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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| In Mongolia we're talking about a crappy environment aren't we, where nomadic pastoralism is the only way to eke a living? You'd think no competition would be supported/tolerated. But if the "wild" horses were penned, they can't have been all that wild. |
You get a crappy lifestyle in a crappy environment, hence nomadic pastoralism. But if the environment is harsh, you need to have something to fall back on, just enough to be an insurance without being an encumbrance perhaps. (I bet you'll find the Bedouin have exactly the right number of camels for their purposes plus a few extra).
The wild horses were extremely docile. They just milled around looking rather bemused. (Like the Chinese reindeer who appear at the beginning of spring when the dinner gong is sounded).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Can we please stop committing Acacia Avenue Syndrome and describing Mongolia as crappy. The Mongols have spent thousands of years converting this stretch of the earth's surface into a veritable paradise (for Mongols). None of us know what it would be like now if the Mongols had not intervened. Possibly a cross between Berkshire and Hertfordshire.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Wow! That's big news that dear ol' Lysenko is getting a place in the sun. What price full-blown Lamarckism? |
Lamarckism has never gone away. It is still the core belief of many biologists despite the current paradigm's religious belief in neo-Darwinism. Darwin himself shared many of Lamarck's view but this is never mentioned in the hallowed halls of academia.
In two recent experiments conducted by biologists Lamarckian principles have been verified.
The first example was bacteria samples that could not survive in a lactose environment. The test bacterium modified a gene that allowed it to thrive in the saline solution and passed it on to its 'children' who were fully able to propagate in the 'alien' environment. In the words of Cairns who conducted the experiment 'the bacteria possessed the ability to generate precisely the mutations needed to adapt to the new environment'
The second was more interesting. In order to survive in a hostile environment (salicin) a different bacteria excised one gene then modified another in response to the new environment. The gene that was modified could not be changed without first getting rid of another prior to the modification. According to Barry Hall 'we now have to examine the notion implied by the results that mutation, like other biological processes, is subject to regulation by environmental factors.'
The experiments proved that the environment determined the mutation; a core principle of Lamarckism.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| "[farming] lessened the need for robust physiques and we have been shrinking ever since." |
Farming increases the supply of bullshit. |
So walking through the woods and firing an arrow into a wild boar is vastly more strenuous than plowing, planting and irrigating the lower forty.
And they actually get paid for this drivel....
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| But if the environment is harsh, you need to have something to fall back on, just enough to be an insurance without being an encumbrance perhaps. (I bet you'll find the Bedouin have exactly the right number of camels for their purposes plus a few extra.) |
Yes, redundancy is a technical matter. But you may also find that nomads are frequently in contact with the townies for fresh supplies and can always fall back on returning to the town to live. Some already hedge their bets by having houses in town.
| The wild horses were extremely docile. |
While zebras can't be tamed...
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| Can we please stop committing Acacia Avenue Syndrome and describing Mongolia as crappy. |
No.
Unless you are a duly equipped and knowledgeable Mongol, you are very likely to die out there. (In the crappy bits, that is. Are there any non-crappy bits where they are, nevertheless, nomadic?) Food, water and shelter are scarce... unless you know just where to go and can get there fast enough...
Whereas in Berkshire or Hertfordshire, you probably need no more than clothing: you can blunder about with no special knowledge and no special materiel and come across fresh water, food and shelter long before your life is in danger. The Home Counties are much less crappy than the Mongolian steppe.
Can we please stop committing Crappiness is a Subjective Matter Syndrome and suggesting crappiness is meant to have anything to do with misery?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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So, we are making progress. You are now specifically equating non-crappiness with "the number of people who could survive without any special skills". This is a little like your earlier heresy of equating crappiness with amounts of biomass.
But even accepting for one moment (for one teeniest moment) your assumption, can you not see that there is a difference between an area of land which requires nomadism -- alpine meadows for instance (I wonder if you'd have the nerve to call them crappy) and the Asian steppe which has been specifically designed by Mongols for Mongols. And that the fewer the number of people who could survive on them the better.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| So, we are making progress. You are now specifically equating non-crappiness with "the number of people who could survive without any special skills". This is a little like your earlier heresy of equating crappiness with amounts of biomass. |
I think you're hanging onto a misapprehension. I never said anything about amounts of biomass: the opposite actually:
'Course, the focus is on 'crappy' environments, places we are not physiologically suited to, places where it is clear that survival is dependent on specialised knowledge and techniques/technologies. We can't survive deserts of sand or ice and I put it to you that the odds are slim in the rainforest, too. There is plenty to make you sick or dead in an English hedgerow, too, so, while temperate conditions are more conducive to humans, 'crappiness' forms a continuum and survival is dependent on knowledge/technology to such-and-such a degree.
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It's not a crappy environment if it's your home and you have learnt the skills from childhood to exploit it, skills which wouldn't be of use elsewhere.
Absolutely. Mick accused me of Acacia Avenue Syndrome on this, too. But it is a plain fact that people die from exposure. If you have to know precisely how to get from one water hole to another and you risk dying if you miss it, you live in a crappy environment. If you need special knowledge to catch fish from under the ice and there is no more food around that you can reach before you collapse, you live in a crappy environment. But if you can blunder around and come across food and water without even trying, then you are not in a crappy environment.
There is a scale of crappiness: the more your life depends on knowledge and equipment (clothing, tooling, shelter...) the crappier the place is. Crappiness of the environment has nothing to do with the happiness or misery of the people living there. Call it harshness, if you prefer.
