It’s growing now because our computers have finally grown strong enough for us to use them to see macroscale patterns that were too big for us to see before. It’s also growing now because we finally know enough to realize that understanding how the parts of a complex network interact is just as important as understanding the parts themselves. And it’s growing now that we realize that an entomologist studying termites may have something to say to a molecular biologist studying mitochondria, who may have something to say to a climatologist studying tornadoes, who may have something to say to a sociologist studying city planning.

It’s still a magpie of a science. It steals ideas from condensed matter physics, biochemistry, molecular biology, embryology, entomology, ecology, evolutionary theory, neuroscience, mathematics, and economics. It feathers its nest with that hodge-podge of ideas, trying to find what’s common among them. It’s hoping to answer just one central question: how does order arise out of chaos? It assumes that there’s similarity of origin regardless of whether that order is in cities or crayfish or economies or railway companies. It’s still flailing around in the dark, but the vague outlines of a coherent theory may not be far off. And that theory, if proven true, may one day imply testable things about our future. However, today even the very definition of the word ‘complex’ is unresolved. We don’t yet have a widely accepted way to measure the ‘complexity’ of a system. So we still don’t have a uniform definition of a ‘complex system.’ So it’s still far from a real science.

Our knowledge base is now growing so fast that in recent decades every new scientific field goes through the same cycle. First a few explorers find something of interest. Then there’s a feeding frenzy as many prospectors join the gold rush. After a while, interest wanes as the same prospectors see that the pot of gold is still distant. That speed-up is a side-effect of our growing knowledge base, but the cycle itself is very old. It doesn’t much matter whether it’s in mining or science, finance or the stock market. We all behave exactly the same way, everywhere and everywhen. In the last century that cycle has played out in systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, game theory, catastrophe theory, fractal geometry, and chaos theory. It’s now playing out in complex systems. Each wave washes up some new and pretty shell on the shoreline of our knowledge, but it’s hard to build those shells into a coherent picture. Too much is still missing. “Quantifying Self-Organization with Optimal Predictors,” C. R. Shalizi, K. L. Shalizi, R. Haslinger, Physical Review Letters, 93(11):118701, 2004. Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, Perseus Books Group, 1999. Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics, Remo Badii and Antonio Politi, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John Holland, Addison-Wesley, 1996. Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, David Blitz, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.

But now, regarding a society as a thing, what kind of thing must we call it? It seems totally unlike every object with which our senses acquaint us. Any likeness it may possibly have to other objects, cannot be manifest to perception, but can be discerned only by reason. If the constant relations among its parts make it an entity; the question arises whether these constant relations among its parts are akin to the constant relations among the parts of other entities. Between a society and anything else, the only conceivable resemblance must be one due to parallelism of principle in the arrangement of components.” The Principles of Sociology, Herbert Spencer, D. Appleton and Company, 1916, page 448. Then followed an entire chapter examining the question (Volume I, Part II, Chapter 2). Spencer primarily saw his ‘super-organism’ as an analogy, intended to point out that society is different from a set of random individuals, but also different from a single organic entity.

For Europeans in North America, maize came to be called ‘Indian corn,’ then simply ‘corn.’ In 1539, Garcilaso de la Vega, part of Hernan de Soto’s expedition in northern Florida and the Carolinas, wrote that, “[We] marched on through some great fields of corn, beans, and squash and other vegetables which had been sown on both sides of the road and were spread out as far as the eye could see across two leagues of plain.” The Florida of the Inca, John and Jeannette Varner (translators and editors), University of Texas Press, 1988.

Slavery can arise even among foragers: if they’re sedentary and have access to a rich food source that rewards intensive labor. One such example is the coastal tribes in the northwest of North America. Their subsistence was based on hunting, gathering, and fishing. They all had a tradition of potlatch. Slavery among them was economically valuable not for primary activities (like fishing) but secondary activities—like drying the fish for storage. Aboriginal slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, Leland Donald, University of California Press, 1997.

These days it’s popular to believe that when we were foragers we likely didn’t take slaves because we were meek and thus didn’t have large wars. Not so. “Anthropology, Archaeology, and the Origin of Warfare,” I. J. N. Thorpe, World Archaeology, 35(1):145-165, 2003. Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past, Debra L. Martin and David W. Freyer (editors), Routledge, 1998. Killing or exploiting each other is ancient. It’s simply that it didn’t pay well when we were foragers.

For recent human genetic change—where ‘recent’ means the last 80,000 years or so—the recent past—see: “Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution,” J. Hawks, E. T. Wang, G. M. Cochran, H. C. Harpending, R. K. Moyzis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(52):20753-20758, 2007. “Genome-wide detection and characterization of positive selection in human populations,” P. C. Sabeti, P. Varilly, B. Fry, J. Lohmueller, E. Hostetter, C. Cotsapas, X. Xie, E. H. Byrne, S. A. McCarroll, R. Gaudet, S. F. Schaffner, E. S. Lander, The International HapMap Consortium, Nature, 449(7164):913-918, 2007.

Further, at least two genes that appear to be involved in determining our brain size have undergone strong positive selection recently, and (here’s the politically volatile bit) only among some of our populations. One haplotype of Microcephalin was strongly selected for starting about 37,000 years ago (confidence limit from 14,000 to 60,000 years ago), and a haplotype of ASPM about 5,800 years ago (confidence limit between 500 and 14,100 years). These are extremely recent haplotypes. Neither have spread very far in our African population yet. “Microcephalin, a Gene Regulating Brain Size, Continues to Evolve Adaptively in Humans,” P. D. Evans, S. L. Gilbert, N. Mekel-Bobrov, E. J. Vallender, J. R. Anderson, L. M. Vaez-Azizi, S. A. Tishkoff, R. R. Hudson, B. T. Lahn, Science, 309(5741):1717-1720, 2005. “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain Size Determinant in Homo sapiens,” N. Mekel-Bobrov, S. L. Gilbert, P. D. Evans, E. J. Vallender, J. R. Anderson, R. R. Hudson, S. A. Tishkoff, B. T. Lahn, Science, 309(5741):1720-1722, 2005. “Reconstructing the evolutionary history of microcephalin, a gene controlling human brain size,” P. D. Evans, J. R. Anderson, E. J. Vallender, S. S. Choi, B. T. Lahn, Human Molecular Genetics, 13(11):1139-45, 2004.

To get some idea of just how short a time 11,000 years is, most species of just one family of beetles (the leaf beetles) last an average of anywhere from one to 10 million years. (The family is called the Chrysomelidae, within the order Coleoptera). It’s the fourth largest family of beetles. The species life-range figure is from: In Search of Nature, Edward O. Wilson, Island Press, 1996, page 153.) Most vertebrate species, of which we’re one, last for an average of about four million years, so our species is still only a baby as species go. (An average species lifespan of four million years holds only for fossilizable species over the last 600 million years or so. Good enough for government work.) Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? David Raup, W. W. Norton, 1991, page 108.

Note though that the figure of 400,000 is a guess. We still don’t know how many plant species there are. “Documenting plant diversity: unfinished business,” P. R. Crane, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London - Series B: Biological Sciences, 359(1444):735-737, 2004. For more recent work just on seed plants, see: “Mega-phylogeny approach for comparative biology: an alternative to supertree and supermatrix approaches,” S. A. Smith, J. Beaulieu, M. J. Donoghue, BMC Evolutionary Biology, 9:37, 2009. They quote a figure of 13,533 for seed plants.

Wheat, barley, rye, and oats belong to the subfamily Pooideae. Maize, sorghum, sugar cane, and most millets belong to the subfamily Panicoideae. Rice belongs to the subfamily Bambusoideae. All are members of the family Poaceae (that is, the true grasses).

At a conference in 1966, one eminent anthropologist called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society” because they (probably) had so much free time. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society,” M. Sahlins, Man the Hunter: The First Intensive Survey of a Single, Crucial Stage of Human Development - Man’s Once Universal Hunting Way of Life, Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore, Aldine Publishing Company, 1968, pages 85-89. Stone Age Economics, Marshall Sahlins, Aldine Transaction, 1972. The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society, Richard Borshay Lee, Cambridge University Press, 1979. But see also more recent analyses: “After the ‘Affluent Society’: Cost of Living in the Papua New Guinea Highlands According to Time and Energy Expenditure-Income,” P. Sillitoe, Journal of Biosocial Science, 34(4):433-461, 2002. “The darker side of the ‘original affluent society,’ ” D. Kaplan, Journal of Anthropological Research, 56(33):301-324, 2000.

Actual twisted fibers dating to about 18,000 years ago have been found in caves in France. The earliest known evidence of woven fabrics might be Venus figurines carved about 26,000 years ago. Some of them have incised representations of what may be skimpy string skirts, presumably for some symbolic purpose. So twining and plaiting may go back 26 millennia. There’s argument about this particular extrapolation. Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing, Mary C. Beaudry, Yale University Press, 2006, pages 45-46 and 90. “Archaeological Textiles: A Review of Current Research,” I. Good, Annual Review of Anthropology, 30:209-226, 2001. “Perishable Technologies and Invisible People: Nets, Baskets, and ‘Venus’ Wear ca. 26,000 B.P.,” O. Soffer, J. M. Adovasio, D. C. Hyland, Enduring Records: The Environmental and Cultural Heritage of Wetlands, Barbara Purdy (editor), pages 233-245, Oxbow Books, 2001. “Upper Palaeolithic fibre technology: interlaced woven finds from Pavlov I, Czech Republic, c. 26,000 years ago,” J. M. Adovasio, O. Soffer, B. Klíma, Antiquity, 70(269):526-34, 1996. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with special reference to the Aegean, E. J. W. Barber, Princeton University Press, 1991.

Tattoos in the neolithic are a guess. However, a tattooed man existed in the Ötztal Alps 5,300 years ago. There seems to be no reason we couldn’t have tattooed, or at least scarred, ourselves 11,000 years ago, or even 50,000 years ago, or more. “Origin and Migration of the Alpine Iceman,” W. Müller, H. Fricke, A. N. Halliday, M. T. McCulloch, J.-A. Wartho, Science, 302(5646):862-866, 2003. The Man in the Ice: The Discovery of a 5,000-year-old Body Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age, Konrad Spindler, translated by Ewald Osers, Harmony Books, 1994.

Incidentally, this particular find has ramified into a murder mystery with new, and so far unpublished, DNA and forensic analysis of the body and its artifacts by Thomas Loy of the University of Queensland. For the same sort of forensics, see: “Kwäday Dän Ts’ìnchí, the first ancient body of a man from a North American glacier: reconstructing his last days by intestinal and biomolecular analyses,” J. H. Dickson, M. P. Richards, R. J. Hebda, P. J. Mudie, O. Beattie, S. Ramsay, N. J. Turner, B. J. Leighton, J. M. Webster, N. R. Hobischak, G. S. Anderson, P. M. Troffe, R. J. Wigen, The Holocene, 14(4):481-486, 2004.

Our oldest known figurine is an ivory Venus dated to 35,000 years ago. “A female figurine from the basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany,” N. J. Conard, Nature, 459(7244):248-252, 2009. Our earliest probable ornaments may go back at least 82,000 years (and perhaps 110,000 years in the latest unpublished research). “82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior,” A. Bouzouggar, N. Barton, M. Vanhaeren, F. d’Errico, S. Collcutt, T. Higham, E. Hodge, S. Parfitt, E. Rhodes, J.-L. Schwenninger, C. Stringer, E. Turner, S. Ward, A. Moutmir, A. Stambouli, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(24):9964-9969, 2007. “Middle Stone Age Shell Beads from South Africa,” C. Henshilwood, F. d’Errico, M. Vanhaeren, K. van Niekerk, Z. Jacobs, Science, 304(5669):404-404, 2004.

Our oldest known ornaments are perforated teeth or eggshell beads from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, and Lebanon, dated between 41,000 and 43,000-years-old, and 40,000-year-old ostrich-shell beads from Kenya. Beads found in Tanzania also appear to be very old, but are so far undated. “Ornaments of the earliest Upper Paleolithic: New insights from the Levant,” S. L. Kuhn, M. C. Stiner, D. S. Reese, E. Güleç, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(13):7641-7646, 2001. “Chronology of the Later Stone Age and Food Production in East Africa,” S. H. Ambrose, Journal of Archaeological Science, 25(4):377-392, 1998. Bead-making may go back at least 100,000 years: “Middle Paleolithic Shell Beads in Israel and Algeria,” M. Vanhaereny, F. d’Errico, C. Stringer, S. L. James, J. A. Todd, H. K. Mienis, Science, 312(5781):1785-1788, 2006.

The oldest known musical instruments, bone and ivory flutes, are also 35,000 years old. “New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany,” N. J. Conard, M. Malina, S. C. Münzel, Nature, 460(7256):737-740, 2009.

Another bitter winter followed. The Baltic iced over and ships froze in place. That spring, torrential rains returned, turning roads to mires and waterways to rivers, further blocking food transport. In Hungary, the Danube, the principal transport corridor for continental Europe, flooded, washing away fields and villages. The sporadic war between France and Flanders, ongoing since 1297, worsened the crisis as armies stole draft animals and added banditry to their list of job skills. Europe began to fall apart. Peasants stumbled across the countryside, begging for food. The urban poor, unable to forage, suffered even more—or so say the chroniclers, but then most of them lived in towns. As among the cattle, disease then spread, killing rich and poor alike. Robbery and murder increased. So did food riots. In war-torn regions like Ireland and the Scottish border, graveyards were reportedly mined for fresh corpses. Corpses of the hanged were apparently cut down from their gibbets and eaten. Jailed convicts ceased to be fed and allegedly ate new prisoners alive. Families were said to eat their dead. Many chronicles even speak of parents killing their children for food.

