jeskill

Have public mess halls that anyone can eat at for free, but the food is all very nutritious, healthy food, prepared by expert chefs to make the food delicious. Maybe you are required to do exercise before eating before you are allowed this public benefit. These are financed by a progressive tax on foods generally accepted to be less healthy. Develop a food index. The higher the index, the higher the tax.

They do this in Brazil, BTW. There's a blurb in this article about "the People's Restaurants"

What you say makes perfect sense, if you envision modern "organic" agriculture as being done the way farming was done 100-200 years ago. There should be an alternative way of doing modern, distributed (high employment) and coordinated (online), low-labor, clean-n-easy, high-tech "organic" agriculture. Such a system would use robots for much of the labor, and direct sensing/assay of soil/plant genetics and health; to be coordinated with remote sensing data and evaluated to guide management decisions, and executed over a video game-like system.

Wouldn't robots require fossil fuels to run efficiently? What's wrong with high-labor? As you stated, it's not like we have too many jobs.

We need to DOUBLE food production over the next 50 years (to accommodate the projected "stabilizing and more affluent" population increase, which will be eating higher up on the food chain)...

while also greatly reducing environmental damage (which current "modern" agriculture is significantly exacerbating).

===

So, this double the food production number is based on the idea that as developing countries become more affluent, they will start to eat more meat, correct? Just out of curiosity, how much meat does this number expect everybody will eat?

Nice articles, btw.

Have you eaten it before? I feel like I should try it now ...

Santalum et al., I've started a new thread on ag productivity so that we don't hijack this one.

I'm just putting this in a different thread so that we don't hijack the original. So, This is an offshoot of a discussion in the "Cultivate salt water crops", in which the statement was made that,

And we should also keep in mind that the only way that most western countries can sustain their current populations is by taking various resources, including food, from less developed parts of the world.

 

If western countries were forced to sustain their current populations on the resources remaining within their current borders then the populations of most if not all of them would crash.

Another poster commented that the U.S. is a net exporter, and thus does not really need food imports from other countries to sustain their populations. This was countered with

There is abundant evidence to support this.

 

I will give you two well documented cases.

 

 

1) The US, Australia and Britain are dependant upon middle east oil and they are in turn dependant on steady supply of oil energy and fertilisers to sustain its current agricultural out put.....apart from their other industrial outputs. If the middle east stops selling oil to them then their agricultural out puts would alone plummet and they would not be able to feed their large over consuming populations. Which is clearly why all three countries are prepared to go to extraordinary military lenghts to maintain their oil supply lines from the middle east.

 

 

2) Don't know about the US and Britain, but recent figures in Australia show that we are now net importers of fresh produce and other non-grain and non-animal foods: http://en.wikipedia....re_in_Australia for starters. Climate change and peak oil/peak fertiliser is expected to further diminish our agriculutral output and we may well become a net importer of grains as well at some point in the near future.

The question of whether or not we can sustain or grow agricultural production in a post-oil/post-fertilizer economy is a useful question. I personally think that a transition to ecological agriculture will allow us to maintain production, but it would require a larger amount of people working in agriculture than are currently. My reasoning is simple: polycultures produce more food per acre than monocultures while utilising less "capital inputs". A transition to polyculture probably wouldn't increase production in the west significantly, but it has been suggested that it would significantly increase production in developing counties. Of course, ecological ag does require more people to work the farm, which would require many people to transition from an urban/suburban lifestyle to a rural lifestyle. I'm not sure that's such a bad thing.

I've just realized that we've gone a bit off topic. Apologies. With respect to the OP's original question, it would seem that by focusing on edible halophytes, we could start growing salt water crops right now, instead of waiting for natural selection and adaptation to create salt-loving wheat or durum. Wired writer Alexis Madrigal wrote an interesting article about salt water crops in 2008:

These plants [halophytes] are attractive candidates for both food and fuel because they have very high biomass and oil seed yields. The

Science authors note that one leading halophyte-candidate, Salicornia bigelovii, produces 1.7 times more oil per acre than sunflowers, a common source of vegetable oil.

