Although it’s in many senses brand new, its roots are also very old, going back at least as far as Aristotle, 2,400 years ago. (For some historical development of it in philosophy and biology, see Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the Levels of Reality, David Blitz, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.) 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. Emergence: From Chaos to Order, John Holland, Perseus Books Group, 1999. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John Holland, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

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. Hierarchical Structures and Scaling in Physics, Remo Badii and Antonio Politi, Cambridge University Press, 1997. “Quantifying Self-Organization with Optimal Predictors,” C. R. Shalizi, K. L. Shalizi, R. Haslinger, Physical Review Letters, 93(11):118701, 2004.

Our knowledge is now growing so fast that every new 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.

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).

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. 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. “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. (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). “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. “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. 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.

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.

As for its effect, here’s a small illustration. The Vikings, perhaps reacting to warming weather starting around 800, colonized Greenland in 986. But with cooling weather starting up again in 1250, those colonies lasted until no later than 1412. In 1492, the year Columbus first crossed the Atlantic, the pope complained that because of the ice no bishop had visited Greenland for 84 years. He didn’t know it, but his Greenland flock probably was already dead. No written records survive, but their skeletons reflect the worsening climate, declining in height from about 1.76 meters (five feet nine and a half inches) in the 980s to about 1.6 meters (five feet four and a half inches) by the 1440s. The oxygen isotope ratios in their teeth tell a story of sharply falling temperatures from 1100 to 1450. A ship driven off-course in 1540 found no one alive and one dead man, frozen where he fell. “Climate and history: the Westvikings’ saga,” J. and M. Gribbin, New Scientist, 125:52-55, 20 January 1990. “Oxygen isotope composition of human tooth enamel from medieval Greenland; linking climate and society,” H. C. Fricke, J. R. O’Neil, N. Lynnerup, Geology, 23(10):869-872, 1995.

More comprehensively, Angel integrated a vast amount of skeletal data from sites in Greece and Turkey stretching all the way from paleolithic times to the near present. In all that time, the Little Ice Age period, from about 1300 to about 1700, stands out as one of several long declines. “Health as a Crucial Factor in the Changes from Hunting to Developed Farming in the Eastern Mediterranean,” J. L. Angel, In Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture, Mark N. Cohen and George J. Armelagos (editors), Academic Press, 1984, pages 51-74.

Most transgenic plants are grown in the United States (about 66 percent), Argentina (23 percent), Canada (6 percent) and China (4 percent). Global Status of Commercialized Transgenic Crops: 2002: Preview, Clive James, ISAAA Briefs Number 27, 2002, The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, ISAAA SEAsiaCenter, c/o IRRI, DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila, The Philippines. (Note: ISAAA is a lobby, funded by Monsato and other big agribusiness companies. As such, readers should be careful with their reported data on worldwide transgenic uptake.)

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.

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 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 Chemical Industry: 1900-1930, International Growth and Technological Change, Ludwig F. Haber, Clarendon Press, 1971.

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.

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. “Fertility and Family Planning in African Cities: The Impact of Female Migration,” M. Brockerhoff, Journal of Biosocial Science, 27(3):347-358, 1995. “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.

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.

For the latest on timing, see “Contrasting Developmental Trajectories in the Earliest Known Tetrapod Forelimbs,” V. Callier, J. A. Clack, P. E. Ahlberg, Science, 324(5925):364-367, 2009. The text’s somewhat snide comment is not meant to imply that there is no ego involved in science. Far from it. Scientists fight and connive just as much as everyone else does. For example, in 1948 Erik Jarvik took possessions of the sole (at that time) fossil of ichthyostega, a now famous intermediary between fish and all tetrapods (four-legged land animals, which includes birds and snakes). He had inherited the specimen from the expedition leader then kept it to himself for 48 years, publishing in that time only three papers on it. No one had any way to check his claims. Many of them were wrong. (For example, he claimed that it had 5 toes; in reality it has 7.) Then he died in 1998. Just before that, other specimes turned up and others begin to correct his errors. “Polydactyly in the Earliest Known Tetrapod Limbs,” M. I. Coates, J. A. Clack, Nature, 347(6288):66-69, 1990. Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods, Jennifer A. Clack, Indiana University Press, 2002. “The axial skeleton of the Devonian tertrapod Ichthyostega,” P. E. Ahlberg, J. A. Clack, H. Blom, Nature, 437(1):137-140, 2005. There are many such stories in science, particularly in the dustier corners of the softer fields, like paleontology. However, it’s harder to politically spin things in science than in many other fields.

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.

Speaking of the Irish reduction in a letter to John Thurloe, the Secretary of State, Henry Cromwell, fourth son of Oliver Cromwell, and commander of the English troops in Ireland, wrote, “It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was thus relieved of a population that might trouble the [English] planters; it was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made English and Christians... a great benefit to the West India sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and the women and Irish girls in a country where they had only Maroon women and Negresses to solace them.” Whence the ‘Black Irish’ of Jamaica, Joseph J. Williams, The Dial Press, 1932, pages 10-11. (Note: Spelling modernized.)