Jordan estimates 30 million for the affected European population, with three million dead in the first three years. The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century, William Chester Jordan, Princeton University Press, 1996. Livi-Bacci, though, estimates that Europe as a whole contained that many as far back as the year 1000. However, although Livi-Bacci estimates 74 million for all Europe, it is for 1340 not 1314, and may include parts of Europe not visited by the 1314 famine. A Concise History of World Population, Massimo Livi-Bacci, translated by Carl Ipsen, Third Revision, Blackwell, 1997.

If we take grain prices as a proxy for poor harvests, then regular famine appears to have been common all over the world and for all recorded time. Although, such price evidence may be good only for Western Europe in the recent past, with waves of inflation occurring in the thirteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 1999.

Note however that paleopathology and paleodemography are still very young fields, with many of their research agendas, tools, and methods still in flux. In particular, any studies that claim anything about disease prevalence, or overall mortality statistics for any not-provably stationary populations, should be approached with caution. “The Osteological Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples,” J. W. Wood, G. R. Milner, H. C. Harpending, K. M Weiss, Current Anthropology, 33(4):343-370, 1992.

Since plants can’t run away, millions of years before we started meddling with them they protected themselves from being eaten by lacing their bodies with all sorts of poisons: antibiotics, fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides—from which we made nearly all of our earliest poisons, perfumes, medicines, and spices.

Today, our perception of risk from our food is severely distorted. Each day, the average American, for example, eats about 10,000 times more plant-generated pesticides than artificial ones. One gram of roasted coffee, for instance, contains about 59 milligrams of chlorogenic acid, neochlorogenic acid, caffeic acid, and caffeine—all toxins, and all put there by the coffee plant, not us. (However, artificial pesticides are still undesirable because being sprayed on, not built-in, they run off easily and collect in aquifers.) Cooking our food adds further toxicity by producing about two grams per person per day of burnt material that contains many rodent carcinogens: polycyclic hydrocarbons, heterocyclic amines, furfural, nitrosamines, and nitroaromatics, as well as many mutagens. Further, many plant toxins are cumulative. Potatoes, for example, contain fat-soluble neurotoxins detectable in the bloodstream of all potato eaters. Potatoes are relatively new to our species, so our genes haven’t yet had time to evolve ways to fully detoxify them.

We don’t drop dead (usually) when we drink coffee and eat some potato chips because all plant-eaters have evolved ways to detect harmful plants and avoid them, or have evolved ways to detoxify a few plant poisons. In our case, we’ve selectively amplified only those few plant cultivars and those ways of preparing food from them that haven’t immediately killed us in the past. For example, cassava (a starchy tuber like the potato and the chief component of tapioca) feeds over 400 million of us in the tropics, but it also contains cyanide. We’ve learned, presumably by long trial and error, how to boil it to reduce the poison to trace amounts. Rhubarb leaves, apple seeds, almonds, lima beans, potato skins, avocado skins, cherry pits—even too much nutmeg in your eggnog—all can kill. “What Do Animal Cancer Tests Tell Us About Human Cancer Risk?: Overview of Analyses of the Carcinogenic Potency Database,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. N. Ames, Drug Metabolism Reviews, 30(2):359-404, 1998. “Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities,” L. Swirsky Gold, T. H. Slone, B. R. Stern, N. B. Manley, B. N. Ames, Science, 258(5080):261-265, 1992.

The estimate of $250 million lost by West African farmers each because of protected cotton alone is from an address by Mark Malloch Brown, who was then the head of the United Nations Development Programme, His address was given at the launch of the Human Development Report 2003, to the Second Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, in Maputo, Mozambique, July 10th, 2003. A year before, he noted that “Every cow in Europe today is subsidised two dollars a day. That is twice as much as the per capita income of a half of Africa. It is the extraordinary distortion of global trade, where the West spends $360 billion a year on protecting its agriculture with a network of subsidies and tariffs that costs developing countries about US$50 billion in potential lost agricultural exports.” From: “The Millennium Development Goals and Africa: A new framework for a new future,” Kampala, Uganda, November 12th, 2002.

Japan has a complex system in place to block as much foreign rice as possible. The markups mostly come from import duties, and can reach as high as 1,000 percent, depending on the rice variety. National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, 2005 The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), United States Government, 2005, page 314.

City life was always attractive, but it used to be that cities were very bad places to live, at least in terms of mortality rates. City disease killed us faster than we could reproduce and only continual replenishment from the countryside let them persist. Today, though, urban mortality rates are better than rural mortality rates. Urban dwellers also have different opportunities and different consumption patterns than rural dwellers. Regardless of income level, urban dwellers have fewer kids, eat more and better food, and consume more energy and durable goods. Of course, all that demand has environmental costs as well. “Consumption Patterns: The Driving Force of Environmental Stress,” J. K. Parikh, S. Gokam, J. P. Painuly, B. Saha, V. Shukla, The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 1991. “Impact of Trends in Resources, Environment and Development on Demographic Prospects,” N. Keyfitz, in Population and Resources in a Changing World, Kingsley Davis, Mikhail S. Bernstam, and Helen M. Sellers (editors), Stanford University Press, 1989.

Given a choice today, we flee the countryside because urban prospects for income, education, medical care, and services (like entertainment) are higher. Urban mortality is lower, and urban fertility is much lower. Over 40 percent of our urban growth since 1960 has not been because of increasing urban birth rates but via flight from rural to urban areas. “People Who Move: New Reproductive Health Focus,” R. Gardner, R. Blackburn, Population Reports, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Population Information Program, 24(3):1-27, 1996. “Fertility and Family Planning in African Cities: The Impact of Female Migration,” M. Brockerhoff, Journal of Biosocial Science, 27(3):347-358, 1995.

The figures for France in 1705 and Britain in 1850 were 1,657 and 2,362, respectively. The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World, Robert William Fogel, Cambridge University Press, 2004, page 9. Eritrea has the highest percentage of population suffering from undernourishment in the world. The State of Food Insecurity in the World, SOFI 2004, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2004.

The text’s description of the French diet circa 1705 is actually from 1777, but it had remained mostly constant for centuries. “Our Frenchmen eat soup with a little butter and vegetables. They scarcely ever eat meat. They sometimes drink a little cider but more commonly water. Your Englishmen eat meat, and a great deal of it, and they drink beer continually in such a fashion that an Englishman spends three times more than a Frenchman [on comestibles].” Delaunay Deslandes, 1777. Quoted in “Continental influences on the industrial revolution in Great Britain,” A. E. Musson, in Great Britain and Her World, 1750-1914: Essays in Honour of W. O. Henderson, Barrie M. Ratcliffe (editor), Manchester University Press, 1977, page 67, footnote 42.

Here are a few more examples. From 1769 to 1771, a famine in British-ruled Bengal killed one in three of us there; perhaps 10 millon people died. The usual cannibalism followed. The government response? They raised taxes. The Annals of Rural Bengal, Volume I, The Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore, W. W. Hunter, Smith, Elder, and Co., 1868, pages 19-48. What should have been an equally bad famine occurred in roughly the place in 1866 (mainly in Orissa, but also Bengal), yet only one million died. The railroad and abandonment of a government ban on speculation in food made the difference. However, a much wider famine, affecting not only Bengal but much of the rest of India, occurred in 1896, once again killing millions. The Famine of 1896-1897 in Bengal: Availability or Entitlement Crisis?” Malabika Chakrabarti, Orient Longman, 2004.

From 1846 to 1852, a potato blight in Ireland helped kill over a million of us. (The figure of one million deaths is widely reported, although it’s only estimated since mortality records weren’t kept in Ireland until 1864.) We let whole villages be swept away by starvation, cholera, typhus, and politics. A Death Dealing Famine: the Great Hunger in Ireland, Christine Kinealy, Pluto Press, 1997. Major famine was nothing new to Ireland, though. For instance, about a century earlier, in 1741, about 300,000 had died, perhaps 13 percent of the population, or about one in seven or eight people.

From 1943 to 1945, heavy rains destroyed part of Bengal’s rice crop. Although its rice supply was still a million tons higher than it had been in 1941, between 3.5 and 3.8 million of us, mostly kids, died. We killed them with patchy infrastructure, profiteering, hoarding, denial, disease, disinterest, and politics. Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Amartya Sen, Oxford University Press, 1981.

Today, despite having more food globally than all of us alive need, we let famine continue in the horn of Africa—particularly Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, and Djibouti. We’re still trapped in a mirrored hall of political desire. Ignorance, disinterest, shortsightedness, power-hunger, and wishful thinking let us see only what we wish to see. It doesn’t matter how powerful our technology becomes if we choose not to use it.

Various chemists, faced with mountains of now nearly worthless calcium carbine in both Europe and the United States, then tried various things. In 1903, two German dyers, Adolph Frank and Nikodem Caro, ran nitrogen over hot calcium carbide, accidentally producing calcium cyanamide, the world’s first artificial fertilizer. They did that not to produce fertilizer but to produce cyanides to help extract gold from its ores (which is sodium cyanide’s chief use today). They formed a company to do precisely that, the Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt, now called Degussa, AG. In 1905, two more German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, developed a completely different, high-pressure way to make sodium nitrate, also a fertilizer. The Frank-Caro process initially nearly destroyed them commercially, though, since it was initially cheaper. Then, during World War I, Germany turned back to the Haber-Bosch process, but not to make fertilizers—to make explosives. The Chemical Industry: 1900-1930, International Growth and Technological Change, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1971. The Chemical Industry During the Nineteenth Century. A Study of the Economic Aspect of Applied Chemistry in Europe and North America, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1958.

The story is even longer, stranger, and more involved than this brief note suggests, containing many more blind alleys and unexpected twists and turns, and altering the politics of many nations, including Germany, France, Britain, Chile, and the United States. Not to mention the consequences of guano, gaslight, the electric light, welding, steel, explosives, poison gas, hydroelectrics, liquid oxygen, the dynamo, famine, the Nazis, and both world wars. Someone should write a book about this. It should be told to every schoolchild as their very first lesson that the world doesn’t work anything like they’ve been told.

Also, all the changes catalyzed yet another network of tools made by another network of early industrialists in Britain (Thomas Highs, John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton). They built the early machines of Britain’s textile industry. That then became one of the first killer apps of the new steam tech. Also, all those people needed yet another network of people (Jethro Tull, Robert Bakewell, Charles Colling, and others). Their farm innovations helped Britain raise its food supply until it could almost feed itself. And to top all that off, add 30 years of great growing weather in Britain from 1720 to 1750.

The productivity of land in England may have more than doubled between 1700 and 1850, with a large jump coming after 1750, although the largest part of the increase came after 1800. The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700-1870, Tom Williamson, Exeter University Press, 2002. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850, Mark Overton, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

It would be wrong to assume that Britain in 1776 was already well-off, just because a tiny percentage of its population now were. The Poor Laws were still in full force, and for good reason—most of the population were still starving, or near starvation. They were also strictly tied to the land—and not just in an farming sense, but also in a legal sense. To travel, the poor needed passes, which they rarely got. For example, on May 28th, 1795, a bill slightly ameliorated the travel problem: “Many industrious poor persons, chargeable to the parish, township, or place where they live, merely from want of work there, would in any other place where sufficient employment is to be had, maintain themselves and families without being burthensome to any parish, township, or place; and such poor persons are for the most part compelled to live in their own parishes, townships, or places, and are not permitted to inhabit elsewhere, under pretence that they are likely to become chargeable to the parish, township, or place into which they go for the purpose of getting employment, although the labour of such poor persons might, in many instances, be very beneficial to such parish, township, or place.” Poor Removal Bill, 35 George III, Chapter 101, (To Prevent the Removal of Poor Persons, Until They Shall Become Actually Chargeable). The bill explicitly excluded pregnant females, as the law had done for centuries already—they were the least able to work and the most expensive to support.

Henry VIII had continued a major push to bring iron making to England, by importing foreign ironworkers. His father, Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had started the push in the 1490s, after he stole the throne. (For example, he started the first blast furnace in England in 1491.) But it was only by the 1540s, under his son, that industry in England really started to take off. The push continued under Elizabeth I, Henry VIII’s daughter, who continued the import of foreign experts. She increased the production of brass and glass in England. All three sovereigns lived in great fear of invasion. And iron-, brass-, glass-, and ship- production all needed massives numbers of trees. For example, a battleship might need more than 2,000 100-year-old oak trees. Wealdean Iron, Ernest Straker, G. Bell & Sons, 1931. The Iron Industry of the Weald, Henry Cleere and David Crossley, Jeremy Hodgkinson (editor), Second Edition, Merton Priory Press, 1995.

The high price of grain during (and artifically propped up after) the Napoleonic wars, compounded the problem. “No doubt, a labourer, whose income was only £20 a year, would, in general, act wisely in substituting hasty-pudding, barley bread, boiled milk, and potatoes, for bread and beer; but in most parts of this county, he is debarred not more by prejudice, than by local difficulties, from using a diet that requires cooking at home. The extreme dearness of fuel in Oxfordshire, compels him to purchase his dinner at the baker’s; and, from his unavoidable consumption of bread, he has little left for cloaths, in a country where warm cloathing is most essentially wanted.” Quoted from: The State of the Poor: or a history of the labouring classes in England, from the Conquest to the present period; in which are particularly considered, their domestic economy, with respect to diet, dress, fuel, and habitation; and the various plans which, from time to time, have been proposed and adopted for the relief of the poor: together with parochial reports relative to the administration of work-houses, and houses of industry; the state of the Friendly Societies, and other public institutions; in several agricultural, commercial and manufacturing, districts. With a large appendix; containing a comparative and chronological table of the prices of labour, of provisions, and of other commodities; an account of the poor in Scotland; and many original documents on subjects of national importance, Frederick Morton Eden, Volume II, B. & J. White, G. & G. Robinson, T. Payne, R. Faulder, T. Egerton, J. Debrett, and D. Bremner, 1797, page 587.

