February 22, 2018 Thursday
Bedtime Story
The Essence of the Agricultural Revolution: Ability to Keep More People Alive Under Worse Conditions
Harari goes on:
“Around 13,000 BC, when people fed
themselves by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals, the area around
the oasis of Jericho, in Palestine, could support at most one roaming band of
about a hundred relatively healthy and well-nourished people.
Around 8500 BC, when wild plants gave way
to wheat fields, the oasis supported a large cramped village of 1,000 people,
who suffered far more from disease and malnutrition.
The currency of evolution is neither hunger
nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes.
Just as the economic success of a company
is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the
happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is
measured by the number of copies of its DNA.
If no more DNA copies remain, the species
is extinct, just as a company without money is bankrupt.
If a species boasts many DNA copies, it is
a success, and the species flourishes.
From such a perspective, 1,000 copies are
always better than a hundred copies.
This is the essence of the Agricultural
Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.
Yet why should individuals care about
evolutionary calculus?
Why would any sane person lower his or her
standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo species
genome?
Nobody agreed to this deal: the
Agricultural Revolution was a trap.”
I shall not go further on this but the point
is humans are very poor in understanding at what makes them happy and it is
often the social pressure that drives them in their acts.
Consider for example the Great and Fat
Indian Wedding Act.
People in general often indulge in foolish
competition in outdoing each other in terms of lavishness and expenditure
during their personal weddings or those of their children, to the extent of
going into burden of loans and perhaps eventually suicides in some extreme
cases.
One of the significant reasons for farmer’s
suicide in India is the indebtedness created as a result of loans taken for
their daughters’ wedding, and may be even for their sons’.
Jacob Bernoulli was born in 1654 when the Agricultural
Revolution had firmly established itself as a way of life and Industrial
Revolution was on the verge of taking off.
Religion was a serious stuff then in
Europe, maybe even more than Islam is today in Middle East and Hindutva in today’s
India and so his parents insisted that he study theology and enter ministry.
Jacob probably was least interested in religion
but could not say no to his folks, so what he did instead was study theology
along with mathematics and astronomy.
On attaining the age of 22, Jacob took a
sabbatical and for nearly six years he traveled all across Europe
corresponding with leading mathematicians and scientists including Leibniz,
Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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