Keith, ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Ray Evans Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 3:59 AM Subject: Height and weight (was Re: Diminution and Expansion)
(snip) > Good gracious! You don't have to be much a of a scientist to answer this > one. Look at the diminished weight and height of the average Asian paddy > field peasant today and compare them with those, such as the young Japanese > today, who have been lucky enough to grow up in an industrial society. This is what I was talking about when I referred to scientists not going deeply enough into an issue. I found a beautiful web site that has a graphic that makes the point. It is at: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html Follow the graphic on "to the power of ten" and realize that everything beyond the solar system and below a certain level of diminution is artistic projection. But it still makes the point that what is reasonable should be probably true. Unfortunately the Hubbell space telescope has defeated many reasonable assumptions and opened our minds beyond our narrow experiences. You are using the same logic that was the basis for the "science of phrenology" 150 years ago. The assumption was that a bigger brain came from a better life and housed more intelligence. The best life was the "civilized life" of course. Only their was a problem. The biggest heads were found in the Northern Plains in the nomadic peoples of the Lakota and the Osage. The same is true of the Dinka in Africa whose heads are not the only biggest thing that they have either. The smallest heads and bodies were from the most civilized societies as were the longest work hours. Something that is still true today. You can make a case for island peoples and people who live and work in extreme situations having compact bodies more equipped to live in tight spaces. Otherwise why would you have all of these citified folks longing for the countryside. I've never longed for it and I'm not a romantic but most of all I have my size before I came to the industrialized world. And for that reason I won't work in such "scale" ordered alleged "productive" environments. The theater builds big bodies, not the laboratory. Diet seems to be less the issue than the cross cultural travel and cross breeding. A seminar on nutrition at Rockefeller University 15 years ago concluded that they didn't know what caused the vast differences in sizes and health from peoples who at vastly different diets. From groups who drink cow's blood to the people down the road who are just as healthy and big and are vegetarians. One thing is however sure. That is that the polluted environment of today's cities and around our factories is not an inducement to anything but blood cancer. Pollution science is apologetics not science. > Paleontologists reckon that the height and weight of the average person in > England did not regain his natural height and weight (that of pre-Neolithic > man) until the 1960s. His dimensions were about the same as in Tudor times > -- or, indeed, at any time for several thousand years past -- that is, > about four inches shorter and 40/50 lbs lighter than he should be. At the > time of recruitment for WWI, only one in three working men were up to > scratch. True, these figures don't speak much for the first 150 or so > grueling years of the Industrial Revolution, but they're even more > eloquent about the long-term effects of the Agricultural Revolution > starting at about 8-5,000 BC. The Lakota and Osage were once agricultural but agriculture gave them bad teeth. They enjoyed the plains. They were also good businessmen when the playing field was level which wasn't often. Keith, this is just so much more compelling a story then you are telling. The use of refined sugars for the wealthy which made them weak and then transferred from the wealthy to the factory workers while the wealthy went to spas. To what end was all of these addictions experienced by the Western Industrial workers? As for progress, you can make a better case for good water and a sewage system that didn't poison them especially after Dickens time, than you can the native grown and developed European foods. The cities of Europe transferred to the New World were so filthy that the Indians who visited often went home and died from the disease. The water was also the reason for the high rate of alcoholism amongst those folks as well. Even today, our virus rich environment is STILL grounded in the animals Europeans kept. When the Europeans went around the world, death followed them like a puppy, but we often are only aware of the death of the humans. In America, the plagues destroyed the animal populations that were teeming from the forestry practices of the First Nation's peoples. As for the European Agricultural revolution, what has happened to the alleged "fertile crescent?" (it is now desert) The Europeans are clever and the only stand of new Sequoia Redwoods in the world are in Italy. They were great collectors but no matter where they went they spread disease and disorder in their wake. They were protected from such truths by the belief in their order which in their minds constituted ORDER. So they really had little idea of how destructive they were. They called their need to propagate European Spreadthink the "White Man's Burden." Even today it is hard to get a modern, industrialized westerner to contemplate where 70% of that food that he or she eats was developed. Not in the factories and not in the fertile crescent either. True, pre-Neolithic people had shorter > life-spans, but that's besides the point -- their way of life was > necessarily highly physical and dangerous. This doesn't preclude the > possibility of happy and fulfilled lives. What is this Neolithic stuff? The people of Mexico refused to use the wheel and preferred stone and obsidian implements to metals. Does that mean that they were Neolithic? I've heard scientists refer to them as Hunter/Gatherers! Their obsidian knives are still superior to every surgical instrument other than the diamond. The flint knives found at the Spiro Mound in Oklahoma are so virtuosic and practical, if you know how to sharpen them, that they were long considered fakes because they didn't fit with the barbaric image propagated by conquerors trying to calm their Christian consciences after they committed genocide. There were also Chinese statues found in that mound just as there has been found tobacco and coca in mummies in Egypt. The wheel use insisted upon in Mexico along with the hooves of the horses, destroyed the shallow soil over the sand of Mexico and created the same types of deserts as we see in the late fertile crescent. Francis Jennings the Newberry Historian pointed out that the Aztecs chose not to use wheels because of what they did to the soil. i.e. created deserts. As for travel. The boat that Thor Hyordal had made in Africa didn't make it to South America but when he had a reed boat made by South American Indians out of reeds it made it across to the Old World. And for those shorter life spans. I don't know about the Neolithic since all I have are shards but highly physical lives are usually more healthy than the sedentary, dull drudgery of today's workers. That is why they have all been exercising. Today's Russians don't have such a great life span. Minimal medical practice, good toiletry, mixed foods and intelligent meats with no pesticides and steroids, and the shifting of multi-use fields where the plants were treated as communities that both took from and gave back to the soil. These are health inducing. More mouths to feed were easy while the ravages of old age with too few children were a disaster. The Industrial era took away the children. What happened in the Industrial era was the brutal supremacy of the machine. A Machine that marched across the world and crushed the organic wherever it was found and is still doing it. Good taste made that unacceptable. The only way to make it acceptable was to do away with good taste. Try a hand finished wild rice from the lovingly cared for fields of the Ojibwa and compare it to the garbage that you find in markets calling itself "Indian rice" which is chopped everyyear, has no finish and is ugly to the taste. If you like that you will love MacDonalds. We are able to cure many things today with modern drugs but we also have many new ailments and a coming set of anti-biotic resistant diseases that will test how healthy our current lives are when pitted against the greatest enemies. Those who are microscopic and eat people as food. And then there is overpopulation and the general pollution of air, water, and food. Yes, there are people who would have died in an earlier culling of the population through disease and birth defects. Steven Hawking among them. That would be a tragedy but I would like to also to admit that this happy jingoism has come at a big cost as well, and my ancestors were the ones who bore the brunt of that cost. Our sacrifices paid for your comfort and Hawking's life. What we would like is just a little gratefulness and grace. REH