It was nonsense, of course. To see just how dumb his idea of motion was, drop three marbles of equal weight. They hit at the same time. Now glue two together, then drop all three again. They still hit at the same time. Yet, were Aristotle right, the two you glued together, being heavier, would hit first. But none of us back then did any such test. Otherwise, we would have laughed at him. So his guess became dogma for us—for over two millennia.

Before you snigger at Aristotle’s muddy thinking, remember when he lived. Back then, he was far from alone in avoiding tests. For example, Plato, his tutor, would never dirty his hands to check an idea. Aristotle was actually more practical than many other early thinkers, but he clearly didn’t test his ideas about motion either. Perhaps he thought them too obvious. Or perhaps, as the smartest kid on his block, he rarely had anyone to answer to but himself.

Aristotle’s completely wrong physics is still intuitive for most of us today, including first-year university physics students. (Don’t believe it? Ask your friends what would happen if they dropped a watermelon and a grape at the same time.) Newtonian physics is still counter-intuitive to most of us today. For example, most of us believe that a constant force applied to a body will produce constant velocity. That’s wrong. And Einsteinian relativity is still completely unknown, never mind counter-intuitive, to most of us today. “Intuitive Physics,” D. R. Proffitt, M. K. Kaiser, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Lynn Nadel (editor), Nature Publishing Group, 2003, pages 632-637. The Unnatural Nature of Science, Lewis Wolpert, Harvard University Press, 1993. Uncommon sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, Alan Cromer, Oxford University Press, 1993. “Common Sense Concepts about Motion,” I. Halloun, D. Hestenes, American Journal of Physics, 53(11):1056-1065, 1985.

Early steam engines created a partial vacuum in the piston chamber when an outside weight (the thing the steam engine is designed to move, for example, water in a mine) pulls up a piston. That vacuum then fills with steam from the boiler. Injecting a little water condenses the steam to water vapor, which creates a partial vacuum in the piston chamber, which draws down the piston again, and the cycle repeats.

Before we could even make a vacuum, and thus one day a steam engine, Galileo, Berti, Benedetti, and Torricelli in Italy; Stevin in Belgium; Pascal in France; and others, first had to expose Aristotle’s misstep. Before there could be a Watt in Scotland there was a Guericke in Germany; a Papin and de Caus in France; a della Porta and Branca in Italy; a Boyle and a Hooke in England. In turn, they built on William Gilbert in England—who, as far back as 1600, guessed that outer space was a vacuum. De Magnete magneticisique corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure; Physiologia nova, plurimis et argumentis et experimentis demonstrata, William Gilbert of Colchester, London, 1600.

It took millennia of accident for us to figure out all the knowledge we needed, and to develop all the tools and skills we needed, to build an efficient steam engine. All that came together only in the eighteenth century. Of course, none of that explains why one arose in the eighteenth century and not later. However it suggests that no industrial reaction network could have built one before the eighteenth century. It arose then and not before because of a long and unplanned chain of reactions going back millennia.

By the way, Sixtus also tried to kick out Rome’s 18,000 prostitutes. After all, they were supposedly useless in a city of celibates. But no amount of engineering could shift that particular stone. “Seen and known: prostitutes in the cityscape of late-sixteenth-century Rome,” E. S. Cohen, Renaissance Studies, 12(3):392-409, 1998, page 404.

First-rate workmen in machinery did not as yet exist; they were only in process of education. Nearly everything had to be done by hand. The tools used were of a very imperfect kind. A few ill-constructed lathes, with some drills and boring-machines of a rude sort, constituted the principal furniture of the workshop....

Watt endeavoured to remedy the defect by keeping certain sets of workmen to special classes of work, allowing them to do nothing else. Fathers were induced to bring up their sons at the same bench with themselves, and initiate them in the dexterity which they had acquired by experience; and at Soho it was not unusual for the same precise line of work to be followed by members of the same family for three generations. In this way as great a degree of accuracy of a mechanical kind was arrived at was practicable under the circumstances. But notwithstanding all this care, accuracy of fitting could not be secured so long as the manufacture of steam-engines was conducted mainly by hand.” Industrial Biography: Iron Workers And Tool Makers, Samuel Smiles, John Murray, 1863, Chapter X.

Allen convincingly argues that in Britain, as opposed to France and China, labor was expensive and capital and energy were cheap. The substitution of capital and energy for labor was then economically forced. This is a great argument. However, it doesn’t explain why Britain was able to supply the machinery and know-how to accomplish that substitution, and why that particular substitution then went on to trigger such huge changes. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Robert C. Allen, Cambridge University Press, 2009. Although, see Killough for a sketch of an earlier version of this argument: International Trade, Hugh Baxter Killough, McGraw-Hill, 1938, pages 83-84.

Note that the proper name for ‘husband’ in Akkadian was mutu; bêlu was its designation. Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, Jean Bottéro, translated by Antonia Nevill, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, page 115. All the listed languages are Semitic. (There are many more: Aramaic, Ethiopian, Gurage, and so on.) But Indo-European languages are similiar in some ways. The analogous root word seems to be póit, or poti-s. According to Pokorny’s proposed Proto-Indo-European derivation it means “owner, host, master, husband.” Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Julius Pokorny, 1959, page 842. That word has cognates in Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, and Hittite. But based purely on the words, Indo-European women may have been somewhat more equal than Semitic women since it also has feminine forms in Proto-Indo-European (but not in Proto-Semitic). Perhaps the difference is between farmers and herders.

Women were not always as constrained in agrarian societies. For example, in our very earliest literate one, in Sumeria four millennia ago, women could be brewers, bakers, tavern-keepers, and priestesses (but not soldiers). Women mostly couldn’t be scribes (although some celibate priestesses could write), but could hold property, including slaves. They could even sometimes divorce, sort of: if a woman’s husband committed adultery, she could sue for divorce; but if she committed adultery, she’d be drowned. In the main and across time, men had far more freedom than women in all agrarian societies everywhere and everywhen. But to look only at agrarian societies because they represent the bulk of our societies today is to overfocus. Pastoralists (herders, like say the very early Hebrews before they settled in Canaan) are different. And nomads (like the Eurasian horseclans) are different again. As are actual hunter-gatherers.

For millennia, however, men and women had well-defined roles. In China, for example, the saying is nan geng nü zhi (men plow women weave). For millennia, agrarian synergy had forced women all over the world into baby-making. When you’re a perpetual baby-machine, the three jobs that best fit you are child watching, home food production, and home clothing production. When some of us were speaking languages like Akkadian, those jobs were spinning thread and weaving, and milling flour and cooking. But in the nineteenth century such tasks began to matter far less than before. Our new factories and industrial farms were pumping out mass-produced food and clothes in vast peristaltic waves. Clothes got so cheap that many of us could afford more than one set. Food also got cheaper and cheaper. Child watching costs also declined as cities grew and schools ballooned. All three of the traditional female occupations grew less economically valuable. Women found other things to do, things that paid money.

But that’s not our most popular explanation for why the change happened. Instead we often prefer hero stories. To make our hero stories work, we must assume a lot. For example, to explain why women’s lives didn’t change for millennia we assume that our species had to wait all that time for the right woman to be born. She then showed us the error of our ways. But to make that work, we must assume yet more. We must assume that all our male ancestors were ruthless. And we must assume that all our female ancestors were cowed by that ruthlessness—until the birth of our brave hero. Such a story could work. But what about all our groups that still limit women’s choices today? Many do. Women in Afghanistan, for example, lead far different lives than women in Iceland. Why? To answer that we then assume that something must be wrong with them. Either that or they’re brainwashed monkeys.

Suppose all that were true. Why though did the birth of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1815 lead to change while the birth of an Anne Hutchinson in 1591 or a Mary Wollstonecraft in 1759 didn’t? Why didn’t the birth of Pharaoh Hatshepsut change Egyptian women’s lives 3,500 years ago? Why didn’t Empress Wu change women’s lives in China? Or Elizabeth I in England? Or Catherine I in Russia? And why do women today lead different lives in our industrial nations versus our non-industrial ones?

For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of the future Mary Shelley, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in England in 1792, during the French Revolution. At the time, it was considered inflammatory. Today, it’s considered seminal. A century later, though, in 1891, Henrietta Muller (whose penname was Helena B. Temple) wrote that, “One of the things which always humiliated me very much was the way in which women’s interests and opinions were systematically excluded from the World’s Press. I was mortified too, that our cause should be represented by a little monthly leaflet, not worthy of the name of a newspaper called the Women’s Suffrage Journal. I realised of what vital importance it was that women should have a newspaper of their own through which to voice their thoughts, and I formed the daring resolve that if no one else better fitted for the work would come forward, I would try and do it myself...” Women’s journals of the nineteenth century, part 1, The women’s penny paper and women’s herald, 1888-1893, microfilm collection, Adam Matthew, 1997. See also Feminist Periodicals, 1855-1984; an Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International titles, David Doughan and Denise Sanchez (editors), Harvester, 1987. Despite all the agitation since at least 1792, it wasn’t until 1918 that 1918 that all adult men, and all women over 30, could vote in Britain. It wasn’t until 1920 that all adult women could vote in the United States. It wasn’t until 1928 that all adult women could vote in Britain.

But that didn’t make the United States unusual. Britain, and the rest of Eurasia, wasn’t much different, except for being more urban. That pattern had held for millennia. For example, in seventeenth-century England, Shakespeare could read, but neither of his daughters could. The pattern wasn’t uniform though. Small newly rich places could be different. For instance, in fourteenth-century Florence, Dante pined for the good old days—back before rich Florentine women grew so uppity. (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XV.) “Gender and Civic Authority: Sexual Control in a Medieval Italian Town,” C. Lansing, Journal of Social History, 31(1):33-59, 1997, page 42.

Mostly though, wherever the plow had touched down women had fallen over, supine and silent. Thus, nineteenth-century British women were, by law, inferior to men. Married women didn’t even exist, legally. They were home-bound, unable to vote, barely allowed to trade. They also had to be widows before they could control their own property. Outside of brothels and nunneries, half of us in 1830, in the United States, Britain, and everywhere else, were wards of the other half, not counting slaves and natives.

In 1860, an estimated 12,106 people lived in Bridgeport. Population of the 100 largest cities and other urban places in the United States: 1790 TO 1990, Population Division Working Paper Number 27, United States Bureau of the Census, 1998.

Incidentally, Bishop also lists manufactory occupations, with a breakdown by male and female, for many towns, notably Hartford, where Samuel Colt had his gun manufactory. It had a much larger spread of female occupations (but then, it was a much larger town than Bridgeport), however, the top three female occupations were still clothing of one kind or another. The largest group was 595 women in clothing. Then 512 women in ‘silk, sewing.’ Then 409 in hosiery. Then 302 in paper. Philadelphia was much larger still, and so had an even wider spread of industries.

The Comstock Act of 1873 (U. S. Statutes At Large, Vol. XVII, p. 598), reads, in part: “That whoever, within the District of Columbia or any of the Territories of the United States, or other place within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, shall sell, or lend, or give away, or in any manner exhibit, or shall offer to sell, or to lend, or to give away, or in any manner to exhibit, or shall otherwise publish or offer to publish in any manner, or shall have in his possession, for any such purpose or purposes, any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument, or other article of an immoral nature, or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section hereinbefore mentioned, can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in anywise make any of such articles, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction thereof in any court of the United States having criminal jurisdiction in the District of Columbia, or in any Territory or place within the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States, where such misdemeanor shall have been committed; and on conviction thereof, he shall be imprisoned at hard labor in the penitentiary for not less than six montns nor more than five years for each offence, or fined not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two thousand dollars, with costs of court.” United States Duties on Imports, 1877, Lewis Heyl, W. H. & O. H. Morrison, 1877, page 144.

Even today, some sex differences remain. For example, since 1998, selling a dildo or vibrator in Alabama could result in a year of jail and a $10,000 fine. Sex toy sales are also illegal in Georgia and Texas, and are restricted in Louisiana and Tennessee. As of February, 2007, The Alabama ruling was once again under appeal (United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, D. C. Docket Number 98-01938-CV-5). Erection-enhancers, like Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra, however, are legal in those states. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, Andrea Tone, Hill and Wang, 2002. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. American Sex Machines: The Hidden History of Sex at the U. S. Patent Office, Hoag Levins, Adams Media Corporation, 1996.

It’s not impossible that sex differences under the law won’t completely vanish until the consequences of sexual acts normalize between the sexes. If so, that’s going to take a long time, although there are signs of it ahead. There’s already been at least one ‘parentless baby.’ A heterosexual couple wanted a child but the husband was sterile and the wife doubly so: not only could she not produce fertile eggs, she also couldn’t carry a baby to term. The couple contracted with a married woman to do the job. Two anonymous people donated sperm and eggs. A fertility clinic brought the egg and sperm together, then implanted the resulting conceptus in the rented womb. The resulting child thus had at least three mothers: an intent-mother, an egg-mother, and a gestational-mother, and at least three fathers: an intent-father, a sperm-father, and the gestational-mother’s husband. While the fetus was gestating, the original couple divorced. The child was born a month later. Who gets custody? Buzzanca v. Buzzanca, 61 California Court of Appeal, 4th District, 1410, 1998. On appeal, the baby, christened Jaycee Buzzanca, was awarded to the original couple, even though they were now divorced and had no biological tie to the baby girl. “The Shadowlands—Secrets, Lies, and Assisted Reproduction,” G. J. Annas, The New England Journal of Medicine, 339(13):935-939, 1998. In 1999 a man in England who wanted to be the father of a motherless baby contracted with an American egg donor, fertility clinic, and surrogate mother. He now has triplets. “I’m the daddy,” Denise Winterman, BBC News, May 17th, 2006.

