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J Scott Hill

The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - 5 views

www.ditext.com/...mistake.html

shared by J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13 - Cached
  • With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
  • revisionist interpretation
  • Just count our advantages
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history
    • J Scott Hill
      J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13
       
      Thomas Hobbes: 1651 Leviathan
  • nasty, brutish, and short
  • progressivist perspective
  • Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries.
  • How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming?
  • indirect test:
  • these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.
  • obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania.
    • J Scott Hill
      J Scott Hill on 12 Mar 13
       
      1st indirect test: looking at contemporary h-g...find their diet is adequate and they work very little.
  • the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients.
  • Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
  • paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
  • Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
  • the average height of hunger-gatherers
  • a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor.
  • Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
  • The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition, (today just three high-carbohydrate plants -- wheat, rice, and corn -- provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.
  • many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease.
  • deep class divisions.
  • there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others.
  • since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth).
  • Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000,
  • fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
  • I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
  • Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
Christian Pyros

UNICEF Rwanda - The children - The Situation for Children in Rwanda - 0 views

www.unicef.org/...children.html

Rwanda Contemporary Issue

shared by Christian Pyros on 01 May 13 - No Cached
  • Christian Pyros on 01 May 13
     
    "Child Survival Rwanda has made tremendous progress in improving child survival. Under-five mortality rate has fallen from 153 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2005 to 76, with maternal mortality dropping from 1,075 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2000 to 487 in 2010 (DHS,2010) However, over 50,000 children under the age of five continue to die annually from diseases like diarrhoea, acute respiratory infection and malaria. In addition, 44% of children under five years old suffer from chronic malnutrition and a quarter of the population still does not have access to an improved drinking water source or improved sanitation facilities (DHS, 2010). Education Thanks to a policy to make primary education free, 95.9% of students; more girls (97.5%) than boys (94.3%) are  enrolled in primary school (MINEDUC 2011), but completion (24%), dropout (12.2%) and repetition rates (14%) for both boys and girls, remain key challenges, along with the switch from French to English as the language of instruction. The latter will clearly impact the quality of education for the immediate future, but is being dealt with through the development of a strategy to address broader issues of the quality of education, including major investments in teacher training and development. HIV and AIDS While Rwanda is one of a few African countries with relatively low HIV prevalence, estimated at about 3% of the adult population, prevalence rates amongst pregnant women in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, range between 16 and 34%. Young people, especially girls, remain at increased risk of contracting the disease and an estimated 22,200 children under the age of 15 live with HIV. The country has made significant progress in scaling up services for HIV positive children, with 75% receiving anti-retroviral treatment (ART) and wants to eliminate the transmission of HIV from mother to child by 2015, making remarkable progress in scaling up services for pregnant women. 82% of health facilities provide PMTC
J Scott Hill

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...ture_of_Scientific_Revolutions

Kuhn science philosophy paradigm revolutions

shared by J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13 - Cached
  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, is an analysis of the history of science, published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of scientific knowledge and it triggered an ongoing worldwide assessment and reaction in—and beyond—those scholarly communities. In this work, Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in "normal science". Scientific progress had been seen primarily as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science.
  • What is arguably the most famous example of a revolution in scientific thought is the Copernican Revolution. In Ptolemy's school of thought, cycles and epicycles (with some additional concepts) were used for modeling the movements of the planets in a cosmos that had a stationary Earth at its center. As accuracy of celestial observations increased, complexity of the Ptolemaic cyclical and epicyclical mechanisms had to increase to maintain the calculated planetary positions close to the observed positions. Copernicus proposed a cosmology in which the Sun was at the center and the Earth was one of the planets revolving around it.
  • Copernicus' contemporaries rejected his cosmology, and Kuhn asserts that they were quite right to do so: Copernicus' cosmology lacked credibility.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In any community of scientists, Kuhn states, there are some individuals who are bolder than most. These scientists, judging that a crisis exists, embark on what Thomas Kuhn calls revolutionary science, exploring alternatives to long-held, obvious-seeming assumptions. Occasionally this generates a rival to the established framework of thought. The new candidate paradigm will appear to be accompanied by numerous anomalies, partly because it is still so new and incomplete. The majority of the scientific community will oppose any conceptual change, and, Kuhn emphasizes, so they should. To fulfill its potential, a scientific community needs to contain both individuals who are bold and individuals who are conservative.
  • If the actors in the pre-paradigm community eventually gravitate to one of these conceptual frameworks and ultimately to a widespread consensus on the appropriate choice of methods, terminology and on the kinds of experiment that are likely to contribute to increased insights, then the second phase, normal science, begins, in which puzzles are solved within the context of the dominant paradigm. As long as there is consensus within the discipline, normal science continues.
  • Those scientists who possess an exceptional ability to recognize a theory's potential will be the first whose preference is likely to shift in favour of the challenging paradigm. There typically follows a period in which there are adherents of both paradigms. In time, if the challenging paradigm is solidified and unified, it will replace the old paradigm, and a paradigm shift will have occurred.
  • Chronologically, Kuhn distinguishes between three phases. The first phase, which exists only once, is the pre-paradigm phase, in which there is no consensus on any particular theory, though the research being carried out can be considered scientific in nature. This phase is characterized by several incompatible and incomplete theories.
  • One of the aims of science is to find models that will account for as many observations as possible within a coherent framework. Together, Galileo's rethinking of the nature of motion and Keplerian cosmology represented a coherent framework that was capable of rivaling the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic framework.
  • Over time, progress in normal science may reveal anomalies, facts that are difficult to explain within the context of the existing paradigm. While usually these anomalies are resolved, in some cases they may accumulate to the point where normal science becomes difficult and where weaknesses in the old paradigm are revealed. Kuhn refers to this as a crisis. Crises are often resolved within the context of normal science. However, after significant efforts of normal science within a paradigm fail, science may enter the third phase, that of revolutionary science, in which the underlying assumptions of the field are reexamined and a new paradigm is established. After the new paradigm's dominance is established, scientists return to normal science, solving puzzles within the new paradigm.
  • SSR is viewed by postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers as having called into question the enterprise of science by demonstrating that scientific knowledge is dependent on the culture and historical circumstances of groups of scientists rather than on their adherence to a specific, definable method.
  • SSR has also been embraced by creationists who see creationism as an incommensurate worldview in contrast to naturalism while holding science as a valuable tool.[7]
  • J Scott Hill on 29 Jan 13
     
    Good highlights of Kuhn's book and the notion of Paradigm shift in science.
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