In this study, we thus demonstrated the feasibility of cultivating Salicornia and Sarcocornia by applying a multiple harvest system and 100% percentages of seawater in the irrigation water generating economic yields with high nutritional value. The findings also showed thatSalicornia and Sarcocornia leafy vegetables may attract additional interest as an alternative source of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids for human consumption, even when the crop irrigated solely with seawater.

Only because the west has cheap contraception. If we did not then our populations would have continued expanding exponentially.

OK. So you're admitting then that there's not a direct cause/effect relationship between food production and fecundity because the availability of contraception affects fecundity regardless of food availability? Great. Thank you for making my point. Would you disagree that fecundity is also affected by the level of political stability and the availability of education? After all, less politically stable places do tend to have more war/rape and have less availability of contraceptives. On the other hand, it's well known that the more education a female gets, the less likely she is to have lots of children regardless of the amount of food available.

That is the trouble with emergency food and medical aid providers. They reduce the death rate but do not meanifully compensate for it by also providing them with adequate contracpetion.

 

Hence in places like africa all they have ever succeeded in doing is providing a temporary pin prick solutions to hunger only to have the region plunged back into human misery when the next drought or war comes along. But as they faciltate the populations to grow they create an ever larger aid burdon for future generations to deal with.

 

Sadly aid providers are largely fixated on short term quick fixes that will never eliminate poverty in the long term for future generations.

USAID and other large organizations are fixated on short term damage control, but there are aid providers who are working on long-term fixes as well. I've mentioned some of them in my previous posts, but there are a lot of small NGOs that are helping farmers grow hardier and healthier crops to reduce malnutrition. If you are someone who doesn't like the quick fixes, you might consider donating to the small NGOs that are taking the long-term route.

And we should also keep in mind that the only way that most western countries can sustain their current populations is by taking various resources, including food, from less developed parts of the world.

 

If western countries were forced to sustain their current populations on the resources remaining within their current borders then the populations of most if not all of them would crash.

Do you have evidence to support this statement?

Yes, that is what I am suggesting.

 

And yes I am suggesting that humans, collectively, are much like bacteria in always expanding their population to take up available food until they exhaust supplies and then the population crashes.

 

The oil age has dramatically increased the supply of food available to humans, our population has expanded exponentially to take up that food supply and now the end of the oil age is upon us.

 

Food supplies will be dramatically cut and the human population must inevitably crash and there will be little that anyone can do about it unless reproduction is banned for a few decades or there is a major deadly epidemic or global conflict to slash our numbers.

OK. The problem with your argument that "we are always expanding our population to take up available food", though, is that there's evidence to refute it: the regions of the world that currently have the most food also have the lowest fecundity. The regions with food scarcity currently have the highest fecundity. If there were a direct correlation between human population growth and food production, developed countries would have the highest population growth rates and developing countries would have the lowest.

Ok, well then relatively speaking, from a single given frame of reference, there is not always enough food. Even though the food still exists miles and miles away, in a localized situation, enough food is not necessarily available.

In certain spaces and certain times, yes, I agree with you. But as stated before, most NGOs working on this issue agree that starvation is a primarily a product of poverty (i.e. lack of purchasing power). Ergo, increasing purchasing power can also decrease starvation due to the fact that many places in the world currently produce an excess of food. To take the Eritrean example, we have people literally creating a mangrove forest on former wasteland, not only creating a habitat that houses their food, but also creating a resource that can be extracted and exchanged for money/food (the resource is wood). So, the mangroves are reducing hunger by increasing the availability of food and increasing the purchasing power of the people.

What happens when all such marginal land is fully utilised and there are yet more starving mouths to feed?

Are you implying that the more food there is, the more the population will grow? Humans are not bacteria -- fecundity is not solely affected by the amount of food available. It's affected by poverty, education, stability, and a host of other socio-economic factors. If you want to lift people out of starvation and poverty, you need to give them stability and a means to survive on their own. This is just one example of how to do it. There's a lot of good evidence to suggest that projects like this can help to lift a significant proportion of people out of starvation and poverty.

Moreover, the main cause of starvation is not a lack of food production. According to FAO and worldhunger.org, poverty and the unequal distribution of food are the main culprits.

Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone?