In 1655, Henry Cromwell was asked for 1,000 Irish girls of breedable age, who were to be sent to comfort 1,500 troops about to be sent to newly conquered Jamaica. In a letter dated September 11th, 1655, he wrote that, “[A]lthough we must use force in taking them up, yet it beinge so much for their owne goode and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted you may have such number of them as you thinke fitt to make use upon this account.” A week later, September 18th, he wrote again, “I shall not neede to repeat anythinge about the girles, not doubtinge but to answer your expectations to the full in that; and I think it might be of like advantage to your affairs there, and to ours heer, if you should thinke it fitt to send 1500 or 2000 young boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age, to the place aforementioned.” The troops, and their new possessions, set sail from Galway the next month, bound for Jamaica. The Cromwell letters are preserved in Secretary Thurloe’s correspondence, Volume IV. The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, John P. Prendergast, McGlashan and Gill, Second Edition, 1875, pages 92-93. Hell or Connaught! The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660, Peter Beresford Ellis, Hamish Hamiton Ltd., 1975, pages 148-149.

English theft of Irish bodies for colonial use started at least by 1612 and continued until at least 1700; it was then outlawed—partly because England’s colonial labor demand grew so strong that slave-takers began indiscriminately stealing English settlers in Ireland as well. Not that the English had serious qualms about enslaving each other: after a failed rebellion in Somersetshire in 1685, 841 were enslaved and shipped to the Caribbean and Virginia. English, Scottish, and Irish rebellions in 1715 and 1745 and 1798 were put down the same way.

Earlier, the Irish had stolen English bodies too. While Rome still ruled Britain, sometime in the late fourth century an Irish flotilla enslaved thousands, including the roughly 16 year-old Maewyn Succat (‘Victorius’), the British-born Roman citizen who would later rename himself Patricius (‘Well-born’) and be remembered as Saint Patrick.

All those 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. Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500-1850, Mark Overton, Cambridge University Press, 1996. See also: The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and the Landscape, 1700-1870, Tom Williamson, Exeter University Press, 2002.

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. 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.

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. We’re an ignorant species. “Common Sense Concepts about Motion,” I. Halloun, D. Hestenes, American Journal of Physics, 53(11):1056-1065, 1985. The Unnatural Nature of Science, Lewis Wolpert, Harvard University Press, 1993. Uncommon sense: The Heretical Nature of Science, Alan Cromer, Oxford University Press, 1993. “Intuitive Physics,” D. R. Proffitt, M. K. Kaiser, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Lynn Nadel (editor), Nature Publishing Group, 2003, pages 632-637.

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.

Incidentally, Sixtus also tried to clear away Rome’s 18,000 prostitutes. The idea was that they were useless in a city of celibates. But against that particular immovable stone he failed. “Seen and known: prostitutes in the cityscape of late-sixteenth-century Rome,” E. S. Cohen, Renaissance Studies, 12(3):392-409, 1998, page 404.

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 Colt had his 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.

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.

To the extent that we ask the question at all, most of our popular answers to it boil down to saying that the Romans had no reason to develop one. Some say that the Roman’s huge slave pool made a steam engine uneconomic. (In other words, the Romans would first have had to give up slavery before they could think to develop a steam engine.) But that would make sense only if Romans had gotten one working then gave it up because slaves were cheaper. That never happened. Others say that the Romans’ huge slave pool made labor-saving unthinkable. But if that were so, why did they bother with labor-saving sails and water-wheels? Slaves would’ve sufficed, and often did suffice, for those needs as well. If your water-wheel broke, you got your slaves to grind the corn. If the sea’s winds died, you got your slaves to row. Plus, for either story to work, Roman slaves would’ve had to have been dirt cheap (to forever beat out all other options). Must we suppose that when you dropped by a dealership to pick up some late-model slaves, the sellers simply gave them away? And threw in the cost to capture, feed, clothe, house, and guard them? Slavery is an institution like any other. It costs money to support. Slave labor is free labor, but it’s not labor for free. So while either story might sound plausible, neither makes much sense.

Nor did the Romans not invent a steam engine because a genius like James Watt hadn’t been born yet. Imagine if a time-traveler had plopped down a steam engine somewhere in the Roman Empire, just as Ivan Polzunov plopped one down in Siberia. What would’ve happened? Like Polzunov’s apprentices, Romans probably couldn’t even have kept it alive long enough to copy it, let alone understand it.

None of those three popular stories for why Romans had not steam engine make much sense. All three share a basic confusion. They assume that one tool is much like another. So it’s as if our species were in a giant hardware store. We’re all facing a giant wall with tools hanging on hooks. All we need is the right economy, the right morals, or the right genius, and, hey presto, we can fetch down a steam engine. Conversely, if we don’t have a steam engine, then we must not have had the right economy, morals, or genius. Such stories work well only in hindsight. Something changes in one of our groups and—after the fact—we come up with reasons for why it had to have happened.

So Romans didn’t build a steam engine. But not because they were economic numbskulls. Nor because they loved to have slaves too much. Nor because they were technical morons. We don’t need any such assumption. More practical reasons will do. They didn’t know enough metallurgy to make high-grade iron. They didn’t have crucible steel for precision cutters and precision bearings. They didn’t have steam-proof solders, sealants, and gaskets. They didn’t even have the skilled machinists to make a steam engine, even if someone simply handed them all those parts, premade. Finally, they couldn’t even imagine one. They didn’t understand the cosmos well enough to see that a steam engine was even possible. They lived in Aristotle’s cosmos, not Watt’s.