We’re also now working on artificial wombs. The possibility of men getting pregnant, or cows carrying human embryos, or full-term artificial wombs is pure science fiction—today. In 1997, Yoshinori Kuwabara, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Juntendo University School of Medicine, grew 17-week-old goat fetuses for two days in amniotic tanks with artificial umbilical cords to deliver nutrients and remove wastes. In 2002, Hung-Ching Liu, Cornell University’s Centre for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, grew human blastulas for six days in an artificial womb. The womb lacked veins so the blastulas could not properly attach to get food and eliminate waste. Further, human embryos can now be brought to term outside the womb as early as 23 weeks after fertilization. (Rumaisa Rahman, a baby born in December, 2004, was 15 weeks premature.) It’s only a matter of time before those two curves cross. “Goat Fetuses Disconnected from the Placenta, but Reconnected to an Artificial Placenta, Display Intermittent Breathing Movements,” S. Kozumaa, H. Nishinaa, N. Unnoa, H. Kagawaa, A. Kikuchia, T. Fujiia, K. Babab, T. Okaic, Y. Kuwabarad, Y. Taketania, Biology of the Neonate, 75(6):388-397, 1999. “Artificial wombs: An out of body experience,” J. Knight, Nature, 419(6903):106-107, 2002.

Black and native women had, and still have, even fewer options. Even after genocide and legal slavery ended, many were at work outside the home, married or single, but only in service or on the farm. By 1890 genocide had reduced the native population from perhaps five million to about a quarter million. That is, 19 out of every 20 were dead. Native fertility rates before 1890 are unknown; however after that date they were high, yet native mortality rates were so high that the native population barely changed. From 1890 it took 70 years, until 1960, to double. Black rates before 1850 are also unknown. After 1850, they too were higher than white rates, but they also fell as white rates did. However, even today they’re still higher than white rates. Black infant mortality was also far higher. It too fell, but today it too is still higher than white rates. Black life expectancy is also still lower today. Today, urban-rural differences in the United States have vanished. Black-white and native-white differences still haven’t. “American Indian Mortality in the Late Nineteenth Century: the Impact of Federal Assimilation Policies on a Vulnerable Population,” J. D. Hacker, M. R. Haines, Working Paper 12572, National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), 2006. “The Growing American Indian Population, 1960-1990: Beyond Demography,” J. S. Passel, in Changing Numbers, Changing Needs: American Indian Demography and Public Health, Gary D. Sandefur, Ronald R. Rindfuss, and Barney Cohen (editors), National Academies Press, pages 79-102, 1996. “American Indian Fertility Patterns: 1910 and 1940 to 1980,” R. Thornton, G. D. Sandefur, C. M. Snipp, American Indian Quarterly, 15(3):359-367, 1991. A Population History of the United States, Herbert Klein, Cambridge University Press, 2004. A Population History of North America, Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel (editors), Cambridge University Press, 2001. “A Statistical Reconstruction of the Black Population of the United States, 1880-1970: Estimates of True Numbers by Age and Sex, Birth Rates, and Total Fertility,” A J. Coale, N. W. Rives, Population Index, 39(1):3-36, 1973. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, Claudia Goldin, Oxford University Press, 1990, Table 2.1 and 2.2, pages 17-18. Statistical Abstract of the United States, United States Census Bureau, 1993.

The idea that labor shortage encouraged machines in the United States is hardly new. It seems to have first been enunciated in: American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century: The Search for Labour Saving Inventions, H. J. Habakkuk, Cambridge University Press, 1962. See, for example, The Emergence of Industrial America: Strategic Factors in American Economic Growth Since 1870, Peter George, State University of New York Press, 1982, pages 37-47. But that pressure wasn’t enough. The United States also needed the new precision machines that were only then becoming available because of decades of steam engine developments in Britain, and of course the import of French ideas about parts interchangeability following decades of effort in France. Telling the story from the point of view of any one nation alone, as is still common today, falsifies it.

Being land-rich and labor-poor wasn’t enough by itself either. If it were, then Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, or Uruguay might have developed mass production first. Various historical accidents (examined earlier) made the United States peculiarly suited to adopting new machines quickly. But the main reason it could adopt those new machines at all was that there were new machines to adopt. In Britain, machines and machine tools were only then becoming reliable and powerful enough to begin to replace our labor. In turn, that was thanks to the autocatalytic effects of steam engine. Without the precision tools that British machinists were then busily creating—and which the United States was just as busily buying, copying, smuggling, or outright stealing—mass production in the United States would’ve been impossible. So the United States did what Britain and France couldn’t, but were it not for France and Britain it would’ve been just as trapped as they were.

“The Americans carry out the factory system, the well-planned division of labour, to a greater extent than we do. They have not more hands than are requisite to do the work which is to be done; and they have not before their minds that fear of strikes, and grumblings and discontent, which frequently deter inventors from introducing new machines in England. Among us, guns and pistols are handwork, made in pieces by artisans who use the hammer and file, and other hand-tools; but in the United States the art is regarded as a kind of engineering, in which steam-power and beautiful machines are employed.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, “What Is A Revolver?” Anonymous, Number 519, December 10th, 1853. (Robert Chambers is the likely author of this piece; he often wrote anonymously to fill his journal.)

As Adam Smith noted in 1776, “[Normally a pinmaker] could scarce... make one pin in a day.... [But now] the whole work... is divided into a number of branches.... One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top....” In other words, pinmakers specialized and together they formed a reaction network. Before that, a pinmaker could only make about one pin a day. Now, the same pinmaker could average around 5,000 pins a day. The price of pins dropped like a rock. By dividing labor we could thus make an assembly line. By adding a steam engine we could also power all the tools on that line. That alone was a huge change, but mass production also involves yet another idea—precision parts. While we could divide our labor in factories to make pins in volume, those pins needn’t be precision-made. Conversely, we could make precision pins in low volume in factories without dividing our labor—painstakingly and by hand. Our production explosion happened only when all four ideas came together.

Mass production is thus a form of volume production in which we divide both the making of and the putting together of standard parts into a series of steps so simple that we can make tools do them. We can then divide the labor of making and putting together the parts for those tools, thus closing the recursive loop.

Factories in China 1,000 years ago: “Organization and Management in the Midst of Societal Transformation: The People’s Republic of China,” A. S. Tsui, C. B. Schoonhoven, M. W. Meyer, L. Chung-Ming, G. T. Milkovich, Organization Science, 15(2):133-144, 2004.

Division of labor is old: Finley cites Xenophon 2,400 years ago explaining why artisans specialize in cities. The Ancient Economy, M. I. Finley, University of California Press, 1973, page 135. However, any large mass of us will specialize—for example, in armies. Probably the idea is so old that it’s impossible to date.

Adam Smith’s pin-making example: “[A pinmaker] could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. But in the way in which this business is now carried on, not only the whole work is a peculiar trade, but it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving, the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some factories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.... Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan Edition, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, Book I, Chapter I, page 3.

Mass production isn’t just volume: For example, Abraham Darby’s brass castings for cast iron, or Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery molds for kiln pottery, or Christopher Polhem’s cogwheels milling machine, or any number of other such items (bootlaces, buttons, coins, cannon balls, and so on). All were in volume, yet none were ‘mass produced.’ In 1452, Gutenberg had made the lead type for his printing press in bulk, but that wasn’t ‘mass production’ either.

In Britain until the 1840s over 400 crimes carried the death penalty. Cutting down a sapling, damaging Westminster Bridge, being a very malicious child, stealing a letter—all were hanging offenses. Children weren’t excepted. From the age of seven, kids convicted of stealing toys, or a spoon, or a pork pie, could be jailed or hung. Or they could be transported—sent to a colony for hard labor—in effect, enslaved. Of the transported, some of those “little depraved felons” went for life. Others went for seven or fourteen years. One boy stole 21 umbrellas and was transported to today’s Tasmania for seven years. He was 11. Another boy also got seven years in Tasmania. He stole three boxes of toys. He was nine. In 1851, perhaps 100,000 children roamed the streets of London alone. Child labor, starvation, disease, near-slavery, harlotry, illiteracy, crime, and bastardy were normal. Kids as young as five were bought and sold, brutalized and exploited, and put to work up chimneys, down coal mines, or in the factories and fields. ‘Baby farming,’ the paid murder of unwanted infants, was an industry. Such ‘farmers’ might accept dozens of babies at once—supposedly to raise, but mostly to kill ‘accidentally.’ They even advertised in the newspapers. Dickens didn’t have to make up anything in Oliver Twist. What he had to do was tone it down.

At the time, many crimes in Britain had only one punishment—hanging. Spending a month in the company of gypsies, stealing goods worth 5 shillings, impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, blacking up at night, being a runaway sailor—all were hanging offenses. But the penalty was so harsh that in practice few were actually hanged, so transportation (essentially penal slavery) was a popular alternative. Also, pregnant women, young children, clergymen, anyone who could read (or pretend to) well enough to pass muster, and—of course—anyone who was rich, often received pardons or reduced penalties, like whipping or branding or pillorying. The laws were beginning to be softened by the 1830s—after huge postwar political unrest from 1816 on, largely having to do with the way the rich treated the poor—but many such laws were still in force by 1851. Crime and Punishment in England: A Sourcebook, Andrew Barrett and Christopher Harrison (editors), Routledge, 2001. “London Crime and the Making of the ‘Bloody Code,’ 1689-1718,” J. M. Beattie, Stilling the Grumbling Hive: the Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750, Lee Davison, Tim Hitchcock, Tim Keirn, and Robert B. Shoemaker (editors), St. Martin’s Press, 1992. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, Peter Linebaugh, Penguin, 1991. Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-century England, Frank McLynn, Routledge, 1989.

Children transported: Two children in Birmingham were sentenced to be transported to Australia on January 5th, 1844. John Locksmith (also known as William Joach), aged 14, got 14 years, and George Wort, aged 15, got seven years. Home Office 11/15: Convict Transportation Registers, 1846-1848, pages 190 and 225. The National Archives, Kew, England.

The phrase “little depraved felons” is that of Governor Arthur, of Port Arthur, in Australia. The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, Knopf, 1986, page 408.

100,000 child vagrants in London: The Seven Curses of London, James Greenwood, Stanley River, 1869. See also Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth Century London, Heather Shore, Boydell Press, 1999. “Histories of Crime and Modernity,” Andrew Davies and Geoffrey Pearson (editors), special issue of the British Journal of Criminology, 39(1), 1999.

A typical baby-farmer ad read: “NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT -- The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.” The Seven Curses of London, James Greenwood, Stanley River, 1869, page 23.

In Britain, after passage of the new Poor Law in 1834, an unwed mother bore the sole financial responsibility until her child turned 16. Many poor unwed mothers couldn’t support their offspring, especially if she was young and had been impregnated by the master of the house or shop or factory in which she worked. Then too there was the stigma of having an illegitimate child. So what many mothers wanted was to make the child disappear. But it was illegal to kill your children (or at least, to be caught at it). Baby farmers existed for those (many) mothers who couldn’t bring themselves to kill their own children, or who didn’t want to risk it, or who chose to believe that their children would be raised properly, albeit very cheaply. Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870-1908, George K. Behlmer, Stanford University Press, 1982. Baby farming also existed in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in the United States until at least 1917. One Chicago ‘farmer’s slogan was: “It’s cheaper and easier to buy a baby for $100.00 than to have one of your own.” Baby Farms in Chicago: An Investigation Made for the Juvenile Protective Association, Arthur Alden Guild Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago, 1917.

Slavery is today no longer legal, but it still exists. Today it’s common to say that we abolished legal slavery in the nineteenth century ‘because it was bad.’ But that can’t possibly be all that matters. If it were, why didn’t we abandon slavery millennia before? If the explanation for that then amounts to ‘because our ancestors were bad,’ then why are there an estimated 200,000 slaves today just in the United States alone? Why are 27 million of us still slaves today? Why must 250 million of our children between the ages of 5 and 14 still labor today? Why are we forcing perhaps 60 million of those children to become prostitutes or soldiers? Aren’t those things bad too? We’ve been slavers and slaves ever since we phase changed into farming and herding, millennia ago. The Hebrews kept slaves. The Maya kept slaves. The Bantu kept slaves. The Persians, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Sumerians—anyone and everyone kept slaves. Even when we tried to abandon slavery we rarely succeeded. For instance, the first effort in Europe to ban slavery came in 655. Europe still kept slaves 1,300 years later. We had to do much more than talk before we could do without slavery—and we still haven’t fully done so.

Nor did we change our division of labor simply because of the steam engine alone. The United States had steam engines early on but still kept legal slaves up to the late nineteenth century. Japan, Germany, China, and Russia all had steam engines by the late nineteenth century, but they still kept penal slaves in the twentieth century. In short, througout our farming history, we all wanted slaves for our fields, our armies, our beds. It didn’t much matter whether we had a king, a constitutional monarchy, a federal republic, a collective. It didn’t much matter whether we were Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Polytheists. It didn’t matter where we lived, nor what languages we spoke, nor what we looked like. Land and bodies were wealth. Legal slavery began to end worldwide only with our phase change into industry. That helped alter whether slavery was legal or not, whether our children had to work or not, whether women got paid for their labor or not, and what jobs men did.

“The United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America’s largest anti-slavery organization, says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State Department’s director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: “That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.” Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time.” Quoted from “The Girls Next Door,” P. Landesman, New York Times, January 25th, 2004. Batstone estimates that there are 200,000 slaves in the United States today. Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade--and How We Can Fight It, David Batstone, HarperOne, 2007.

The United Nations International Labor Organization estimates a minimum of 12.3 million slaves worldwide today. Bales estimates 27 million, a widely accepted guess. A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, E. Benjamin Skinner, Free Press, 2008. A Global Alliance Against Forced Labour, International Labour Office, United Nations, 2005. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, Kevin Bales, University of California Press, 2000.

“Year after year, NGOs presented more and more examples of the same inquitous practices, as well as new ones. Members [of the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery] listened to governments’ claims that they were eliminating them, only to hear a year later from NGOs that nothing had changed. The only certainty was that if there were any results they would be long delayed. While the UN talked and governments made excuses, more people fell into debt-bondage, more women were forced into marriage, more children were sold and ill-treated, and more workers were exploited.” Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem, Suzanne Miers, Rowman Altamira, 2003, page 404.