The world produces enough food to feed everyone. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day according to the most recent estimate that we could find.(FAO 2002, p.9). The principal problem is that many people in the world do not have sufficient land to grow, or income to purchase, enough food.

• Do you believe in God? If so, briefly explain your view.

No.

• How do you think the universe began?

Don't know. This is not relevant to Evolution, as the theory of evolution describes the change in allele frequencies in a population of living organisms over a period of time. Cosmology is the science that deals with the origin of the universe, not evolution.

• How do you think life originated?

Abiogenesis. It should be noted that this is a also separate theory from the theory of evolution.

• Explain how you believe life forms evolved.

Evolution occurs when there is a change in the allele frequencies in a population over time. This can occur via natural selection, artificial selection, genetic drift, sexual selection, gene flow, and mutation (did I miss any?)

Important Note: I do not "believe" that life forms evolve. I accept the theory of evolution because there is a highly robust collection of evidence supporting this theory. I have read a significant amount of this evidence and I understand it. Belief is not a word that should be used when discussing science -- it implies that you are not basing your assessment on evidence, but on personal conviction.

• How old do you think the earth is and why?

Geological evidence suggests that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Some of the evidence is listed here.

• Do you believe in life on other planets, aliens, and UFOs?

I neither "believe" nor "disbelieve" in aliens. Evidence suggests it is possible, but as far as I know, there is no strong evidence to suggest that we have found any or any have found us.

• Is evolution still happening, and if so, what do you think will be the end result?

Yes, evolution is still happening and will continue to happen. It can be hard for us to observe because evolution happens over a long period of time -- over generations. It's easier to observe when generation time is quicker than ours. For example, scientists have definitely observed evolution in bacteria, C. elegans, and weeds.

There is no end result. Evolution is not a means to an end, it's just a process that brings about change. This question seems to imply that evolution always changes organisms from simple to complex, or inferior to superior. This is not always the case. Sometimes, evolution changes organisms from complex to simple (google "blind cave tetra fish"). Sometimes, evolution can cause changes that eventually make a population unfit for its environment.

• Do you believe in life after death? Explain.

No, I don't.

• How do your beliefs in origins and evolution affect your sense of purpose for your own life?

It is my sense that we only have one life and currently, one planet. Once things are gone, they're gone. This viewpoint has made me a humanist who believes very strongly in social justice. My purpose in life is to work towards creating an environmentally sustainable future for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc. etc.

• Any other comments.

Edit: I did this blindly without looking at other people's answers first -- it was interesting to see how similar my answers were to some others.

There's a really cool sea water horticulture project going on in Eritrea that involves foresting marginal areas with mangroves and feeding salt water grasses to livestock and creating a habitat for fish (that can also be eaten). Not really an example of salt water plants being eaten by humans, but a good use of formally marginal land and it does seem to reduce hunger.

Isn't "πεολειχία" spelled like "peoleichia" in English? How is that anywhere near "PIPA"?

I'd respond to the other stuff, but Imaatfal said what I would have said, only more succinctly. The only comment I'd make is that I do agree that sex education and better availability of contraceptives certainly seems to reduce the number of unwanted teen pregnancies, and thus, the number of abortions. I just don't think that this measure would reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies to zero, and I don't think that a woman who has taken precautions and still gets pregnant should have to carry it to term.

The other issue that's been sidestepped is what to do about contraceptives which may prevent implantation of a fertilized blastocyst (instead of preventing conception). This is a huge issue in the "life at conception" argument. If you are against abortion, but you are OK with people using the pill, where are you drawing the line and why?

Why do we instantly jump to the idea of killing the child, rather than finding someone else to care for it? Surely there is a couple out there who would be willing to step up and take the baby to keep it from being aborted.

If it's healthy. If it has down syndrome or fetal alcohol syndrome it's less likely to be adopted. Come to think of it, the number children with fetal alcohol syndrome and other preventable diseases caused by mothers with addictions and unhealthy lifestyles would also probably increase if abortions were illegal.

It's hard to have this discussion because while there does seem to be cultural differences, culture is so diverse and ever-changing, it's hard to say with certainty "this is how it is in this country" without over-generalizing and pigeon-holing.