Carlyle, a strong believe in hierarchy, was at the time arguing with John Stuart Mill, who had proposed that we were all much the same and that our institutions, not our skin color, decided how we must live. Carlyle, and many others, refused to accept that, calling blacks ‘two-legged cattle,’ who needed ‘the beneficent whip.’ But he didn’t reserve such beliefs only for blacks. Carlyle spoke for many in Britain when he visited Ireland after the Irish potato famine in 1849-52 and called the Irish, “this brawling unreasonable people.” Ireland, he wrote, was a “human swinery,” “an abomination of desolation,” and “a black howling Babel of superstitious savages.” The Orange Card: Racism, Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland, Flan Campbell, Connolly Publications, 1979, page 12.

Caravel technology is complex, and a lot of the original details have been lost because most of it was done by illiterate fishermen and shipbuilders experimenting in the Mediterranean over the last millennium. However, the Arabians, the Portuguese, and the Spanish each had a large hand in its later versions, particularly the versions that later crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific. Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700, Carlo Cipolla, 1965 Barnes and Noble, Reprint Edition, 1996. The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600, Richard W. Unger, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980. “The Portuguese Caravel and European Shipbuilding: Phases of Development and Diversity,” M. M. Elbl, Revista da Universidade de Coimbra, 33:547-572, 1985. “A Caravela,” J. da G. P. Barata, Estudos de Arqueologia Naval, Volume II, 1989, pages 13-53.

In 1835 in Manchester “Thirty or forty factories rise on the tops of the hills I have just described. Their six stories tower up; their huge enclosures give notice from afar of the centralisation of industry. The wretched dwellings of the poor are scattered haphazard around them.... Some of [the] roads are paved, but most of them are full of ruts and puddles into which foot or carriage wheel sinks deep.... Heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools are found here and there amongst the houses and over the bumpy, pitted surfaces of the public places.... Amid this noisome labyrinth from time to time one is astonished at the sight of fine stone buildings with Corinthian columns.... But who could describe the interiors of those quarters set apart, home of vice and poverty, which surround the huge palaces of industry and clasp them in their hideous folds? On ground below the level of the river and overshadowed on every side by immense workshops, stretches marshy land which widely spaced muddy ditches can neither drain nor cleanse. Narrow twisting roads lead down to it. They are lined with one-storey houses whose ill-fitting planks and broken windows show them up, even from a distance, as the last refuge a man might find between poverty and death. Nonetheless the wretched people reduced to living in them can still inspire jealousy of their fellow beings. Below some of their miserable dwellings is a row of cellars to which a sunken corridor leads; twelve to fifteen human beings are crowded pell-mell into each of these damp, repulsive holes.” Journeys to England and Ireland, Alexis De Tocqueville, translated by George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer, edited by J. P. Mayer, Yale University Press, 1958, pages 105-106.

The cheap and plentiful drinking water supply that the rich of our species takes for granted today became widespread in the industrial world only after 1900. And still London’s water wasn’t always clean. That had to wait until 1921. Londoners back then, just as village Egyptians today, feared chlorine in their water. It tasted of ‘chemicals.’ Obviously it was a government plot. That political battle alone took 24 years to resolve. (Studies in Water Supply, A. C. Houston, Macmillan, 1913, page 64. “Water and the Search for Public Health in London in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” A. Hardy, Medical History, 28(3):250-282, 1984.) Meanwhile, their children died and died.

Clean, cheap, and plentiful bathing, washing, and flushing water had to wait even longer. It only become widespread in London and the rest of today’s rich world around 1950. The world we know today is a recent invention. (London’s Water Wars: The competition for London’s water supply in the nineteenth century, John Graham-Leigh, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2000.)

Šulgi’s line, the Ur III dynasty, ended with his grandson, when the Elamites destroyed Ur as little as (perhaps) 50 years later. Two centuries of war and confusion followed, at the end of which a new ruler, Hammurabi, and a new city, Babylon, rose to power and the age of early Sumeria ended forever. Even the language Šulgi used, Sumerian, began to vanish. The Babylonians too had their own narrative for why they had what they had, and why it would persist forever.

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.

Of course, closure alone can’t explain everything. For example, Germany became half-urban 50 years after Britain did, yet still it caught up. 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 while a head start of four generations—100 years—did. 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.

Here’s the backstory: Today’s biology is built around one central idea, evolution. Evolution is built around one central idea, natural selection. Selection can’t work without something to be selected, a unit of selection. The question is: what should be that unit? Today we take it to be a gene, a set of genes, or an individual organism (which contains a genotype, a bundle of genes). Here’s why: It’s individual organisms that live and die based on what their genes shape them to do, so it’s individual organisms that are selected for (or against). Genes also compete among themselves. They can sometime copy themselves on top of each other on the genome, for example. They’re thus ‘fighting for space’ on the genome. So they too are a unit of selection. Groups of genes can occur together and function together, so they too can be units of selection. From about 1920 to 1960, an alternative unit of selection was widely accepted in biology: a species itself. Somehow, organisms in a species were supposed to work ‘for the good of the species’ and so selection somehow happened against individuals even if they otherwise would have been successful, if that were necessary to perpetuate the species. That view, largely politically motivated as a reaction to the strong eugenic position that preceded it from 1880 to 1920, is now in bad odor among most serious biologists. It is, however, still widespread among the lay public, who no matter what the prevailing political winds in biological thought, always deeply misunderstand evolution.

