Innocence lost / innovations = bad

[Monte Davis]

  > Meh.  I didn't mean to open the gates to smugglers 
 
And I didn't mean to reprove you personally in any way. I meant that as a
culture, we have yet to absorb all the premises and implications of what Dan
Dennett calls "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"... that the *mechanism* of evolution
(natural selection through differential reproductive success) works one
organism, one breeding population, one generation at a time, responsive only
to *that* environment at *that* moment, and is completely independent of
ideas of long-range "progress" we may bring to it.
 
E.g., we look at blind cave-dwelling organisms whose ancestors had eyes and
are prone to think of it as "devolution." But as far as evolution is
concerned, it happened because growing and maintaining eyes has a
significant metabolic cost. In caves there was no penalty -- in fact, a
slight benefit -- for those who didn't do it, so mutations for smaller,
funkier, less functional eyes accumulated until the eyes were gone. Ditto
for all kinds of parasites down to viruses, whose ancestors lived
independently, We think of them as having "given something up," but it's
been a very successful strategy: there are far more parasites than
free-living organisms, and may well be more *species* of parasites.
 
Or look at us: as primates, we can't synthesize vitamin C as birds,
reptiles, amphibians and nearly all other mammals do. Presumably we lost
that because for most of the last 50+ million years primates lived in
fruit-rich tropical environments where there was always plenty on the diet.
So when a mutation knocked out that abillity, it cost us nothing (and again,
may well have conferred a small benefit in no longer supporting that bit of
biochemistry). But when humans spread into colder environments with no fresh
green stuff part of the year -- voila, scurvy! until we found storable
C-rich root vegetables such as potatoes, or developed pickling and other
preserving techniques. 
 
By any objective standard it was certainly not an "improvement" to lose that
C-synthesis ability -- but evolution doesn't have standards, doesn't have
progress in mind. All it 'knows" is "whatever works a bit better *here and
now*,  there'll be more of it in the next generation."
 
> If "health" is described as either an active resistance to disease, or as
a passive non-disposition  
> to receiving it genetically, and there were a collective grade for the
mean health of a human population  
> in a given historical moment, proportional to the number of human
residents in that moment,  
> would you not say that we are healthier now than we were one century ago?
Do you agree w/ that? 
 
Sure -- as long as you keep in mind that, e.g., people with the genes for
sickle-cell anemia can be simultaneously "healthier"  -- if they live in
malarial regions where its downside was long outweighed by the resistance it
confers -- and "less healthy" if they don't, or if DDT shows up and the
malaria goes away. Evolution plays no favorites between the two.
 
At a deeper level, when you say "we're healthier (or otherwise biologically
better off) than our ancestors" it's very easy to bring connotations that
really belong to *individuals*, because we use the same cluster of words --
"growth, development," etc" -- for *individuals* within one lifetime and for
*populations* over many. As you grow and learn, *you* improve: get bigger,
stronger, more capable. But one century from now, *we* will all be dead --
that evolutionary "improvement" will be different gene frequencies in a
whole new population, which will be a fine thing but not at all the same
thing.   
 
To bring it back to the original arguments about hunter-gatherers, disease
etc: when Asian nomads came to the New World and found two continents full
of big game that had never been hunted, it was a total bonanza: they spread
and proliferated for millennia: a "progressive" success story if there ever
was one, by the standards of the Paleolithic Old World they had left. But
*at the same time* and *for the same reason*, they were missing out on all
the fun of density-dependent diseases -- millennia of plague after plague --
that were evolving in the larger populations of the Old World.
 
So when Leif Ericsson, Columbus et al arrived... 
 
And remarked on the stature and general healthy-lookingness of the
hunter-gatherer locals compared to their own scurvy sailors... 
 
And  breathed, excreted, shook hands over a peace pipe, whatever -- 
 
The holocaust was on, and continued until within a century or three the
"Native" Americans had been culled as fiercely as the homeboys had been
culled over all those millennia. The Economist article is part of the same
decades-long change in thinking that produced McNeill's Plagues and Peoples,
Crosby's Ecological Imperialism, Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Mann's
1491, etc.. The master narrative has largely shifted from "advanced European
society/technology overwhelms primitive New World versions" to "big pathogen
inventory from Old World decimates unprepared population in New World, then
social/technological advantages mop up the survivors."
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