For a sampling of the wider history, see: Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery In The Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, And Italy, 1500-1800, Robert Davis, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy, Steven A. Epstein, Cornell University Press, 2001. Slavery in the Arab World, Murray Gordon, New Amsterdam Books, 1989. Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, two volumes, John Ralph Willis (editor), Routledge, 1986. Slavery and Human Progress, David Brion Davis, Oxford University Press, 1984. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Orlando Patterson, Harvard University Press, 1982.

William the Conqueror, too, is often alleged to have banned slavery in Britain after the conquest in 1066, but what he actually did was the same that any other European ruler did—he banned export slavery of English slaves (maybe because he didn’t get a cut on those sales?). It’s also often reported that various religious leaders, Saint Wulfstan or Anslem or Archbishop Lanfranc or Saint Patrick, for example, ended slavery in England—or even Europe as a whole. Not so. There were occasional admonitions, for example, after the (first) invasion of Ireland by English barons in the 1160s, but at most they lead to a reduction in Christian export slavery. In short: in Europe, it was ok to have slaves, it was ok for them to be Christian, it was ok to export slaves, too. The European abolition effort in medieval times was primarily about the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands.

Finally, it’s often stated that even if Christianity itself accepted slavery that after the Protestant Reformation it died out in Europe because of the new Protestant zeal. It’s true that it mostly did die out after the Reformation, and it’s true that Puritans, in particular, who were themselves badly treated, were more against slavery than normal, but it’s also true that many still kept slaves. William Penn, for example, a Quaker, who also owned Pennsylvania, was both a slave holder and a slave trader. England didn’t make slavery on English soil illegal until 1796 (not 1772 as is often reported; the James Somerset case in 1772 prevented slave recapture in England, but the idea of slaves as property was only overturned in 1796). Nor was English slavery particularly special within Europe. For example, thanks to their longships, the Vikings earlier took Norse, Saxon, Irish, Gallic, Italian, and Slav slaves from all over Europe and sold them to other Europeans, to the Muslims, and to each other. Also, from the eighth century on, North Africans—from Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, known at the time as the Barbary coast—took slaves in England and Ireland for centuries, as well as slaves all over the North Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, from Iceland to Palestine—including Miguel de Cervantes, who was enslaved off the Catalan coast on September 26th, 1575, 30 years before he wrote Don Quixote.

Recently, consensus seems to be forming that no matter when the peak is, economic and political decisions taken within two decades of it will make a huge difference on its mitigation. “Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production,” United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-07-283, 2007. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Recent forecasts,” R. L. Hirsch, World Oil, 228(4), 2007. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation & Risk Management,” R. L. Hirsch, R. Bezdek, R. Wendling, United States Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory, 2005. “Long Term World Oil Supply Scenarios - the future is neither as bleak or as rosy as some assert,” J. H. Wood, G. R. Long, D. F. Morehouse, Energy Information Administration, United States Department of Energy, 2004.

Both sides of today’s debate about oil depletion and alternative energy have clear political agendas. They each see the same amount of future oil in the ground in two completely different ways. Huge amounts of power and money—not to mention strong feelings of guilt and shame—depend on what policies each of our countries adopt, so the urge to sway those policy choices one way or the other is strong. However, the data on which such policies might be based is poor—and may even be deliberately distorted in some cases. When giants clash, amateurs can only watch and try to come to as reasonable a conclusion as possible. Those who say that oil production has peaked, or will soon, seem right. Physics favors them. But that still means that we have as much oil left as we’ve used until now. So those who say that we’ll likely invent our way out of disaster also seem right. Economics favors them. That seems to be roughly what those who are most informed seem to be saying on our oil futures markets. That’s where we place long-term public bets about future oil supplies and consumption patterns. There at least, hard data is in constant demand and continuous evaluation. Also, politics matters less there. Futures traders are betting thousands of millions of dollars on being right. Maybe they’re wrong, but so far it doesn’t seem so.

Incidentally, radioactivity is a source of great fear and also of great fearmongering. Most of the radiation you receive over your lifetime (about 82 percent, in the United States) comes from natural sources, including food, no matter how ‘organic.’ About 55 percent comes from radon in your own home (and other structures). Nuclear power plants release far less radiation than coal-fired plants do. Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy, Gwyneth Cravens, Knopf, 2007. “Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash: Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance,” Fact Sheet FS-163-97, United States Geological Survey, 1997. Environmental Aspects of Trace Elements in Coal, D. J. Swaine and F. Goodarzi (editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. “Ionizing radiation exposure of the population of the United States,” National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Report 93, 1987.

The following abstract summarizes where experts think the technology is going over the next four decades: “Subjective probabilistic judgments about future module prices of 26 current and emerging photovoltaic (PV) technologies were obtained from 18 PV technology experts. Fourteen experts provided detailed assessments, including likely future efficiencies and prices under four policy scenarios. While there is considerable dispersion among the judgments, the results suggest a high likelihood that some PV technology will achieve a price of $1.20/Wp by 2030. Only 7 of 18 experts assess a better-than-even chance that any PV technology will achieve $0.30/Wp by 2030; 10 of 18 experts give this assessment by 2050. Given these odds, and the wide dispersion in results, we conclude that PV may have difficulty becoming economically competitive with other options for large-scale, low-carbon bulk electricity in the next 40 years. If $0.30/Wp is not reached, then PV will likely continue to expand in markets other than bulk power. In assessing different policy mechanisms, a majority of experts judged that R&D would most increase efficiency, while deployment incentives would most decrease price. This implies a possible disconnect between research and policy goals. Governments should be cautious about large subsidies for deployment of present PV technology while continuing to invest in R&D to lower cost and reduce uncertainty.” From: “Expert Assessments of Future Photovoltaic Technologies,” A. E. Curtright, M. G. Morgan, D. W. Keith, Environmental Science and Technology, 42(24):9031-9038, 2008. (Note: ‘Wp’ means ’peak Watts,’ that is the wattage that a panel can produce on a bright sunny day. So a price of ‘$1.20/Wp’ means that the panel costs $1.20 for ever watt pumped out on the panel’s best day. Also note that over the past decade, good ratings for panels are in the $4.50/Wp to $5.50/Wp range.)

There are other, more far-out, ideas: Perhaps we could build cheap and reliable suborbital hypersonic scramjets or rocketplanes. We might also use nukes in orbit-changing spacecraft. Or, one day, we might replace rockets with superconducting mass drivers and free-electron launch lasers. We might even figure out how to build a space elevator. Costs would also lower if we already had moon colonists and got them build satellite parts. Or if we already had an orbital power satellite. (Its power could reduce the cost of lunar mining and manufacture.)

For a survey of powersat technology, see: Laying the Foundation for Space Solar Power: An Assessment of NASA’s Space Solar Power Investment Strategy, Committee for the Assessment of NASA’s Space Solar Power Investment Strategy, United States National Research Council, National Academies Press, 2001. Much of scramjet research is classified. Here’s a report giving a good overview of what little is known publically: “A Comparison of Propulsion Concepts for SSTO Reuseable Launchers,” R. Varvill, A. Bond, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, 56:108-117, 2003. Mass drivers and launch lasers are even more speculative: “Preliminary Feasibility Assessment for Earth-To-Space Electromagnetic (Railgun) Launchers,” E. E. Rice, L. A. Miller, R. W. Earhart, NASA Report Number CR-167886, United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1982. For something a lot more speculative, but even bigger-picture, see: The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, Marshall T. Savage, Little Brown, 1994, pages 103-123. The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System, Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling, BC Edwards, 2003.

In the more immediate future though, the private company, SpaceX, became suborbital on March 21st, 2007. Its rocket then achieved orbit on September 28th, 2008. However, its rocket is not the first privately owned orbital rocket; it’s the first private liquid-fueled rocket to achieve orbit. Orbital Sciences Corporation was the first company to orbit its own (sold-fuel) rocket (in 1990).

In the long run, though, orbital power may still be in our future even if we never lower launch costs. Space flight today is like catapulting an egg into a tree. To survive, the egg has to carry its nest with it. That means huge catapults and careful launches. Instead, one day we may first build a nest for the egg in the tree, and only then launch the egg. How might we do that? Getting out of a deep gravity well is like giving birth. Babies with big brains are useful, but they also mean long pregnancies and risky births. Kangaroos, though, bear tiny joeys. They’re about the size of a jelly bean. Pregnancies are short. Births are easy. The joey then crawls into its mother’s pouch and lives on her milk until it matures. One day we might do the same. What we want is brains and hands in orbit. Today we get them by sending big, finicky, costly, one-shot rockets. We do so because we’re sending humans. Never send a human to do a machine’s job. Sending robots into space is already far cheaper than sending humans. Spacebots need neither food nor water, nor a ride home. And if one blows up, so what? Staging missions would then become easier. Instead of everything having to happen in the small window of time before astronauts start to die, mission buildup could go on for years. Lots of small launches could send up fuel and parts, plus more spacebots. Further, our spacebots are getting better all the time, because our computers are getting better all the time.

Of course, none of that is likely to happen soon. One reason we toss eggs into trees is that it’s more exciting that tossing nests into trees. There’s always the chance that the egg will break. So funding for egg-tosses far exceeds funding for nest-tosses. Another thing that may change the picture is if another space race develops. Horse races are exciting and thus attract funding. That will likely continue to be true until nest-launch grows so cheap that we do it anyway. By then we won’t just be using bots to explore space, we’ll also use them to build in space. We might first operate them in orbit, like remote hands, then we might build ones that can build copies of themselves out of rocks and sunlight. If so, they could then build orbital power plants for us out of more rocks and sunlight. Mostly what we’d then be launching is knowledge, and what we’d get back is power.

No one really knows what the cost of humans versus robots in space is, but a possible figure might be between a 10- to 100-fold difference, but that’s just a guess. Estimates of the cost differential vary widely since the missions that each get sent on are so very different. Robots are far less flexible, but humans are vastly inferior in terms of endurance, weight, consumables, cost, and risk.

Space robotics is still in the covered-wagon stage, but there have already been a few in-space experiments (Germany’s ROTEX in 1993, Japan’s ETS-VII in 1997, and Germany’s ROKVISS in 2005). “Ground verification of the feasibility of telepresent on-orbit servicing,” E. Stoll, U. Walter, J. Artigas, C. Preusche, P. Kremer, G. Hirzinger, J. Letschnik, H. Pongrac, Journal of Field Robotics, 26(3):287-307, 2009. Advances in Telerobotics, Manuel Ferre, Martin Buss, Rafael Aracil, Claudio Melchiorri, Carlos Balaguer (editors), Springer, 2007. The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement, David Schrunk, Burton Sharpe, Bonnie L. Cooper, Madhu Thangavelu, Springer Praxis, Second Edition, 2007. “Robotics Component Verification on ISS ROKVISS - Preliminary Results for Telepresence,” C. Preusche, D. Reintsema, K. Landzettel, G. Hirzinger, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 9-15 October, 2006, pages 4595-4601. “Space Robotics—DLR’s Telerobotic Concepts, Lightweight Arms and Articulated Hands,” G. Hirzinger, B. Brunner, K. Landzettel, N. Sporer, J. Butterfaß, M. Schedl, Autonomous Robots, 14(2-3):127-145, 2003.

We have many other energy options, too. In the nearer term, we might find more efficient ways to mine oil from shale or oil sands, or from methane clathrates on the ocean floor. Then there’s bioreactors that extract energy from waste. We can also tailor lifeforms for use in such bioreactors using artificial evolution. We’ve already evolved bacteria to extract heavy metals and sulfur and nitrogen compounds from coal or oil. For example: You can grow hydrothermal bacteria in their normal nutrient bath mixed with small amounts of oil. Then, in stages, grow the survivors with ever higher proportions of oil, until they eat only oil. By that time, all remaining survivors eat only oil. Then add coal in the same staged way. You end with bacteria that can eat coal at high temperatures and pressures. “Biochemical technology for the detoxification of geothermal brines and the recovery of trace metals,” E. T. Premuzic, M. S. Lin, H. Lian, Heavy Metals in the Environment, 2:321-324, 1995.

A similar scheme might make bacteria that could leech oil from shalesands. That would lower the mining price for oil sands and shale oil enough to compete with liquid oil. Or it might even be used to convert our planet’s vast coal reserves into oil. Other research efforts to make genetically modified bacteria, or wholly synthetic cells, that make fuels (like ethanol) are already underway. We can also make oil—it just costs more than digging it out of the ground. We can thermally depolymerize biomass into light crudes, water, and minerals. We can even grow plants to get fuels like ethanol and biodiesel. We can burn waste to make syngas (which is mostly carbon monoxide and hydrogen), then make diesel fuel from that. A new company, Synthetic Genomics, has gotten funding from Exxon Mobile on the hundred-million dollar scale to investigate making biofuels directly from genetically engineered algae. We can also simply burn biomass to make electricity. Plasma processing can convert municipal solid waste (or farm wastes like corn stover or rice straw) into syngas. Then we can steam-reform the syngas to make nearly pure hydrogen.

Hydrogen would be a good byproduct because we could use it to fuel cars and trucks. It’s also clean-burning and can be handled safely. But making it via electrolysis is three times more expensive than gasoline, and ten times more expensive than natural gas. Also, converting all our gas stations and cars and trucks and motorbikes to use hydrogen would be costly. Rich countries have a huge investment in cars and trucks powered by petroleum (whether gasoline or diesel). If they do it slowly enough to avoid severe economic disruption, and if they only have today’s science and technology to do it with, it’ll take decades for them to move from gasoline to hydrogen. On the other hand, hydrogen might be an easier choice for industrializing countries like China and India and Brazil. They don’t yet have as many cars per person. Also, new and relatively cheap pebble-bed nuclear reactors make both hydrogen and electricity. So such countries may convert to hydrogen sooner than rich ones.