The use in the text though is less about whether a ‘swarm’ can be selected for by evolution than the beginnings of a more detailed analysis of whether such a thing might be considered to even be alive.

In 1979, Hofstadter sketched a metaphor for symbols and signals in both ant colonies and human brains. “Ant Fugue,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, 1979. In 1982, Dawkins argued that the effects of genes in the body (the phenotype) and its environment (the extended phenotype) is as important as the genes themselves (the genotype). “The gene’s extended phenotypic effect, say an increase in the height of the [beaver] dam, affects its chances of survival precisely in the same sense as in the case of a gene with a normal phenotypic effect, such as an increase in the length of the [beaver’s] tail. The fact that the dam is the shared product of the building behaviour of several beavers does not alter the principle: genes that tend to make beavers build high dams will themselves, on average, tend to reap the benefits (or costs) of high dams, even though every dam may be jointly built by several beavers.” The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press, New Edition, 1999, page 209. In 2000, Turner argued that we might also consider animal-built structures as ‘external organs,’ just as if they were hearts of lungs. The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal-Built Structures, J. Scott Turner, Harvard University Press, 2000.

The treatment in the text goes only one step further to recognize that (short-term) pheromone trails and (longer-term) structural damages and (long-term) nest structure and (longest-term) genetic structure are also (synergetically bonded) parts of a termite swarm. A termite swarm’s brain thus has four levels of memory: the (shortest-term) scent trails, the (longer-term) nest damages, the (long-term) persistent nest structure, and the (longest-term) termite genetic structure. Like any brain, it also has sensors to detect changes in its world. It also has an attention mechanism to specify what changes to focus on when. And it has effectors to alter its world. All those parts are synergetically bonded into one distributed being. The fact that its parts are separated in space is irrelevant.

The analogy to our species, the things we do and say, the artifacts we build and pass on, and our genetic inheritance, then follows. The idea is also related to recent work in both anthropology and in cognitive science on ourselves as cyborgs. See, for example, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Andy Clark, Oxford University Press, 2003.

That ‘white-wall’ analogy is modeled after a standard technique in artificial intelligence called ‘blackboard systems.’ A blackboard system is an area of shared computer memory (or shared disk storage), called the blackboard, which contains a problem to be solved, and a set of software agents that can access and modify the blackboard. The idea is that no agent is smart enough to solve the problem, but each has pieces of knowledge that can be helpful in solving it. When they think that they have something relevant to add, they add it, then other agents react to that addition until the original problem is solved. There are several implementations of blackboard systems in use as expert systems today. Classifier systems, for example, are one such scheme.

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.

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. “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. “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. “Peaking of World Oil Production: Recent forecasts,” R. L. Hirsch, World Oil, 228(4), 2007. “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.

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.

More far-out ideas: Perhaps we could could loft satellites on today’s high-altitude, station-keeping balloons. Or 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.)

Scramjets: Much of scramjet research is classified. Here’s a report giving a good overview of what’s 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: “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 bigger-picture, see: The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, Marshall T. Savage, Little Brown, 1994, pages 103-123.

Space elevator: The Space Elevator: A Revolutionary Earth-to-Space Transportation System, Bradley C. Edwards and Eric A. Westling, BC Edwards, 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. 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.) We’ve also just recently learned exactly how photosynthesis works. And today we’re beginning to duplicate it. One day we might have huge bioreactors that function as plants do. They might take in water and carbon dioxide (the single largest greenhouse gas), and make oxygen plus edible starches. We might also have versions that split water to make cheap hydrogen. We could then use that hydrogen as fuel. That might then solve two problems at once—reducing greenhouse gases and making fuel. Right now, though, such artificial photosynthesis is far in the future for us, perhaps as much as four decades. We have little idea of the best chemistry to make such devices, and we have little idea of their various costs. “Architecture of the photosynthetic oxygen-evolving center,” K. N. Ferreira, T. M. Iverson, K. Maghlaoui, J. Barber, S. Iwata, Science, 303(5665):1831-1838, 2004. “Water Photolysis in Biology,” A. W. Rutherford, A. Boussac, Science, 303(5665):1782-1784, 2004. “Towards complete cofactor arrangement in the 3.0 Å resolution structure of photosystem II,” B. Loll, J. Kern, W. Saenger, A. Zouni, J. Biesiadka, Nature, 438(7070):1040-1044, 2005. “Light harvesting in photosystem I supercomplexes,” A. N. Melkozernov, J. Barber, R. E. Blankenship, Biochemistry, 45(2):331-345, 2006. Artificial Photosynthesis: From Basic Biology to Industrial Application, Anthony F. Collings and Christa Critchley (editors), Wiley-VCH, 2005. “Reduction of CO₂ with H₂O Using Highly Efficient Titanium Oxide-based Photocatalysts,” M. Anpo, both in Carbon Dioxide Utilization for Global Sustainability, Sang-Eon Park, Jong-San Chang, and Kyu-Wan Lee (editors), Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Carbon Dioxide Utilization, Seoul, Korea, October 12-16, 2003, Elsevier, 2004. “In Situ Formation of an Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst in Neutral Water Containing Phosphate and Co²⁺,” M. W. Kanan, D. G. Nocera, Science, 321(5892):1072-1075, 2008. We’re still in the basic science phase of artificial plants. We have much to learn about biophysics, biochemistry, synthetic chemistry, and physical chemistry, before we can build our own efficient plant-substitutes.

