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Naturally occurring biological warfare. (NEW CONCEPTS)
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GrouchoMarxthespot



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It is widely accepted that European settlers/invaders carried diseases that decimated the aboriginal populations of Australia and N America.
If this is a fact then the assumptions behind this outcome are worth thinking about:

1. Separate and isolated human groups must share many diseases and acquired resistance to them, simply because of the impact of the global atmospheric system that distributes wind borne bacteria.
2. For a disease to be acquired by just one human group presupposes that the disease is immobile, and can only get from A to B if the human host goes from A to B.
3. The group who have acquired the potentially fatal disease are in a state of equilibrium with it: It doesn't kill them, nor does it die out. It remains alive and potent to those without acquired immunity.
4. It must be transmitted by proximity alone, not windborne nor the movements of animals.

If these assumptions are correct then the European Disease Model, which is a model of naturally occurring biological warfare, works. It does depend, heavily, on complete separation of the groups concerned.

There is another factor:

Call the European invaders Group A, and the aborigines Group B.

Group B must share ALL their fatal diseases with Group A, and therefore have no advantage in this naturally occurring biological warfare. Group A must have at least ONE fatal disease they do not share with Group B, thus giving them an advantage in this biological war, through their acquired immunity.

(If, hypothetically, the aborignal inhabitants of Australia/N America had invaded Europe they would, therefore, probably have failed due to the disease deficit that they had).

If we generalise back from these recent occurrences to prehistorical human groups it is reasonable to assume that there were many isolated human groups around, and therefore many group specific diseases. For example groups with heavy exposure to domestic animals would have acquired diseases and immunity that nomadic groups would not.

Hypothesis: Pre historic groups that had a disease deficiency vis a vis any other group with whom they came into contact would be more likely to lose population than the other group.

Should this approach be fed into the guesses we make about trade/invasion/re settlement among pre historic groups?
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Mick Harper
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Welcome, Mr Spot. Your piece was too long and complex for me (at least) to understand. One of the things we have painfully learned over the years is that taking a small piece of an argument and shaking it like a rag doll produces the best material. Go back and choose one 'bit' and re-present. From what I can see you may be on to something.
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GrouchoMarxthespot



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Thank you Mr Harper,

Good advice.

Why didn't the aboriginal inhabitants of at two areas, N. America and Australia, have diseases that were at least as big a threat to European invaders as the European invaders' diseases were to them?

K Spot
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Mick Harper
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Now if I may say so that is an important question which, as far as am concerned, has not been asked before, obvious though it now is.

First there is the matter of venereal diseases for thataway transmission. Secondly, one not very good reply to your question would be that Population A is large and Population B is small. It is not a good reply because while it is probable that overall survival would probably not be at issue for Population A, we would certainly have heard about diseases on a smaller scale. And (apart from venereal disease) we haven't.
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GrouchoMarxthespot



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Makes you wonder if the whole European Disease Model is a convenient construct:

'Oh look they're all very poorly.'

'Nothing to do with us Guv, they've caught some nasty diseases.'

And so we are absolved from the fact that the conquered are dispossessed and shunted into abysmal living conditions by the workings of an impersonal biological model - much in vogue at the time.
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Mick Harper
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Try not to be too left-wing, Carlos. We do not need to concern ourselves with what was in vogue then though since you've raised it, my own impression is that people were really quite proud (or at any rate unconcerned) at the way they killed off the locals. "All the more room for us" is, maybe was, a perfectly respectable expression of cultural superiority.
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Ishmael


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Historiography is the most neglected discipline.
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GrouchoMarxthespot



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Don't worry about my left wing leanings, Harpo.

Darwin's ideas were, most likely, a synthesis of emerging thoughts - it is quite likely therefore that settlers/invaders to Australia would view the fate of the aboriginal population within that emerging paradigm of the survival of the fittest - ie the European settlers.

Ishmaael's comments re historiography are very pertinent: Contemporaneous written accounts of the fate of the aboriginal population are likely to reflect the dominant paradigm - which is survival of the fittest.