With regards to the issue of female/male dynamics, I do think that there is a major difference in the way women are perceived and treated in different cultures, and I do wonder if the difference is, in part, affected by how much importance is put on individuality vis-a-vis the family unit.

The reason I asked the question in my previous post, JustinW, is because as a feminist, I had a difficult time understanding women's role in society when I lived in Istanbul, Turkey. Of course, this is a place with a huge diversity of women anyways -- I interacted with both "modern" turkish women and "traditional" turkish women. I understood the "modern" turkish women more, obviously, although I did have some odd conversations that tweaked my sense of values. For example, one of my single friends who was an independent working woman told me that she wouldn't respect her boyfriend if he didn't cheat on her. I HOPE she was just an anomaly, but it did seem that cheating was considered much more acceptable there than in, say, Canada. And then there was the traditional religious turkish women -- I lived in an apartment block with very conservative families and our interactions were mostly pleasant. On one hand, the traditional turkish women seemed to have such strong ties to their family, and this seemed lovely. On the other hand, there is such mistreatment of women --- physical abuse, limitations on their freedom far beyond what I could handle, etc. etc. As a foreigner, to some extent, I am beholden to the rules of the land. But if the rules of the land go against my ethics and values, am I allowed to speak out and judge? That line was really hard for me.

So, I guess I the conundrum of when to judge and when not to judge is something that I have wrestled with. On one hand, it's important to respect another person's culture, in part because if you want them to respect yours, then you have to respect theirs. On the other hand, is it ethical to stand by and not say or act when something you believe is unethical occurs just because you're a foreigner and your values are not their values? Where is that line?

I'm going to try to re-phrase your question. Are you asking the question: when should we accept cultural differences and when should we try to change a cultural practice (or judge it) because we think it's ethically wrong?

The topic was more about how societies are different around the world and if a certain amount of prejudice is ethically justifiable because of those differences.

Why would societal differences "ethically justify" prejudice?

With regards to the condom + pill approach, I'm saying that without actual probabilities and numbers, we can't assume that the rate of failure is, as you put it, "incredibly rare". Probabilities allow us to better evaluate risk and therefore, allow us to better evaluate potential actions.

Can't you also do a home genetics test and send in the sample to see where your ancestors are from?

I must say, I've a Canadian friend who gets asked where's she's from all the time, and she just answers, "Ontario". Then they say, but no, where are you from originally? And she says, "Cambridge". It's quite fun.

I was thinking in terms of how people view their own rights, as opposed to how the law sets up rights. It seems that in the east, the will of the collective, whether it be the family, or the community, has more power than the will of the individual.

Don't know about the issues you've listed, but to me, it seems the main difference is that in the West, individual rights trump collective rights while in the East collective rights (i.e. of the family, community or state) trump individual rights.

Speciation is a) not a spontaneous process, and b), as in all evolution, happens within populations. What is usually necessary is that e.g. from a common population (or species, if you want) subpopulations are getting separated and the genetic flow between them is very limited or zero. Over time both populations accumulate different genetic properties that may eventually render them genetically incompatible. At that point the two subpopulations can be considered different species.

While speciation is usually not spontaneous, it can occur quite rapidly when polyploidy occurs.

I have never met a psychologically healthy woman who had an abortion then proceeded to say it was no big deal and hasn't affected her life at all.

That is not the same as psychological trauma. It is possible to have an abortion, have it affect your life, and not be traumatized by it. Although, anecdote does not equal evidence, I have talked to at least 10 women about their abortions. Only 1 regretted it -- she felt pushed into it by her husband. All others used words like "relief" to describe how they felt about it.

If you go back into my post, you'll notice that I said the odds of both of these events occurring at once, then resulting in actual conception.

Well what are the odds then? This is not evidence, but conjecture. Moreover, it's an incredibly high standard to suggest that everyone use both condoms and the pill, especially when you consider how many people are in long-term monogamous relationships.

Studies show that as literacy rates go up, unwanted pregnancy goes down.

Education works. That needs to be our first line of defense.

As someone who is pro-choice, I agree with this statement.