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.

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.

“And too many Christian men have been sold out of this land, now for a long time, and all this is entirely hateful to God, let him believe it who will. Also we know well where this crime has occurred, and it is shameful to speak of that which has happened too widely. And it is terrible to know what too many do often, those who for a while carry out a miserable deed, who contribute together and buy a woman as a joint purchase between them and practice foul sin with that one woman, one after another, and each after the other like dogs that care not about filth, and then for a price they sell a creature of God—His own purchase that He bought at a great cost—into the power of enemies. Also we know well where the crime has occurred such that the father has sold his son for a price, and the son his mother, and one brother has sold the other into the power of foreigners, and out of this nation.” The sermon of the Wolf to the English, when the Danes were greatly persecuting them, which was in the year 1014 after the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York and Bishop of Worcester, around 1014. Ibid. At the time, Bristol was a major slave port. Dublin was the largest slave market in western Europe.

Ecologists have long had to face this chasm separating what we think will happen and what actually happens. For example, since the 1940s the United States Forest Service has tried to suppress forest fires. New fire-retardant chemicals and rapid deployment of fire fighters stopped many fires before they spread. But because they no longer spread, accumulating thickets climbed into the understory of trees. And clear-cutting left quantities of branches and needles on the forest floor. When fires eventually erupted, they spread faster and burned hotter—so fast and so hot that they were totally out of control, thus destroying more than before. “Smokey’s Revenge,” C. E. Little, American Forests, 99(5-6):24-25,58-60, 1993. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Edward Tenner, Knopf, 1996.

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 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.

Politically, the problem is most acute in our democracies. To get traction, each interest group oversells its problems. It must also oversell its proposed solutions. So every decision is muddied by biased data and misperception. Every problem becomes ‘a national disaster.’ Its proposed solution becomes a ‘war’ on it. And, somehow, the first thing to do about it is to give the government control of more money. The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States, Theodore J. Lowi, W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

But our governance problem isn’t solely a disease of our democracies. For example, today’s dictators have it easy—unless their goals include living long enough to be dictators tomorrow. No leader can be everywhere, putting a gun to everyone’s head. In any case, rule by fear alone isn’t enough. You also need to bribe your minions to keep them friendly. The only way to do that is to let them milk the public. Your minions—the bureaucrats, judges, police, and soldiers who actually run things—are subject to the same non-linear forces. Their goal in life is the same as yours. It isn’t to govern fairly; it’s to grow ever more secure (so that they can govern fairly). Our varied lobbies, whether they concentrate money, or votes, or guns, tug those enforcers in many directions at once, just as in our democracies. So all our governments, even those that do their decision-making with guns on the table, are just as non-linear as our democracies.

Although enacted in 1993, the GPRA’s first full year of agency compliance was 1999. But the GPRA itself has no failure statements (that is, what it would take to declare that the act has itself failed). In a statement on February 12, 1997, before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, John A. Koskinen, Deputy Director for Management at the OMB noted that: “[U]sing performance measures in the budgeting process will never be an exact science, or even a science at all. Often, an under-performing program will benefit from additional resources, not fewer. Comparing results across program lines will always require political judgments about the relative priorities, for example, of programs for highways and education. And... performance information will often be used to adjust the way programs are managed rather than to change the resources provided....”

Three years later, in a statement on July 20, 2000, before a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Ellen Taylor, a policy analyst at OMB Watch, a non-profit watchdog organization, noted that: “...we remain skeptical about GPRA, while recognizing its great potential as a useful tool to strengthen the operation of government. However, we remain dubious that GPRA can achieve this potential. For this to happen, there must be: 1) greater transparency around the plans and reports... 2) greater public and stakeholder involvement in the process of implementation... and, 3) perhaps most important, greater positive cooperation between Congress and Executive agencies in using GRPA wisely and well.”

Of course, such attempts do have political uses: politicians can use them to castigate and throttle initiatives they don’t like. It’s highly likely that politics will never ever change.

Although viewed as a new problem, information overload has a long history going back at least as far as Socrates and his negative reaction (according to Plato, in the Phaedrus) to writing. But here are some recent books with an often anecdotal, mostly negative slant. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson, Prometheus, 2008. No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life, Heather Menzies, Douglas & McIntyre, 2005. Technophobia: The Psychological Impact of Information Technology, Mark Brosnan, Routledge, 1998. Data Smog, David Shenk, HarperOne, 1997. The Cult Of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise On High Tech, Artificial Intelligence & The True Art Of Thinking, Theodore Roszak, University of California Press, 1994.

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. The 2005 figures are PPP and are averaged from the figures reported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The CIA World Factbook gives South Korea an even higher rating.