Making cheap hydrogen might also be useful if we ever decide to do something about climate change. We’ve just recently learned that, unlike animals, a plant’s metabolism is almost solely governed by its nitrogen supply. Change that, and you change everything. “Universal scaling of respiratory metabolism, size and nitrogen in plants,” P. B. Reich, M. G. Tjoelker, J.-L. Machado, J. Oleksyn, Nature, 439(7075):457-461, 2006. “Dark respiration rate increases with plant size in saplings of three temperate tree species despite decreasing tissue nitrogen and nonstructural carbohydrates,” J. L. Machado, P. B. Reich, Tree Physiology, 26(7):915-923, 2006.

Aluminum makes up 8.2 percent of the earth’s crust. It’s the third most abundant element on earth, after oxygen and silicon. Worldwide, from 1884 to today, our yearly aluminum supply rose from around 200 metric tons to around 22 million. About five million of that is recycled. So our species as a whole now has at least 100,000 times as much aluminum as we did before. And we have it at about 1,000th the price. We now make more aluminum than any other metal, save iron. It’s now so plentiful and cheap that we make throw-away cans and tin-foil with it. That price drop comes through better infrastructure and knowledge. We now know more about the universe than we did in 1884. We also now have more tools than in 1884. We have more trained people, and they’re more highly trained. We also have more and bigger and faster and cheaper mines, railroads, ships, smelters, and the like. Education, exploration, mining, shipping, and processing costs, all have fallen for a good chunk of our species. Lastly, though, the price of aluminum has fallen because of our new energy supplies.

Botanists and ecologists mostly don’t use the word ‘ecogenesis.’ They do however have several related concepts, principally ‘seral succession,’ ‘community assembly,’ ‘pedogenesis,’ and ‘demutation.’ There are also various biome-specific cases, like xerosere, lithosere, and so on. I thought these were either too specific, too technical, or too colorless for a popular science book. A Theory of Forest Dynamics: The Ecological Implications of Forest Succession Models, Herman H. Shugart, The Blackburn Press, 2003. Plant Succession: Theory and Prediction, David C. Glenn-Lewin, Robert K. Peet, and Thomas T. Veblen (editors), Springer, 1992. Ecological Assembly Rules: Perspectives, Advances, Retreats, Evan Weiher and Paul Keddy (editors), Cambridge University Press, 2001. Assembly Rules and Restoration Ecology: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice, Vicky M. Temperton, Richard J. Hobbs, Tim Nuttle, and Stefan Halle (editors), Island Press, 2004.

The idea of succession is old in some ways, young in others. Early forms of it trace back to Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle. “Ecology today: Beyonds the Bounds of Science,” Nature and Resources, 35(2):38-50, 1999. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Clarence J. Glacken, University of California Press, 1976, pages 129-130.

Here is Reginald of Durham on Godric: “[I]n his beginnings, he was wont to wander with small wares around the villages and farmsteads of his own neighborhood; but, in process of time, he gradually associated himself by compact with city merchants. Hence, within a brief space of time, the youth who had trudged for many weary hours from village to village, from farm to farm, did so profit by his increase of age and wisdom as to travel with associates of his own age through towns and boroughs, fortresses and cities, to fairs and to all the various booths of the market-place, in pursuit of his public chaffer.... [T]hen he travelled abroad, first to St. Andrews in Scotland and then for the first time to Rome. On his return, having formed a familiar friendship with certain other young men who were eager for merchandise, he began to launch upon bolder courses, and to coast frequently by sea to the foreign lands that lay around him. Thus, sailing often to and for between Scotland and Britain, he traded in many divers wares and, amid these occupations, learned much worldly wisdom.... [A]t length his great labours and cares bore much fruit of worldly gain. For he laboured not only as a merchant but also as a shipman... to Denmark and Flanders and Scotland; in all which lands he found certain rare, and therefore more precious, wares, which he carried to other parts wherein he knew them to be least familiar, and coveted by the inhabitants beyond the price of gold itself; wherefore he exchanged these wares for others coveted by men of other lands; and thus he chaffered [haggled] most freely and assiduously. Hence he made great profit in all his bargains, and gathered much wealth in the sweat of his brow; for he sold dear in one place the wares which he had bought elsewhere at a small price.” From: Life of Saint Godric of Finchale, Reginald of Durham, in Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, G. G. Coulton (editor), Cambridge University Press, 1918, pages 415-420. See also: “The Benedictines, the Cistercians and the acquisition of a hermitage in twelfth-century Durham,” T. Licence, Journal of Medieval History, 29(4):315-329, 2003. “Durham Priory and its Hermits in the Twelfth Century,” V. Tudor, in Anglo-Norman Durham, David Rollason, Margaret Harvey, and Michael Prestwich (editors), Boydell & Brewer, 1998, pages 67-79. St Cuthbert and the Normans: The Church of Durham, 1071-1153, William M. Aird, Boydell & Brewer, 1998. From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, M. T. Clanchy, Wiley-Blackwell, Second Edition, 1993, pages 237-240. The Hermits, Charles Kingsley, Macmillan, 1913, pages 309-328. Libellus de Vita et Miraculis S. Godrici, Heremitæ de Finchale, Reginaldo Monacho Dunelmensi (Reginald of Durham), Joseph Stevenson (editor), J. B. Nichols and Son, 1847.

The time period coincides with the Viking incursions into Europe. The Vikings were marauding then because of northern Europe’s warming climate. That warming kept the north seas ice-free all year round, but it also changed north European farming. New tools—the wheeled iron plow, the nailed horseshoe, the horsecollar—had started opening virgin land. The forests fell and the villages spread. As produce grew, so did trade. England, with the climate of today’s southern France, grew grapes and exported wine. (And wool and slaves.) It was then rich—well, for northern Europe, anyway. Then in 1066 a bunch of French-speaking ex-Vikings invaded. They called themselves ‘Normans’ rather than Norsemen because they’d invaded France so long before that by then they’d turned French. Meanwhile, their cousins invaded Sicily and Italy. Poverty, ignorance, slavery, and war—a thousand years ago that was Europe, especially northern Europe. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, about all it was good for was furs and slaves.

The horsecollar and nailed horseshoe alone increased crop yields by 50 percent. Since Roman times, horsecollars choked horses when pulling heavy loads. The new horsecollar took the weight off the horse’s neck and put it on the horses’s shoulders, thus relieving it of the threat of strangulation. Since a horse can work for about 3 hours more per day than an ox, animal power no longer was the limiting factor in food production. Land was. The word ‘acre’ originates from that time; it’s the amount of land a horse can plow in one day. The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, Jean Gimpel, Penguin, 1976.

When we think about the world around us, we often assume ceteris paribus, Latin for ‘all else being the same.’ In reality, though, it’s cetera desunt, ‘all else is missing.’ In non-linear networks, ceteris is never paribus. Ecologists have long had to face this chasm separating what we think will happen and what actually happens.

Many of us don’t like uncertainty and will do nearly anything to remove it as a possibility. Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak, MIT Press, 1986. Reasoning and Decision Making, P. N. Johnson-Laird and Eldat Shafir (editors), Blackwell, 1994. Decision-Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment, Irving L. Janis and Leon Mann, Free Press, 1977.

In the stock market it’s called ‘The Greater Fool Theory,’ and it goes something like this: ‘I may be a fool, but since I’m induced to buy this stock now, there should be greater fools out there I can sell it to later.’ For the ridiculous extremes this style of reasoning can drive us to see, for example, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, Roger Lowenstein, Random House, 2001. Inventing Money: The story of Long-Term Capital Management and the legends behind it, Nicholas Dunbar, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.

Scientists fall for such mental shortcuts, too. “Assessing uncertainty in physical constants,” M. Henrion, B. Fischoff, American Journal of Physics, 54(9):791-797, 1986. Uncertainty: A Guide to Dealing with Uncertainty in Quantitative Risk and Policy Analysis, M. Granger Morgan and Max Henrion, Cambridge University Press, 1990. Should We Risk It? Exploring Environmental, Health and Technology Problem Solving, Kammen and Hassenzahl, Princeton University Press, 1999.

The 1963 per capita income figures are from the United States Department of State and the article “Third World Economic Development,” C. Crook, in The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics, David Henderson (editor), Warner Books, 1993. See also “Ghana and South Korea: Explaining Development Disparities,” An Essay in Honor of Carl Rosberg H. H. Werlin, Journal of Asian and African Studies, 29(3-4):205-225, 1994.

Urbanization data is from: “Urban Growth in Korea, 1970-1980: An Application of the Human Ecological Perspective,” S. H. Ko, Korea Journal of Population and Development, 23(1):1-18, 1994.

As of 2007, the International Monetary Fund estimates that GDP (PPP) in Canada is $1,265,838, while in South Korea it’s $1,200,879, making them 13th and 14th in the world. The United States Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook estimates Canada at $1,266,000 and South Korea at $1,201,000, again making them 13th and 14th in world ranking. The World Bank reverses their order, but its estimates are about the same: South Korea at $1,199,270 and Canada at $1,178,205.

Another interesting comparative case is South Korea versus the Philippines. Lectures on Economic Growth, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Harvard University Press, 2002, especially Chapter 3. And of course, South Korea versus North Korea.

“Some 1.8 million child deaths each year as a result of diarrhoea—4,900 deaths each day or an under-five population equivalent in size to that for London and New York combined. Together, unclean water and poor sanitation are the world’s second biggest killer of children. Deaths from diarrhoea in 2004 were some six times greater than the average annual deaths in armed conflict for the 1990s.” Human Development Report, 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2007, page 6.

“Poor water and sanitation produce nonfatal chronic conditions at all stages of the lifecycle. At any given time close to half the people in the developing world are suffering from one or more of the main diseases associated with inadequate provision of water and sanitation such as diarrhoea, guinea worm, trachoma and schistosomiasis. These diseases fill half the hospital beds in developing countries.” Human Development Report, 2006, United Nations Development Programme, 2007, page 45.

“...10.7 million children every year do not live to see their fifth birthday...” Human Development Report, 2005, United Nations Development Programme, 2006, page 3.

In 1990, the United Nations World Health Organization reported that 1,015 million of us, almost one sixth of everyone alive, were forced to drink contaminated surface water, and 1,764 million, almost a quarter of us, were without adequate sanitation. Despite immense gains over the past 20 years, an additional 800 million people made the situation much the same ten years later: “The percentage of people served with some form of improved water supply rose from 79 percent (4.1 billion) in 1990 to 82 percent (4.9 billion) in 2000. Over the same period the proportion of the world’s population with access to excreta disposal facilities increased from 55 percent (2.9 billion people served) to 60 percent (3.6 billion). At the beginning of 2000 one-sixth (1.1 billion people) of the world’s population was without access to improved water supply and two-fifths (2.4 billion people) lacked access to improved sanitation. The majority of these people live in Asia and Africa, where fewer than one-half of all Asians have access to improved sanitation and two out of five Africans lack improved water supply. Moreover, rural services still lag far behind urban services. Sanitation coverage in rural areas, for example, is less than half that in urban settings, even though 80 percent of those lacking adequate sanitation (2 billion people) live in rural areas - some 1.3 billion in China and India alone.” Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report, WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation, 2000.

Farming as a share of national Egyptian income fell from more than 38 percent in 1975 to 16 percent in 1995. As of 2006, its population is still growing, but only by 1.75 percent a year—far below its peak of 2.7 percent in the 1980s. Its economy is rising at 4.5 percent a year. Its middle class is growing too. About 43 percent of its population is now urban. Female literacy and paid employment are also rising. Thus, from 1990 to 2005 Egypt’s birthrate fell from 4.3 to 3.1 births per woman. Its child death rate also plunged 68 percent—the biggest drop in the world. Both literacy and new tools are spreading. Many villages now have both clean water and electricity. Roads are being paved. Clinics are spreading. So are schools. The stigmergic effect of all that new infrastructure is rising. But the quality of such services isn’t yet high. There still isn’t enough money, nor enough skilled people. In Egypt, two in every five of us still are below or just above the world poverty line—$2 U.S. a day. In the Arabic world as a whole, life for us is changing fast as well. Since 1970, female literacy has tripled. But our problems are still vast. Today, 43 percent of all Arabic women still can’t read. And 35 percent of men can’t either.

But that won’t last forever. In Egypt, our new tools are adding up and starting to work synergetically with each other. Nor is that process special to Egypt. Today, our material welfare is changing everywhere. Since 2000, over 82 percent of us around the world now have safe water. Over 61 percent of us now have adequate toilets. In 1990, those figures were 78 percent and 51 percent, respectively. Our resources do change, but it takes time for our tools to cheapen and spread, then to link up synergetically.

For a summary look at the relevant policy changes in 1991 and 1993, see The State of Food and Agriculture 1997, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1998. Egypt’s child death rate plummeted 68 percent: It dropped from 104 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 33 in 2005. State of the World’s Mothers: Saving the Lives of Children Under 5, Save the Children, 2007, pages 22 and 27. State of the World’s Children, UNICEF (The United Nations Children’s Fund), 2007, Table 10. Egyptian life expectancy in 2005: World Health Statistics, 2007, United Nations World Health Organization, 2007.

Operational closure isn’t ‘catalytic closure’ (that is, that a reaction network makes all its own catalysts). That’s already guaranteed with the assumed collective autocatalysis (which is called ‘synergy’ in the text) of the given reaction network. Instead, operational closure here means something stronger. It means that the reaction network is closed not just with respect to its catalysts but also their substrates—the ‘resources’—that the collectively autocatalytic (‘synergetic’ in the text) reactions need.

Of course, closure alone can’t explain everything. For example, Germany became half-urban 50 years after Britain did, yet still it caught up fairly quickly. It invested in research more rapidly and more heavily and moved that research more rapidly into development. Plus, it could start with the best factories and machines available at the time whereas Britain was slow to change even when it invented new things. For instance, aniline dyes—then drugs based on them—grew into a huge industry in Germany, not Britain, even though Britain discovered the first one. The first aniline dye was commercialized as mauveine. It was discovered accidentally by William Perkin in 1856. But leadership in organic chemistry soon passed from Britain to Germany. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World, Simon Garfield, W. W. Norton, 2000.