I don't believe in abstinence - it's just not practical. But we have oral contraceptives, vaginal contraceptives, condoms, etc. There are plenty of options to prevent a child from being conceived. ...

Just out of curiosity, do you draw the line at conception? If so, how do you justify the use of contraceptives that prevent implantation as opposed to preventing fertilization?

Abortion is psychologically damaging.

Do you have statistics to back this statement up that come from peer-reviewed sources? The evidence from peer-reviewed papers I've read suggest that post-abortion trauma is not the norm and is highly affected by previous personal trauma.

In the incredibly rare chance that a woman on birth control, and a man using a condom, somehow manage to conceive a child, why is adoption not an option?

The chance of conceiving using birth control is between 0.1 and 5 percent. For condoms, the failure rate is between 3-14%. That's not "incredibly rare".

I have enough trust in people to say that if you give them the right information, they'll most often make the right decision.

I agree, but the right information should be backed by evidence as opposed to conjecture.

My main argument would be (facetiously) that our definitions and understanding of consciousness are so vague that it is not correct to be so dogmatic. do not single celled organisms perceive and respond to environmental stimuli - I realise I am splitting hairs. But more importantly - no I do not think we can segue from scientific reasoning to logical reasoning and retain the same level of persuasiveness and rigour.

This may be a subject for another thread, but it was my understanding that, from a physiological perspective, we do have a rather robust definition of consciousness. For example, peeps from stanford have outlined the physiological aspects of consciousness as they pertain to brain functioning, Psychologists such as Patrick Korch or Rachel and Stephen Kaplan have discussed the evolution of recognition and interpretation in humans as being mental processes that are not ubiquitous in all animals. To bring it back to your example, certainly, a single-celled organism can perceive and respond, but I've never heard of a single-celled organism deciding on which response to perform based on their perception. They can't do that because their responses (and most responses of most animals) are innate.

That being said, I do recognize that consciousness is not simply a black and white concept, and that there is likely a sliding scale here.

I'm not really sure what you mean by the last sentence. Could you elaborate?

Pharyngula (PZ Myers) has a really interesting post about a recent paper in Bioessays concerning the evolution of menstruation.

My favourite line: "I suppose we could blame The Curse on The Fall, but then this phylogeny would suggest that Adam and Eve were part of a population of squirrel-like proto-primates living in the early Paleocene. That's rather unbiblical, though, and what did the bats and elephant shrews do to deserve this?"

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/why_do_women_menstruate.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PeerReviewOnScienceBlogs+%28Peer+Review+on+Science+Blogs%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Hi Ben,

Can I make a suggestion? Given that there are many reasons why people prefer organic to GM food, you might want to ask a question that gets at that. Your questions seem to suggest that the only aspect of GM foods which is ethical or unethical is the scientific technique used to create them. But that's actually not why many detractors, including myself, think GM foods are unethical. I have no problem with genetic modificiation, per se. However, I do think that the current crop of GM foods are unsustainable from an economic and ecological perspective. I'm concerned about the manner in which large corporations make it difficult for small peasant farmers to save seeds or buy local varieties. I'm concerned with the legal and ethical ramifications of "escaped" GM seeds given that there are already plenty of examples of Monsanto destroying the livelihoods of small farmers in order to protect their patent. There are also potential ethical issues surrounding the ecological ramifications of planting monocultures of GM crops, most of which either require one herbicide or are infused with one pesticide. This method of agriculture increases the likelihood of super-weeds developing and can actually lead to more -- not less -- toxic herbicides being used.

I googled the article linked to in the OP, and it seems the OP didn't read the whole second half.

Another quote from said article:

The image of civic lassitude dragging down more diverse communities is at odds with the vigor often associated with urban centers, where ethnic diversity is greatest. It turns out there is a flip side to the discomfort diversity can cause. If ethnic diversity, at least in the short run, is a liability for social connectedness, a parallel line of emerging research suggests it can be a big asset when it comes to driving productivity and innovation. In high-skill workplace settings, says Scott Page, the University of Michigan political scientist, the different ways of thinking among people from different cultures can be a boon.

According to Scott Page, "immigrants" drive productivity and innovation. That would seem to be a benefit to the economy and society, would it not?