Such arguments, and their various counter arguments, all assume that nothing else changes besides ‘culture’ or ideology. That seems backwards. Many of our current political ideologies and economic beliefs only flowered in our last three centuries or so, and that time has been full of scientific and technological change. How can we tell if one led to the other? Some group-based quirks, though, do predate that cutoff time, and it’s possible that some of them are vastly better at generating or preserving wealth and power. Capitalism springs to mind, especially with the recent collapse of communism. Douglass North, much as John Stuart Mill before him, has long argued that it’s evolving economic institutions that make the real difference, a view closer to my own. In general, economists, starting with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, tend to take a more ecumenical view of human ability and thus focus more on institutions and incentives. All I would quibble with that position is that it tends to undervalue all the remaining kinds of technology we develop. The Lever of Riches: Technology, Creativity, and Economic Progress, Joel Mokyr, Oxford University Press, 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Douglass North, Cambridge University Press, 1990. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World, Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr.,

Another fundamental problem with a cultural or ideological explanation might be that we don’t have a level international playing field to decide experimentally which ideology or culture, if any, is clearly better for gaining material wealth. Every nation has a history and geography. Differences in initial state, and differences in ongoing environment, both influence each nation’s wealth and power. The text thus avoids culture, religion, and politics in favor of more concrete, less contentious, and more testable forces. Besides, many books treat those topics, so there’s no point going over the arguments yet again. That doesn’t make them completely irrelevant, though, especially since most of us think they are. So whether they really are or not is not important—most of us think they are, and act accordingly. How we behave is partly determined by what we believe about how we behave, so even if our physical constraints dictate one set of choices, we might actually do something different, if that’s what we believe we must do—at least for a while.

The question of ‘culture’ is very important because Europeans began to believe that they were the purpose of the universe, and various religious beliefs, characteristics, political organizations, legal arrangements, or economic systems were argued to be the reason why. Starting in the late eighteenth century and continuing to today, a long line of philosophers, historians, and sociologists each elaborated various theories of historical development that, while differing wildly, all assume in one form or another that we are perfectible creatures on some sort of linear progression, and, desiring ever increasing creature comforts, we, over time, develop more and more support for those comforts. More recent philosophers, like Karl Popper, have attacked such theories as naive, instead likening the human story to an evolutionary process highly dependent on its initial conditions, and therefore one with an unpredictable future course. The text takes more of a middle course—accidents of history do matter, but broad trajectories are still discernible over our entire species. Whether there are any special characteristics, outside of historical happenstance, to explain why Europe industrialized first is of little direct importance in this text.

However, the question of Europe’s dominance is still one of the central questions of both modern history and modern economics. Many authors have tried their hands at it. Here are a few recent ones. The European Miracle: Environments Economics and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, Eric L. Jones, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, Mancur Olson, Yale University Press, 1982. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World, Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, Jr., Basic Books, 1982. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, Joel Mokyr, Oxford University Press, 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, Douglass North, Cambridge University Press, 1990. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, J. M. Blaut, The Guilford Press, 1993. World Economic Primacy: 1500-1990, Charles P. Kindleberger, Oxford University Press, 1996. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton, 1997. China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, R. Bin Wong, Cornell University Press, 1997. Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor David S. Landes, W. W. Norton, 1998. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age, Andre Gunder Frank, University of California Press, 1998. Conquests and Cultures: An International History, Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 1998. The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Kenneth Pomeranz, Princeton University Press, 2000.

My attitude to all that is summed up well in the following two extracts: “The question of the rise of Western Civilization to economic and technological domination continues to fascinate scholars... Almost everything about the topic is in dispute, and because the rhetoric of this literature almost invariably turns on the “for example” variety, little persuasion has actually occurred. First, ideology gets in the way. If one believes in free markets, the West’s commitments to them explains it all. If one is against free markets, one can either deny the historical fact of Western predominance altogether or condemn it squarely. Second, theory is of little help: economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and geography all play a role, but none produces a single consensus view of what matters most. Finally, while the historical record is rich and immense, it is far from clear if it will ever allow a sharp discrimination between alternative hypotheses.” “Eurocentricity Triumphant,” Joel Mokyr, a review of David Landes’ The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, The American Historical Review, 104(4):1241-46, 1999. “On close inspection, most characteristics alleged to give a special character to the West turn out either to be found in non-Western nations too or to have no clear causal connection to the innovations in constitutions and production processes that were the key elements in creating Western modernity... Cultural characteristics long thought to doom Asians to pre-capitalist life, such as Confucianism, are now seen by some as ideal foundations for advanced industrial organization. Western Europe’s conquest of the New World, once seen as unique, may have had counterparts in the Russian expansion into central and eastern Asia, and in the Qing expansion into central and southeastern Asia... Failures of the theory of the West’s “special something” have led some scholars toward yet a third hypothesis—that there was in fact no special something that fated the West for superiority over other civilizations, and that its divergence occurred relatively late (not until the late eighteenth century) and largely as a concatenation of chance circumstances.” “Whose Measure of Reality?” J. A. Goldstone, The American Historical Review, 105(2):501-508, 2000.

See also: “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the Rise of the West and the British Industrial Revolution,” J. A. Goldstone, Journal of World History, 13(2):323-389, 2002. And: Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History, Eric L. Jones, University of Michigan Press, 2000.

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, “World Income Distribution: Which Way?” P. Svedberg, Journal of Development Studies, 40(5):1-32, 2004. “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. “The World Distribution of Income: Falling Poverty and... Convergence, Period,” X. Sala-i-Martin, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 121(2):351-398, 2006.