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I described conditions at the extremes of the LP's range as crappy, but this is with respect to the LP and not necessarily anything else. It seems to go something like this: Harry Potter has at least one trick up his sleeve to deal with everything he encounters at home... Eventually, it's Game Over.
Ron Weasley, meanwhile, is fully equipped or better equipped where Harry is struggling: different criteria of crappiness apply to him.
(Crappiness is nevertheless an objective measure for each of them. This is not Acacia Avenue Syndrome.)
| can you not see that there is a difference between an area of land which requires nomadism and the Asian steppe which has been specifically designed by Mongols for Mongols. And that the fewer the number of people who could survive on them the better. |
It's an objective matter: I don't care how it came to be crappy: if it is, it is. Making it crappy on purpose would be a rather effective means, but you wouldn't have said "the fewer the number of people who could survive on them the better" if there were not plain facts of who could and who couldn't.
| alpine meadows for instance (I wonder if you'd have the nerve to call them crappy) |
You said nomadism is required there, so I suppose they must be; but the answers for goatherds and hermits might be different.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| ...there is a difference between an area of land which requires nomadism -- alpine meadows for instance (I wonder if you'd have the nerve to call them crappy) and the Asian steppe which has been specifically designed by Mongols for Mongols. |
Such a 'designed' landscape ensures the way of life can, indeed has to, continue once the requisite survival skills have been learned. We accept that we have to master the three R's in order to live reasonably comfortably in, say, the Home Counties.
| And that the fewer the number of people who could survive on them the better. |
The best defence against would-be invaders with or without technological or numerical superiority. If no other group can dominate the area or even wants to, stability is guaranteed. How many armies have come to grief on the steppes? How many armies have even attempted to cross the Alps, let alone survived?
| If you have to know precisely how to get from one water hole to another and you risk dying if you miss it, you live in a crappy environment. If you need special knowledge to catch fish from under the ice and there is no more food around that you can reach before you collapse, you live in a crappy environment. |
Don't these extremes apply to inexperienced outsiders? Not many Aborigenes die of thirst or Inuit from starvation as far as I know (and we have instances of people dying from hypothermia even in the uncrappy West)
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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In the case of horse cultures the critical factor IS BIOMASS. Horses have the great advantage of making their riders mobile. But their greatest disadvantage is they can't survive marginal climatic conditions nor are they able to survive in rocky terrain.
Horses excrete 75% of the nutrients they ingest while cattle retain 75% of their nutrients. In even mild drought conditions horses die.
The plains Indians survived even prolonged droughts because they had bison wandering about the plains. The Mongols by contrast did not. They relied on their horses for most of their nourishment and supplemented it by subjugating upland cultures who could supply them with goods and services.
This was the cause of the downfall of the earliest recorded Mongol empire the Avars. A massive climate catastrophe in 536-7AD killed millions (50% of the western world at that time). Major trading cities like Constantinople were devastated. Historical records from China, India, Persia, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Levant, Turkey, Italy, France and Britain record that the sun was dimmed for a year and a half and record that plague and famine ensued.
On the Asian Steppes the Avars suffered a dramatic reversal of fortunes. Their horses died in their thousands and their former vassals became the masters. The Mongols were not technically sophisticated; they gained their metal weapons and wealth by forcing others to do their bidding because they controlled the breeding and use of horses. Their mounted warriors were always superior to unmounted opposition. But their greatest asset was also their greatest weakness.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| And that the fewer the number of people who could survive on them the better. |
The best defence against would-be invaders with or without technological or numerical superiority. |
I say the Roman roads argument starts with the need to conquer the people, not open the spaces... but if the people are like waves, adept at rolling back and forth across boundless acres at will...?!
| Don't these extremes apply to inexperienced outsiders? Not many Aborigines die of thirst or Inuit from starvation as far as I know |
Yes, exactly. The Aborigines have amazingly precise knowledge of where to find water. Last one I saw moved some random-looking stones to uncover a sweet water hole about a foot across. That's what song lines and the prodigious Aborigine memory are all about.
And that, by definition, is non-primitive, by the way.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| That's what song lines and the prodigious Aborigine memory are all about. And that, by definition, is non-primitive, by the way. |
No, that by definition is primitive. Non-primitives would never use such absurdly inefficient systems as song-lines, prodigious memories and suchlike. You'd have to be...an aborigine even to consider it.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| And that, by definition, is non-primitive, by the way. |
Ray Mears in his musings on the Aborigines' extraordinary level of expertise said in a western society they'd be lawyers or similar. Why is it that westerners view this area of knowledge as "primitive"? Because it's too specialised? (And they're armed only with knowledge, no special equipment required).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It's simple. Everybody is so terrified of calling primitives 'stupid' that they fail to see that primitive is merely a technical term. I don't question the fact that learning song-lines is roughly of the order of difficulty of learning case-law -- it's just one is primitive and the other isn't.
Not that I would trust Ray Mears. Australian aborigines have had the chance to be lawyers for many decades now and thunderously few have availed themselves of doing so. One explanation is that they're stupid. However there are others.
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Komorikid
In: Gold Coast, Australia
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| Australian aborigines have had the chance to be lawyers for many decades now and thunderously few have availed themselves of doing so. One explanation is that they're stupid |
I know of a lot of lawyers whom I would consider thunderously stupid. They're called politicians.
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