A head start of two generations—50 years—didn’t make much difference (between England and Germany) while a head start of four generations—100 years—did (between Germany and Egypt). Why? Perhaps such questions can be answered by recent work on growth theory in economics. For example, see “First Mover Advantages, Blockaded entry, and the Economics of Uneven Development,” J. R. Markusen, in International Trade and Trade Policy, Elhanan Helpman and Assaf Razin (editors), MIT Press, 1991, pages 245-269.

Note that the way the text defines operational closure differs from the definition given by Varela, which is more concerned with a system’s autonomy. Although both definitions are motivated by the same underlying idea of closure in mathematics (and especially in topology). See the Preface to: Toward a Practice of Autonomous Systems: Proceedings of the First European Conference on Artificial Life, Francisco J. Varela and Paul Bourgine (editors), MIT Press, 1992.

Today though, many foreheads in rich countries crease over talk of a ‘loss of competitiveness’ or even of a ‘flat world.’ It’s hard to know why. India and China, in particular, are indeed growing fast now. From 1978 and 2007, for instance, rural poverty in China fell from 30.7 percent to 1.6 percent. But India and China also started from far behind. From 1990 to 2003, per person income in China leapt 196 percent. In rich nations it went up only 24 percent. Yet today, income in rich lands is still over five times larger than income in China. China today is about where Japan was in the 1970s. Similarly, India’s economy is now surging at 9.4 percent a year—yet even were its torrid growth to persist, it would still take many decades to catch up with our rich countries. It has huge problems. Its adult literacy rate is lower than Rwanda’s. Its percentage of children in school is smaller than Vietnam’s. Its per person income is lower than Nicaragua’s. More than a fourth of the very poorest of us live in India.

India in 2005 had a life expectancy of 63.7 years, an adult literacy rate of 61.0 percent, a combined gross enrollment ratio for primary, secondary, and tertiary education of 63.8 percent, and a per-person GDP (PPP, that is, purchasing power parity) of $3,452. Table I (page 231) of Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world, United Nations Development Programme, 2007.

Education: “Getting the Numbers Right: International Engineering Education in the United States, China, and India,” G. Gereffi, V. Wadhwa, B. Rissing, R. Ong, Journal of Engineering Education, 97(1):13-25, 2008. Rural poverty: Access for All: Basic public services for 1.3 billion people, China Human Development Report 2007/2008, United Nations Development Programme, page 10. Growth curves: Human Development Report, 2005: International cooperation at a crossroads: aid, trade and security in an unequal world, United Nations Development Programme, 2006, page 37.

Of course, no edge lasts forever. Five thousand years ago, Egypt, not Britain, had bronze tools, big cities, large buildings, writing, math, and advanced medicine. As the decades pass, many of our presently poor countries—not just India and China—will shift fully into industry. Their populations will phase change into cities, literacy, and more female control of reproduction. But by then some vital resource, like cheap oil, may have run out. By then, our current barracuda may well have converted that resource into other advantages that they’ll mostly keep. So although many of our nations will rise, and a few will change position, don’t look for major change anytime soon. South Korea might soon be a barracuda, but Egypt surely won’t.

The extrapolation of working-age population is from World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, 2007. The data on working-at-home in the United States is of 2004. Only about half that population was actually paid to work at home. whether part-time or not. Work At Home In 2004, Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS), Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, 2005.

For general analysis of the economic costs of farm subsidies in the United States, see the following United States Congressional Budget Office Reports: “The Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Review of Modeling Studies,” June 2006. “The Effects of Liberalizing World Agricultural Trade: A Survey,” December 2005. “Policies That Distort World Agricultural Trade: Prevalence and Magnitude,” August 2005

What you need is a cheap, easy-to-build, maintenance-free water filter. You must be able to make it out of cheap and common things too. And with unskilled labor. The filter must also need only a little energy to run. And that fuel source must also be easy to get anywhere. Plus, it must be cheap. It can’t need steel milling plants, nor electricity grids. Nor must it need effective governance, well-behaved officials, and guarded borders. The poorest of us don’t yet have such luxuries. However, such low-demand, low-energy filters do exist. To make one, mix equal parts clay and coffee grounds—or rice hulls, or tea leaves—and form it into a cup. Then fire it for one hour with cow dung. That simple clay cup will filter out almost all microbes. It’s dirt cheap. It’s easy to make anywhere. It could save millions of our lives. But today, almost none of us, rich or poor, knows about it.

The dollar figures given assume that the average worldwide annual income is $5,000 U.S. (1999 estimate by Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute). The best-fit statistical distribution itself is from: “True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculations, Based on Household Surveys Alone,” B. Milanovic, Policy Research Working Paper, page 30, Poverty and Human Resources Research Group, The World Bank, 1999. Published in: The Economic Journal, 112(476):51-92, 2002.

Both the World Bank and the United Nations roughly agree on the above trends. However such measures, and their interpretations, are contested within econometric circles. See, for example, “The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and... Convergence, Period,” X. Sala-i-Martin, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2):351-398, 2006. “The World Distribution of Income and Income Inequality: A Review of the Economics Literature,” A. Heshmati, Journal of World-Systems Research, 12(1):1-24, 2006. “World Income Distribution: Which Way?” P. Svedberg, Journal of Development Studies, 40(5):1-32, 2004.

However, the following paper shows that while inequity is large today, it used to be larger, but within countries, less so between countries. The industrial revolution led to a large spike in inequity for its first 90 years or so, then the within-country inequities leveled off and the between-countries inequities grew. “Inequality among World Citizens: 1820-1992,” F. Bourguignon, C. Morrisson, American Economic Review, 92(4):727-744, 2002.

The easier a job becomes, the more insecure it becomes. That will have consequences for our settlement patterns and work lives. We’re competing for jobs, but our cities are competing for us—as tax payers. Our cities are also competing for firms—for tax income. Our firms are also competing for cities and us. We’re all looking for the lowest costs and highest returns. Thus, over time, as our transport and communication tools grow and spread, our jobs everywhere—not just in our rich countries—will grow more creative, more transient, and more part-time. They’ll also grow more personal, and more dependent on networking with others around the globe. And to do them we’ll need higher-intensity training in ever shorter bursts.

But what becomes of job security when anyone anywhere can do the same job? What becomes of a city’s toolbase when much of the income to pay for it comes from firms that can move in an instant? What becomes of careers when neither you nor your city nor even your country can guarantee decades-long employment in any specific job? What becomes of mating and reproduction and schooling and health care and pensions when income security is unheard of? What happens to countries when their tax rate is set not by them but by global demand and supply? We don’t know the answers to any of those questions yet. But we’re going to find out.

This idea was inspired by work on scale-free networks. A network becomes scale-free if its number of nodes is growing and if the chance that a new node will link to an existing node is proportional to how highly linked the existing node already is. “Statistical mechanics of complex networks,” A.-L. Barabási, R. Albert, Reviews of Modern Physics, 74(1):47-97, 2002.

For an early example of the ideas behind what is now called scale-free networks (and their associated power laws, as well as an explanation for their random generation), see “A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes,” D. J. de Solla Price, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27:292-306, 1976. For further background on scale-freeness, see “Towards a Theory of Scale-Free Graphs: Definition, Properties, and Implications,” (Extended Version), L. Li, D. Alderson, R. Tanaka, J. C. Doyle, W. Willinger, Internet Mathematics, 2(4):431-523, 2005. “Scale-Free Networks,” A.-L. Barabási, E. Bonabeau, Scientific American, 288:60-69, 2003. Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Randomness, Duncan J. Watts, Princeton University Press, 1999. For an application to business, see: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, Hyperion, 2006.

A century before, in 1311, in Yorkshire, England, a bible was worth 33 pounds, 6 shillings, and 8 pence—a fabulous sum; enough to buy 60 cows or 50 slave families. The History of Bradford and Its Parish: With Additions and Continuation to the Present Time, John James, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1841, page 60 and pages 74-75, footnote.

Even by 1500 a book might cost a ducat in Venice, where a servant earned about seven ducats a year. For a teacher or skilled artisan, a book might cost about a week’s wages. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine, Longitude Books, 1998, page 160.

“Incest, if not detected, was to cost five groats; and six, if it was known. There was a stated price for murder, infanticide, adultery, perjury, burglary, etc.” The History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, Volume I, J. H. Merle d’Aubigne, 1835, translated by H. White, Robert Carter and Brothers, 1875, page 56.

China invented paper even earlier, perhaps in 105, if not before. It had toilet paper and paper money and a large literate class long before anyone else. The Muslim world discovered the secret after capturing some Chinese paper makers in a battle near Samarkand in 751. By 794 there was a paper factory in Baghdad. The technology then spread within the Muslim world from Baghdad to Syria and further west to Morocco until it reached Muslim Spain about a century later, by 1150 if not before. (Muslims had toilet paper when Christians had moss and straw and hockey-shaped sticks in buckets of water. Don’t ask how those sticks were used. I’ll only note that the expression ‘the wrong end of the stick’ had a concrete meaning once upon a time.) From Spain, printing took another couple centuries to reach the rest of Europe, first to Italy in 1275 then to France and Germany over the next century.

The Muslim world never invented its own printing press. With Arabic’s cursive writing it was hard to imagine it being separated into letter types. There were also religious beliefs to contend with. In the Ottoman empire in 1483, Sultan Bayezid II decreed the death penalty for anyone printing Arabic or Turkish script. The ban held until 1727.

“Paper, Printing and the Printing Press: A Horizontally Integrative Macrohistory Analysis,” S. A. Gunaratne, International Communication Gazette, 63(6):459-479, 2001. “Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print,” F. Robinson, Modern Asian Studies, 27(1):229-251, 1993. “Innovation and Diffusion of Technology: an Example of the Printing Press,” M. Macioti, Impact of Science on Society, 154:143-150, 1989. Annals of Printing: A Chronological Encyclopaedia from the Earliest Times to 1950, W. Turner Berry and H. Edmund Poole, University of Toronto Press, 1966.

Spinning wheels apparently existed in Persia in 1257 and may have come there from India. By the late twelfth century, Chinese spindle wheels were in use in Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Italy and Switzerland. Spinning Wheels, Spinners and Spinning, Patricia Baines, B. T. Batsford, 1977.

Once print’s cost fell sufficiently, however, printers became itinerate, driving their horse-drawn presses from town to town. Broadsheets began to appear everywhere, and then even the powerful lost control. Everything started to change. As some of the age-old verities came under question, even by unlettered peasants, anyone with anything to lose was petrified. Heresies had come before, revolts had come before, but print spread thought wider and faster, like napalm airstrikes on a dry forest. The resulting turmoil, like most major changes our species stumbles into, was not bloodless, nor was it without the usual ironies. In 1525, for example, Martin Luther, the instigator of Protestantism back in 1517, sided with the nobility and clergy against a peasant revolt that he helped encourage and in which perhaps 100,000 were massacred. By 1543 he also wrote a book inciting pogroms against Jews—and exactly four centuries later, another German leader was to take him seriously.

Nor was Germany unusual. All Europe would, by 1562, be bathing in blood over religious differences, and many European countries would expel their Jewish populations after centuries of persecution, demonization, and massacre. Sectarian violence raged on in firecracker chain-reactions until the end of the century, then flared up repeatedly over the next 250 years over the entire face of Europe, then the rest of the world. Nor was conflict solely due to religious difference. In a pinch, any difference between us will do, as two short, global, non-religious, high-intensity bursts in the twentieth century show. Eventually, though, the gains in applicable knowledge about the universe forced Europe’s eyes to begin to turn, grudgingly, oh so slowly, from the past to the future. That love of novelty, fueled by an uncontrolled printing press, and at the time largely unknown elsewhere in the world, would have major consequences for that same unsuspecting world.

“ ‘Cause’ means (1) [Material Cause:] that from which, as immanent material, a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze is the cause of the statue and the silver of the saucer.... (2) [Formal Cause:] The form or pattern, i.e. the definition of the essence... (e.g. the ratio 2:1 and number in general are causes of the octave).... (3) [Efficient Cause:] That from which the change or the resting from change first begins; e.g. the adviser is a cause of the action, and the father a cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made.... (4) [Final Cause:] The end, that for the sake of which a thing is; e.g. health is the cause of walking. For ‘Why does one walk?’ we say: ‘that one may be healthy’; and in speaking thus we think we have given the cause.” The Works of Aristotle, Volume VIII: Metaphysics, Book V, Part II, W. D. Ross (translator and editor), Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 1928.

Philosophical ideas on what science is have been raging for at least the last two centuries. Every formal definition that philosophers have come up with has been shot down in one way or the other. Scientists, though, still know what constitutes science and what does not. For two recent contrasting overviews of scientific methods, see: “Reflection on rules in science: an invisible-hand perspective,” T. C. Leonard, Journal of Economic Methodology, 9(2):141-168, 2002. and “The Invisible Hand and Science,” P. Ylikoski, Science Studies, 8(2):32-43, 1995.

Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, then Francis Bacon and later David Hume, William Whewell, and John Stuart Mill, and others started the philosophical argument from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, arguing about the various roles of induction versus deduction. The three dominant philosophical threads these days are: Pragmatism, Realism, and (the one that’s ignored by most scientists), Social Relativism. Here are a few of the main modern references in the area: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn, University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, 1970. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Pierre Duhem, Atheneum, 1962. “Natural Kinds,” W. V. O. Quine, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, 1969. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper, Hutchinson, Sixth Edition, 1974. Progress and Its Problems, Lawrence Laudan, University of California Press, 1977. “Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes,” I. Lakatos, in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (editors), Cambridge University Press, 1970. Against Method, Paul K. Feyerabend, Verso, 1975. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, David Hull, University of Chicago Press, 1988. The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism, Frederick Suppe, University of Illinois Press, 1989. As usual, there’s a lot of wind out there, but as the philosophical and sociological arguments rage, most scientists ignore them as they go on reinventing our universe.