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.

He may have also had at least 30 different bronze surgical tools—scalpels, tweezers, needles, and a spoon. Such tools were discovered in the burial goods of a chief physician named Qar, who lived in the Sixth Dynasty (around 4,350 years BP to 4,180 years BP, or around 3 to 5 centuries after the Edwin Smith doctor). Qar was buried at Saqqara, close to to Djoser’s pyramid complex. His tomb and grave goods were first found in 2000, then his sarcophagus was found far below that in 2006. Disease and Medicine in World History, Sheldon Watts, Routledge, 2003, page 21. “Too big for a coffin,” N. El-Aref, El-Ahram, Issue Number 823, 7-13 December 2006.

Finally, it’s often reported that Egypt had opium early on. For example, “Opium was being used in Egypt as far back as 2000 BC as a children’s sedative and teething remedy... [The] Ebers Papyrus... found between the legs of a mummy in a tomb near Luxor... [and] dated about 1550 BC... describes a mixture of opium and another material which was found effective in quietening crying children. Till some time ago children in Egypt, India and even Europe were being soothed with opium. It is said that mothers often used poppy juice to smear on their nipples so that the child would immediately stop crying on sucking this ‘drugged’ milk.” Narcotic Drugs, Anil Aggrawal, National Book Trust, 1996. However, while it’s likely that opium made it to Egypt during the 18th dynasty (about 3,400 years ago), since Mesopotamians apparently cultivated it as early as 5,400 years ago, hard evidence for its use in Egypt that early or earlier is, so far, weak. “Was opium known in 18th dynasty ancient Egypt? An examination of materials from the tomb of the chief royal architect Kha,” N. G. Bisset, J. G. Bruhn, S. Curto, B. Holmstedt, U. Nyman, M. H. Zenk, Journal of Ethnopharmacololgy, 41(1-2):99-114, 1994.

Millennia after the early Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Hindus, too, had a similar form of malpractice insurance. Surgical techniques were recorded in the Vedas or Samhitas. The Sushruta Samhita, for example, perhaps dating back to 2,800 years ago, describes one of the first specialties, lithotomy (that is, removal of bladder stones). The tract advises that the potential lithomist should first practice on three heretics. If they died, he should practice no more, for the next death would be murder. The Sushruta Samhita, An English Translation Based on Original Sanskrit Text, Kaviraj Kunjalal Bhishagratna (translator and editor), Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, Fourth Edition, 1991. “Cutting for the Stone: Lithotomy Through the Ages,” M. Andreoiu, Proceedings of the 10th Annual History of Medicine Days, pages 30-40, W. A. Whitelaw (editor), University of Calgary, March 23rd, 2001. “Urolithiasis through the ages,” J. Shah, H. N. Whitfield, BJU International, 89(8):801-810, 2002.

The missing protein is L-gulono-γ-lactone oxidase. It catalyzes the last step in the four-step biosynthesis of ascorbic acid from glucose:

In 1617, John Woodall, surgeon-general to the East India Company, wrote a guide to naval medicine that would be carried on all his company’s ships. For scurvy in England, he advised ‘scurby-grass’ (spoonwort), horseradish root, watercress, wormwood, and sorrel. Abroad, he suggested lemons, limes, tamarinds, and oranges. For scurvy at sea he recommended lemon juice. “... [W]e have in our owne country here many excellent remedies generally knowne, as namely, Scurvy-grasse, Horse-Reddish roots, Nasturtia Aquatica, Wormwood, Sorrell, and many other good meanes... to the cure of those which live at home... they also helpe some Sea-men returned from farre who by the only natural disposition of the fresh aire and amendment of diet, nature herselfe in effect doth the Cure without other helps... [At sea,] the Lemmons, Limes, Tamarinds, Oranges, and other choice of good helps in the Indies... do farre exceed any that can be carried tither from England... The juyce of lemmons is a precious medicine and well tried... It is to be taken each morning two or three teaspoonfuls, and fast after it two hours.” The Surgeon’s Mate, or Military and Domestique Surgery, John Woodall, 1617.

In 1634, Nathaniel Boteler, an English captain, wrote a guide to naval life, noting that the Dutch, the great sea traders of the time, avoided scurvy on their long voyages with cassava, pumpkins, potatoes, plantains, oranges, lemons, limes, and pineapples. “...[T]heir cassada, pompians, potatoes, plantains, oranger, lemons, limes, pines; which are excellent against the scorbute; so that the Dutch men-of-war, which yearly haunt all those coasts, do continually maintain themselves...” Six Dialogues about Sea Services. Between an High-Admiral and a Captain at Sea. Concerning the Commander in Chief... The Common Mariner... The Victualling out of Ships... The Names of all the Parts of a Ship... The Choice of the Best Ships of War... The Sailings, Signals, Chases and Fights ...; By Nathaniel Boteler esq; lately a commander and a captain in one of His Majesties Royal ships of war, Moses Pitt, 1685, page 66, Reprinted as NRS Volume LXV, 1929. Published in 1685 but apparently written in 1634.

In 1646, in the middle of the English Civil War, Giovanni Ferrari, a Jesuit professor in Rome, wrote the equivalent of the world’s best encyclopedia on oranges, casually mentioning that they cure scurvy. Hesperides sive de Malorum Aureorum Cultura et Usu Libri Quatuor, Giovanni Battista Ferrari, 1646.

