our most pressing problems, typically quietly, over a long period of time, and with little fanfare. This noble work will go on even if "eco-warriors" or anti-GM activists only want to whine and make little impact except to make people feel bad.

lupin_sansei 17y ago
"people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they'd been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days "experts" spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager
chez17 17y ago
Did you care about this guy before he died? Or are you just using his death to grandstand on some anti-environmentalist rant?
- petercooper 17y ago
  No, I hadn't heard of him - that's sorta my point. World changing scientists are not, typically, well known. Famous environmentalists are ten a dollar. So, sure, it's an anti-environmentalist rant because I'm anti-environmentalist but I consider it a pro-science rant at heart.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

weegee 17y ago

here is the bullshit feature Penn and Teller did on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cR2-3Y56U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cR2-3Y56U

kingsley_20 17y ago

If you do believe that his work is worth continuing, I recommend donating to the Borlaugh foundation. My wife & I just did: http://borlaug.tamu.edu/legacy/donors/index.php http://borlaug.tamu.edu/legacy/donors/index.php

tybris 17y ago

Again?