We really need a virologist/bacteriologist's comments here about the likelihood of group specific diseases - is there a doctor in the house?
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Boreades


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This reminds me very much of The Way The West Was Won. But not through the myth of conquest by Superior White People - but by the spread of diseases.

See " 6 Ridiculous Lies You Believe About the Founding of America"

http://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-believe-about-founding-america.html
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Ishmael


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I do not believe in race-killing epidemics.

I suspect that most of the disease-killed-the-Indians mythology was invented after the influenza epidemic of 1919 -- and that that epidemic (we are slowly coming to appreciate) was not caused by the flu but by the medicine used to treat it (the intellectual/scientific establishment was motivated to develop the race-threatening-epidemic idea just in time to keep anyone asking uncomfortable questions about how millions could die from a mild seasonal infection).

I don't think there were ever very many "natives" in North America to kill off. And the much larger South American population looks to me like it survived in situ. As I love to point out, the face of Hugo Chavez can be seen painted in several places on Aztec Walls.





So that leaves the BLACK DEATH of Europe only to explain.

One explanation then is that the Americas were actually discovered in the dark ages -- and the disease model is correct (with both populations suddenly infected and suffering massive kill-off).

But is there another way to explain "The Plague?"

If we assume it wasn't a plague at all, what could produce death-by-disease on such a massive scale?

When I posed this question to my father, he immediately saw just how to do it.
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GrouchoMarxthespot



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The usual metaphysics from Ishmael:

I do not believe in race-killing epidemics. ...


His reference to his father may be evidence for a Lamarkian view of inherited bigotry of course.

Modern vaccination techniques support a social intervention/socialist model for optimising a population's resistance to a disease. Equally, an invader's toxicity would work in the opposite direction.

Diseases are actually very interesting.

There were many 'plagues' in the British Isles by the way.
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Jorn



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Ishmael wrote:

But is there another way to explain "The Plague?"

If we assume it wasn't a plague at all, what could produce death-by-disease on such a massive scale?

Economic collapse.

The population in Europe had increased because trade had made it possible to live where not enough food were produced locally.

Six hundred and fifty years ago came the climax of the worst financial collapse in history to date. The 1930's Great Depression was a mild and brief episode, compared to the bank crash of the 1340's, which decimated the human population.

The crash, which peaked in A.C.E. 1345 when the world's biggest banks went under, 'led' by the Bardi and Peruzzi companies of Florence, Italy, was more than a bank crash...it was a financial disintegration. Like the disaster which looms now, projected in Lyndon LaRouche's 'Ninth Economic Forecast' of July 1994, that one was a blowup of all major banks and markets in Europe, in which, chroniclers reported, 'all credit vanished together', most trade and exchange stopped, and a catastrophic drop of the world's population by famine and disease loomed.


http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/954_Gallagher_Venice_rig.html

In Swedish you had the concept of field sickness, that covered basically every disease that hit the Swedish army's field train. In normal circumstances you had an equilibrium between the diseases, and how many people who moved around and how many people who lived together, how much food was available, etc.

When the army was called together, all normality was set aside, and you got a large collection of hungry, dirty and weak people that made every disease blossom. ***

Something similar happened with the black death, no matter if you believe in a single plague or not. Once commerce broke down, people became hungry and started to roam the countryside in search of food and economic opportunities, while they were growing weaker and more filthy.

***Trying to induce the field sickness among the the Swedish army, seems to have been Norway's standard defense against the Swedes for centuries, as they burned the land and poisoned wells, lakes and rivers with dead animals.

It might be because water with living fish in them was safe to drink, that the knowledge of keeping well fish never died out in Scandinavia.
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Ishmael


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GrouchoMarxthespot wrote:
There were many 'plagues' in the British Isles by the way.


Really?

When was the last one?
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Ishmael


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Jorn wrote:
Ishmael wrote:

But is there another way to explain "The Plague?"

Economic collapse.


Your answer lacks the simplicity and elegance present in my father's proposal. Your model also lacks his model's immediacy and near certainty of outcome.
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Ishmael


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GrouchoMarxthespot wrote:
Modern vaccination techniques support a social intervention/socialist model for optimising a population's resistance to a disease.


Then reason to suspect its benefits have been exaggerated.
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