When speaking of revisiting childhood experience of majestic Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, my father once gave me advice very similar to this:
“It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it. To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory. It is only in the mind that shining adventure remains forever bright.”
– Aldo Leopold (1949), A Sand County Almanac.
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy just issued its much-awaited International Energy Outlook (IEO) 2009. To my knowledge, this marks this first time the U.S. Federal government has acknowledged the possibility of rapidly increasing hydrocarbon prices in the near future:
Well, humans, hasn’t it been an interesting week in the modelling of your behaviour?
(1) To start off, {Powell et al. (2009), Science, 324, p. 1298-1301} convincingly argue that it was population density, not genetic change, that got the ball rolling on your symbolic and technological complexity in the Late Pleistocene: (z measures “level of ability at some cultural skill or in some cultural domain”.)
An illustration, from a single iteration and shown at 25-generation intervals, of the spatial structuring of skill accumulation in a heterogeneous subpopulation density world. The left side of each subplot is populated at density Dhigh (0.02) and the right side at density Dlow (0.002). Each subpopulation is marked by a circle, centered on the spatial location of the group and with diameter proportional to its mean z value. Regional mean z values are also given at the top of each subplot.
(2) And {Bowles, S. (2009), Science, 324, p. 1293-1298} argues that it was mortality due to inter-group rivalry that gave rise to your much-touted costly individual altruism. Particularly interesting is his analysis of Pleistocene mortality rates resulting from inter-group conflict:
Sources of archaeological (filled squares) and ethnographic (filled dots) evidence on warfare and genetic (open dots) data on between-group differences.
Summary statistics: Fraction of total mortality due to warfare.
“[…] although an angel, considered absolutely, is better than a stone, nevertheless two natures are better than one only; and therefore a universe containing angels and other things is better than one containing angels only; since the perfection of the universe is attained essentially in proportion to the multiplication of individuals of a single nature.” – Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, III.
“[…] the laws of logic which ultimately govern the world of the mind are, by their nature, essentially unvariable; they are common not only to all periods and places but to all subjects of whatever kind, without any distinction even between those that we call the real and the chimerical; they are to be seen even in dream.”
РAuguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie positive, 52e le̤on.
A forceful work tying economic inequality to environmental devastation.
Smoothly written history of Western philosophy, with Jungian overtones.
“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than nature will allow.”
– Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein.
