I didn't know about the pentaploid aspect of bread wheat. Thanks.
]]>I can see how that would be useful, but geez, any idea of keeping control over it sounds far-fetched. Spores are itty bitty teeny weeny things and quite robust. OTOH, while the potential for screwing up is high that does seem like the most likely way to get rid of the giant mounds of plastic littering the landscape. If you could get them eating away at polystyrene or something I'd be very happy :)
(no, I'm not fussed at the prospect of having to guard against them digesting my house, I will deal with it... the woody bits already have that problem)
]]>That seems very likely to me. I would not be even slightly surprised to hear that there are reef fish, for example, that are toxic to to foreigners but happily eaten by polynesians. I swear I have been sick as a landlubber in a tumble dryer eating stuff that even babies eat, raw or cooked. Bastards.
OTOH, I have also fed guests a bean casserole that had them fighting to use the toilet even though I'd had no problems and in fact (causal connection, even) habitually ate stuff like that. Stuff like al dente red kidney beans.
As you point out with nightshade, the tolerance variations range from discomfort probably all the way to death. Ooops.
]]>Not to mention differences in gut microbiomes. I suspect that different gut microflora will affect how much nutrition you can extract — and whether you have negative effects after ingestion.
]]>No, it follows from biology and population modelling. Populations that grow beat populations that don't.
You're the one making cultural assumptions by saying "they didn't do that because of culture". But that's just begging the question: why that culture?
'Culture' evolves: cultural practices that help more people make it to the next generation tend to thrive and ones that don't tend not to.
Surely neither of us believes that there was a magic aura of pacifism and loveliness that suffused the entire Australian continent for 10 millennia - and every other place hunter/gatherers live - and stopped normal competition between groups.
But if not, then why did groups that grow their population not just take over and win out everywhere over those that didn't? How could cultures of limited growth be all the successes?
The answer, surely, must be that actually they were resource-constrained. Cultures that didn't respect those constraints didn't do well.
(BTW, while I know little of Australian aborigines, I am a bit suspicious of the claim you imply that they're all one "culture". Wikipedia tells me the continent had 300 different languages in 28 language groups.)
]]>His point was that civilizations there tended to fall apart after a few generations, because "populations that grow beat populations that don't" turns out to be not true.
Populations that grow rapidly also tend to be harder hit by famines, for one thing. Resilience is the inverse of productivity, and that's why many groups (especially in California and Australia, which have extremely variable climates) didn't go in for productivity. It's also likely why modern humans have been around for 300,000-odd years, but the neolithic revolution and civilization are no more than 7,000 years old. It's not recent genetic changes in humans, it's that the Younger Dryas was when the climate became predictable enough that agriculture (doing the same thing year after year) became practical. We know humans had been experimenting with agriculture over 10,000 years before the Younger Dryas ended.
In South East Asia, growth was all about rice paddies, which meant getting a lot of people to farm small spaces. Unfortunately, those spaces are limited by the large number of mountain ranges on the peninsula, so when the local ruler started pushing people beyond what they wanted to do, they'd leave for the mountains. Living in the mountains, in part or entirely by foraging, wasn't idyllic, but it beat being a peasant under a repressive king. As a result, many kingdoms only lasted a few generations before they fell apart due to defections. Then some other would-be god king would attract a following, attract people from the hills with the promise of land and good rice harvests, and the cycle would begin again. It only started to end in the 1950s, when helicopters made it possible for the lowlanders in what is now Myanmar to subjugate the hill tribes, and that fight (the Kachin rebellion, the Rohingya, etc.) is still going on.
I know you're wedded to growth, but growth is at best a short term answer. We personally won't know otherwise, because the real test is whether there are still 10 billion humans living on the Earth in 2100. If there are a few billion or less, then it will turn out that growth wasn't the answer for us either.
]]>Then wikipedia is overstating the success of the genocide... there is evidence for at least 500 languages (or 700) but the "language groups" thing is a guess - there are areas where we only know that "people lived here, then the British exterminated them leaving no trace". Plus linguistics is approximate. Culturally there's a degree of regional homogenuity, but even the Australian Government recognises the island culture in the north as distinct enough to justify calling them "Torres Strait Islanders" rather than "Aborigines".
I periodically explain to people that it's like saying "european" or "asian"... few would expect a Spaniard to speak Sami, or someone from Vietnam feel at home in Khazakstan. Even within regions you can easily end up asking a couple of people "you're both from the island of Ireland, surely you have the same culture" and... well, getting the sort of response you'd expect from the Irish example. FWIW it's actually worse in PNG, because that island is almost the size of Australia as the hominid travels (800+ languages in a space the size of Sweden). There's a lot more linguistic and cultural variation than a naive visitor might expect even after 100+ years of "civilising influence".
]]>I don't know about California, but Australia is also known for the "vanishing colony" problem. Europeans (and possibly others) would arrive, set up, do well for a few years then a ship would arrive and ... no colony. Generally no sign of war, sometimes a few starving survivors, and invariably the rains hadn't come, or the bushfire had, or both.
Even today morons and dickheads* talk about farming the great northern plains and how modern technology can overcome trivial obstacles like lack of water and infertile soils. Soils that often make coral sand look promising, and in some cases are coral sands.
Actually, quite a few spices stimulate bowel movement, so it's not that clear what's recreational and what's medicinal.
]]>The great thing about those sorts of stamp-collecting exercises is the discussions about what constitutes a distinct language and what are mere dialects ("define planet", anyone?). Spanish, Portuguese, Italian... just dialects of Latin, right :) And when you only have a few transliterated words recorded, good luck even counting major language groups.
]]>Quite so, my point was that when you say European or Asian in relation to cultures, people know what you're talking about since there is a mostly shared majority set of influences and values across the diverse specific cultures. While the extremes edges might seem radically different to each other, there is a continuum between them. Add to that the understanding that Australia is and has been remarkably homogenous in terms of these overarching belief systems and cultural themes. The variation is mostly in terms of each group's specific songlines, totems and the land for which they are collectively and individually responsible (at 3-4 levels of "group").
The homogeneity thing seems to work for post invasion people too, and to have started happening in the first couple of generations.
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