Further, the English weren’t the only explorers to suffer from scurvy. The French, for example, also had a chequered history with scurvy. Both Cartier and Champlain recorded it. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, H. P. Biggar (translator), Ramsay Cook (editor), University of Toronto Press, 1993. The Spanish, too, suffered.

Insurrections because of enclosures had started at least as far back as 1543 and had led to slavery in 1547. Tudor life was not fun. Villages like Stratford, where Susanna and the rest of Shakespeare’s family, lived, frequently starved, or lost everything to fire (in Stratford, this happened twice in the 1590s), while in larger towns, merchants travelling from the biohazard hotspots in the south, brought disease, in particular plague. Meanwhile, the Little Ice Age winters just got worse and worse, with the Thames regularly freezing solid as far as London Bridge. With England’s impossible roads, when the rivers froze, so did trade, and with trade went food in winter. Starvation in winter, plague in summer; what joy. England was gearing up to have a revolution—which it finally did, in 1642. “The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements,” W. E. Tate, Victor Gollancz, 1967. “Crime and Popular Protest,” S. Hindle, in Blackwell Companions to British History: A Companion to Stuart Britain, Barry Coward (editor), Blackwell, 2003, pages 130-147. Frost, Freezes and Fairs: Chronicles of the frozen Thames and harsh Winters in Britain since 1000AD, Ian Currie, Frosted Earth, 1996. Coriolanus, William Shakespeare, Introduction, G. R. Hibbard (editor), Penguin, 1967, page 12.

This time though the admirals sided with the surgeons against the physicians. But, again, not for medical reasons. Their reasons were purely political. George Anson, whose 1740 voyage had prompted Lind’s test, was now fabulously wealthy. He was also a Lord, an admiral, and First Lord of the Admiralty (until 1762). He also admired Lind. It also didn’t hurt that the current king, George III, who wasn’t yet mad, was of Germanic extraction. He loved both lemonade and sauerkraut. (George III: A Personal History, Christopher Hibbert, Perseus Publishing, 1998.)

So this time the admirals ignored the carping physicians. They supplied their captains, one of whom was James Cook, with sauerkraut and other proposed cures. That included lemon juice boiled down to a syrup, which was Lind’s idea. The tests went nowhere. Boiling lemon juice denatures its vitamin C, although no one knew that. Lind didn’t notice because he didn’t do the right tests to control for it; he wasn’t the world’s best scientist. Plus, of all the test voyages, only James Cook’s lost no one to scurvy. But mostly that was because he was very clever about getting his men to eat anything—including foreign muck like onions and sauerkraut. So as far as the Admiralty was concerned, Lind’s lemon theory was worthless. Plus, lemons were still expensive. Meanwhile, the navy had a new war to fight, this time against some uppity colonists in British America. Then France entered the war as well. So scurvy continued to kill as usual.

New vitamin C sources just then becoming common, particularly potatoes and tomatoes, only made understanding the disease harder. And, because of scurvy, most captains tried to land often. Nearly all the early European colonies on the American, African, Indian, and Australian continents, started as vitamin pitstops. Of course, no one knew it at the time. Plus, even those few captains, like James Cook, who tried to vary their crew’s diet often failed in the face of their sailors’ insistence on foods they knew. They wanted sea biscuits, salt pork, and beer. They didn’t want any newfangled food technology, thank you very much. Their officers couldn’t understand that adventurous appetites only come with easy lives. The fewer our luxuries, the more we cling to them.

In 1768-71, Cook circumnavigated the planet in three years and lost not a single sailor to scurvy. He did it again in 1772-75, and yet again in 1776-79. He made regular landfalls to get fresh food and continually experimented with anything he came across—even onions—first trying it himself then giving it to his crew and gauging the effect. Strangely, Cook seemed to actually care about his sailors, perhaps because, unlike other captains, he was the son of a day laborer, and he had been promoted up the ranks on sheer ability, not connections. To prevent scurvy, he had sauerkraut first served to his officers as a special privilege, waited for jealousy to build up among the ordinary sailors, and only then had it served to them. Cook praised sauerkraut, but, being politically savvy, he also praised other of the Admiralty’s test cures. This is why, in 1779, the Admiralty started supplying all navy ships with rob and barley malt beer, both of which were useless. It was the sauerkraut and frequent landfalls that likely kept Cook’s crews alive.

Here’s what Cook had to say privately (in a letter to John Pringle, dated Plymouth Sound, July 7, 1776): “I entirely agree with you, that the dearness of the rob of lemons and of oranges will hinder them from being furnished in large quantities. But I do not think this so necessary; for, though they may assist other things, I have no great opinion of them alone. Nor have I a higher opinion of vinegar. My people had it very sparingly during the late voyage, and, towards the latter part none at all; and yet we experienced no ill effect from the want of it. The custom of washing the inside of the ship with vinegar, I seldom observed; thinking that fire and smoke answered the purpose much better.” Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, Performed by Captain James Cook. With an Account of his Life during the previous and intervening periods. Also an appendix detailing the progress of the voyage after the death of Captain Cook, Andrew Kippis, Carpenter & Son, 1814.