The long philosophic change we now call the scientific revolution started mainly in the middle and late sixteenth century (after the printing press in 1452), with Nicolaus Copernicus, Niccolò Tartaglia, Lodovico Ferrari, Girolamo Cardano, Andreas Vesalius, Giovanni Benedetti, Tycho Brahe, Giordano Bruno, Simon Stevin, Galileo Galilei, and others. Then, building on that work, the first big mechanist wave followed in the early seventeenth century with William Gilbert, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Jan van Helmont, William Harvey, René Descartes, Evangelista Torricelli, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Fermat, Otto Guericke, John Napier, and others. Then, as young natural philosophers grew up with the insights of the first two waves, the mechanist tide started to crest with Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Jeremiah Horrocks, Edmond Halley, Giovanni Cassini, John Wallis, John Flamsteed, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Marcello Malphigi, Jacob Bernoulli, Ole Rømer, Christiaan Huygens, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton. Newton, born the year the English Civil War started, and a year after Galileo died (blind, and under house arrest in Florence) was also lucky enough to concern himself with physics, the most sharp-edged part of the new natural philosophy as it is the most universal, the most easily mathematized, and the most easily tested. Newton was an inheritor as a well as a creator. (Note: Many books state that Newton was born the same year that Galileo died. However, it was actually a full year later. Galileo died January 8th, 1642. Newton’s birth date is usually given as Christmas Day, December 25th, 1642, but England was still using the old (Julian) calendar at the time instead of the new (Gregorian) calendar so on the continent it was actually 10 days later, January 4th, 1643.)

It’s odd that similar waves of scientific thought had earlier happened around the eastern Mediterranean over 26 centuries ago. Thales of Miletus, building on earlier Egyptian and Chaldean mathematics and astronomy, started the ball rolling, just as Copernicus was to do much later. Thirty years later came Anaximander, then twenty years after that, Anaximenes (all from Miletus in today’s Turkey). About fifteen years after Thales, Pythagoras was born on Samos, 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) from Miletus. He then moved to Croton, in today’s southern Italy, and his school also flourished. The tradition is that Thales taught Anaximander, who taught Pythagoras. Then a second wave started with Anaxagoras and Empedocles, then Democritus, Hippocrates, Socrates, and Plato, then Aristotle. Then yet another wave with Euclid, Aristarchus, Archimedes, and Erastothenes. Then it petered out. So perhaps Europe’s new natural philosophy would have petered out as well, had not an industrial revolution followed it. For an interesting theory about this, see The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn, Lucio Russo, Birkhäuser, 2004.

From there jump with Descartes to map a circle centered on two right-angled axes, x and y. Observe that because of Pythagoras’ theorem, each point, (x, y), on a circle of radius r must obey the equation:

Now recall with Kepler, based on Brahe’s observations, that the planets move in ellipses with the sun at one of the ellipse’s focal points, then contemplate that fact with the genius of a Newton or Hooke or Huygens and deduce that elliptical orbits imply that the force binding a planet to the sun must vary in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. Combine that insight with various estimates we produced over the millennia for the mass of the earth and you can estimate the mass of the sun.

Now that you have all that, you can predict when the sun will come up next Tuesday. Once you have good telescopes, you can then relate the tides on earth to the orbit of Jupiter. You can then derive distances, and then deduce, with Rømer, that light has a speed—it isn’t instantaneous. You can also predict, with Newton, that the earth’s poles must be flattened compared to the earth’s equator. More than that, though, as you stare at your little diagram sketched in the sand you realize that the planets wish to move off in a straight line from their direction of orbit. Perfect the calculus with Newton or Leibniz and you can calculate just how much they want to do so. From that you can tell the orbit of comets, and predict which will hit the earth and which will not. More prosaically, you can also tell a cannoneer how to aim his cannon to best destroy his enemy.

You can model many things now that you can integrate as well as differentiate. You can use your new powers to find the minimum curve of a hanging chain, or tell the amount of iron you need to make a bell of a given volume, or derive the speed of a coach from measurements at its axle, or how to shape a ship’s sail or keel or prow for maximum effect and minimum cost, or what shape to make a reflector to best collect light and so make better telescopes or lighthouses.

Link that power to mechanics and you can derive the strength of various materials even before you create them, or the mass of a planet you’ve never set foot on. Go far enough down in size and you can predict how strong or weak a material will be, how much you need of it to build a bridge over a certain span that must take a certain weight, how to build a rocket fast enough to reach orbit. From there you can see, unhindered by an atmosphere, far enough to imagine and begin to calculate how far back in time the universe goes.

From scratching simple diagrams in dirt to understanding the beginning of the universe, in mathematics everything connects to everything else. There is a passion here, a wondrous excitement at the relatedness of things, and a reveling in the ability to play at this level. Few of us ever gain the mathematical prowess to see all this immense beauty, but it is there, nonetheless. And no one knows why.

For example, not even Newton liked his own theory. It’s tempting, and easy, and common, to make Newton into some sort of scientific saint. Certainly nearly all the science writings about him make him out to be such, but that’s far more to do with what modern scientists and technologists wish to believe about themselves than anything to do with the real Newton. Like all of us, Newton was a child of his time. He was a stupendous thinker, but he still carried a huge and unavoidable set of assumptions about how the world works, which he inherited from the deep past. For example, Newton produced many more writings on what we would today call occult matters than scientific matters. But only the science gets published. On his death, the Royal Society refused to accept most of his writings and returned them to his family. Decades later, his first serious editor, Samuel Horsely, saw the papers and he “slammed shut the lid of the trunk that held them.” His papers lived in that trunk until the middle of the twentieth century, where they were auctioned, and spread piecemeal among many institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, the British Museum, and Jerusalem University, most of which wanted nothing to do with the rest of the collection. John Maynard Keyes then scavenged some of the manuscripts and concluded that instead of being the first real scientist Newton was “the last of the magicians.”

Only toward the end of the twentieth century did most of Newton’s science-related writings finally see the light of day, and even today, nearly three centuries after he died, most of his other writings still have not. For Newton, those writings were at least as important as those we accept today as ‘scientific.’ All were parts of his carefully thought-out, and slavishly worked-on, grand unified theory of the universe. The Birth of Modern Science, Paolo Rossi, translated by Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen, Blackwell, 2000, page 215.

What is true of Newton is also true for all Europe’s early natural philosophers, including Spinoza, perhaps the most relentlessly rationalist of them all—at least until Laplace in the late eighteenth century. Kepler, for example, devised his system of planetary orbits but named the thing that moved them the ‘Holy Spirit Force.’ Physics students rarely hear that he lived in an era that imprisoned his 73-year-old mother for witchcraft, and would have burnt her too, were it not for his years-long efforts. Kepler’s Witch: An Astronomer’s Discovery of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of His Mother, James A. Connor, HarperSanFrancisco, 2004. All that is elided from physics books as scientists continue to pretend that there is some deep division between what we can prove about the universe and what we wish to believe about it. On the other hand, it is easy to claim that there is no distinction at all between science and other ways of understanding the universe, as if science is just some random collection of made-up stories. A hilarious recent book of some examples of the extremes of that particular trend is: Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Picador, 1998. More generally, though, the following neuroscience book points out the folly of trying to rigidly separate reason and emotion: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Antonio Damasio, Grosset/Putnam, 1994. This desperate need of ours to separate, to make an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ in all things, is foolishness. But then lacking so very much knowledge of reality, foolishness must always be the one thing we’re most expert about.

If Newton, or Leibniz, in indeed most natural philosophers of the time, were alive in today’s secular times, they’d pray for us. Like Leibniz, and many other proto-scientists, Newton couldn’t imagine a universe without God. They only argued about how God manifested. All of their contemporaries, except perhaps Hooke and maybe Huygens, were theists or, at most, deists.

France, with its enormous wheat fields and army, was the power in Europe at the time, with land power partly shared by Sweden and Poland-Lithuania, and sea power going mostly to the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Portuguese, though, were just in the process of slitting their own economic throats, just as the Spanish had earlier done, by having the Inquisition largely destroy their educated commercial class—mostly Jews and Protestants—and now were rapidly losing trade routes to the Dutch, who later lost out to the English (hence the series of wars between them around this time). France, too, had tried to commit economic suicide in nearly the same way, and had almost succeeded. Its Protestants, the Huguenots, had been persecuted then massacred, or had fled to Holland, England, Protestant parts of Germania, South Asia, or various colonies. See, for example, “The Inquisition and the Portuguese Economy,” L. M. E. Shaw, Journal of European Economic History, 18(2):415-431, 1989. “The First Global War: The Dutch versus Iberia in Asia, Africa and the New World, 1590-1609,” P. C. Emmer, e-Journal of Portuguese History, 1(1), 2003.

The quote’s originator, Bernard of Chartres, was a Breton monk who ran the Chartres cathedral school in France from 1114 to 1124. Merton traces the quote’s history forward from the twelfth century, and backward to Priscian, a sixth-century Constantinople grammarian, whose grammar Bernard had followed assiduously. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript, The Post-Italianate Edition, Robert K. Merton, Chicago University Press, 1993.

Although England’s new Royal Society, created in 1660, was stuffed with noble twits, almost none of the productive natural philosophers we remember today were from the moribund Anglican universities, Oxford and Cambridge, which at the time were mainly sink-holes for educating the clergy and the more useless children of the nobility. And almost all of them were non-Anglican Protestants, desperate for a way to gain power in a society otherwise closed to them. Which is perhaps a clue to why natural philosophy became a vogue in Europe around the same time as Europe was inventing modern banking, and while its stock markets were beginning to grow, and while women were first allowed on stage in the largest cities, and while, in those same cities, newly rich merchants were out shopping for family heirlooms to fake an ancestry.

The merchant class was rising relative to the nobility and clergy in agrarian Europe, like magma seeking any way up through a mantle of cracking rock. The steam engine, first created by Thomas Savery in 1698, was only one of many blooms to emerge from the new natural philosophic way of thought. Natural philosophers at last had enough tools to began to build on each other, erecting a new kind of thing, a nest for the mind to clamber around in. A few of us in Paris, Amsterdam, Leipzig, and London started questioning our ages-old explanations for how matter moved and what made up the world we lived in, both in the large and in the small. Natural philosophers, massing on each other’s insights, were coming up with new ideas, and more importantly, new instruments to measure the world, and new machines to begin to change it. But that was still in the future. At this time, 1666, while there were changes in London, most of the rest of England, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, with the exception of a few stray sparks in small towns like Edinburgh, Manchester, and Birmingham, were still deep in the agrarian world that had lasted for at least the last 6,000 years.

The newly optimistic tone shifted after a major earthquake destroyed Lisbon in 1755. The usual cruelties, wars, and slaughters didn’t help either. (To give some vague idea of the era, in 1718 Peter I, Czar of Russia, tortured and killed his own son.) But still an irrepressible Voltaire would write in 1756 that “reason and industry will always bring about new progress.” However, he also covered his bets in 1759 by making Candide ping-pong between Pangloss and Martin. By 1783, he was five years dead when British America became the United States of America. Its whole system of government came to be based on the new ideas, the first time that happened. That same year, perhaps four hundred thousand Parisians, about half the city, crammed themselves into the Tuileries Gardens. They were there to watch two men ascend in a balloon, like godlings spurning the earth. The news stunned both Europe and the brand new United States. That, plus two other new amusements—electricity and ‘animal magnetism’—convinced Europe’s few urbanites, male and female, young and old, that they would soon be living in a new age. Now not just the strange new natural philosophers, or their new mercantile or political hangers on, but anyone who could afford the coin to see the new marvels stood agape, dreaming of yet another new thing: ‘the future.’ Then, just ten years later, the guillotine began to fall, the tumbril to roll, and the gutters to run with blood. The Terror had come.

Voltaire on progress: Quoted in The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth, John Bagnell Bury, Kessinger Publishing, Reprint Edition, 2004, page 99. As in most things mentioned in the text, the idea of progress itself has a quite complicated history. For more background see also: The Idea of Progress: History and Society, Sidney Pollard, Pelican Books, 1971. History of the Idea of Progress, Robert Nisbet, Basic Books, 1980.

Balloon ascent on December 1st, 1783: The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001, I. F. Clarke, Jonathan Cape, 1979, pages 29-30. Popular Science And Public Opinion in Eighteenth-century France, Michael R. Lynn, Manchester University Press, 2006, page 126.

The impact of balloons on Europe: The following might give some idea of the tenor of the times: “Balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody.... When the arts are brought to such perfection in Europe, who would go, like Sir Joseph Banks, in search of islands in the Atlantic, where the natives in six thousand years have not improved the science of carving fishing-hooks out of bones or flints! Well! I hope these new mechanic meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and the idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science.” From “Letter 2283, to Sir Horace Mann, December 2, 1783,” in The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, Horace Walpole, Peter Cunningham (editor), Volume VIII, Richard Bentley and Son, 1891, page 438.

The plague didn’t end in 1665. Winter killed off many of the rats carrying it, but it resurged the following spring. The 1665 plague also visited other places in England besides London (not counting its continental toll). York, for example, was particularly hard hit. Finally, plague was no stranger in London. Ever since 1348 it had been taking lives almost yearly, some years more than others. In 1563, 1603, and 1625, in particular, it had taken between a fifth and a quarter of all London. The plague usually peaked in August or September, after the harvest, especially after hot summers. For epidemiology of the 1665 plague visit, see “Plague in London: spatial and temporal aspects of mortality,” G. Twigg, Epidemic Disease in London, J. A. I. Champion (editor), Centre for Metropolitan History Working Papers Series, Number 1, pages 1-17, 1993.