George Monbiot on the arc of History

There’s a simple view of history as series of pageants. Kings fight glorious battles, heroes like Nelson and Genghis Khan kill lots of people, talented artists like Michaelangelo gaily paint frescoes of the male nude all over the walls of some slightly dodgy cleric’s new palace It’s interesting, it’s fun, it excites podgy old men who have never been in a war to dress up in funny costumes. There’s only one problem with it, in fact,

It’s bollocks.

Starting slowly at first, reading the works of much clever people like Professor Kennedy[2] [3] we realised that History is driven by deep slow moving inexorable forces: things like climate, infant survival rates and technology. Britain rose because it was the first to develop modern commercial and industrial processes. It fell when other countries started to do those things better. Rome succeeded, for a while ,because it turned the Mediterranean Sea into a single trading zone in an epoch when sail was the most economic means of transport. It fell when plagues and climate change so decimated its population that it could no longer defend the frontiers of that zone. Above all it’s demographics, economics and logistics that determine the fate of nations, not battlefield heroics.

It is in this light that we present this article by George Monbiot of the Guardian. [1] For it attempts to address this single determining factor, both in our lives-and those of the next four or five generations to come. It doesn’t matter if you love immigration, or hate it. Whether you thought everything would solved by a rising population or a falling one, (as we used to). See this more as advice from a wise accountant to a failing family firm “this much is in your coffers, therefore these will be your spending options” In world terms, the arc is very simple. The population will grow a little while longer. Then it will start to fall. Precipitously. All decisions on defence, finance culture, even our own little idées fixées like antibiotics and climate change, shall be made in the light of this simple, ineluctable fact.

We have followed Monbiot on many topics for years; his writings are always stark and cogent. We urge to you look him up and read more. But today, for now, we beg you to read this one, It should lend perspective like nothing else.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/12/europe-migrants-birth-rates-immigration-countries

[2]Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

[3] Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

#history #population #demographics #immigration ##economics

Identity Protective Cognition. Will this be the real cause of human extinction?

Have you ever stood in a pub and listened to a group of men talking? Are they really exchanging information? Trying to learn, to incorporate new facts and modify their opinions? Or do they just stand there, declaiming little nuggets of information, signalling their belonging to the group, and their status in it? We think its about 6% the former and 94% the latter. If that is the case, the implications for how people think, the very way they use and incorporate facts are disturbing indeed.

Dan Kahan[1] [2] and Brendan Nyhan[3] suggest this is exactly what happen in most peoples minds, most of the time. They think that considerations like pride and group loyalty far outweigh the effects of evidence and logical process. Our space is limited; but we hope the extensive bibliographies below will convince readers of the essential value of their insights, “If I admit I am wrong, then I have lost face” is where most people come from. And suddenly we see: This terror of looking weak, of jeopardising social status, lies behind so many of the mysteries we have struggled with here for five years now. Why does emotion seem to always triumph over reason? Why do objective facts, on things like Climate Change or vaccination, so utterly fail to change preconceived views? How indeed have issues of pure science become mired in questions of group identity and gender role?

Veteran readers will recall our long-held belief that reason and evidence are the principal survival adaptations of this species. We can never be as strong as bears, nor swim as well as whales. It was these qualities of intelligence that allowed a small weak ape to survive, and prevail. There have been times when these qualities did indeed seem to dominate, briefly. And other times when these qualities were almost extinguished by barbaric ignorance and brutality. Somehow, reason survived and recovered, and even went on to brief triumphs in eras such as the Renaissance or the Enlightenment. The difference now is that the threats such as Climate Change or pollution are existential. If not addressed, this species will become extinct. Yet the very people who might solve these problems-scientists, lawyers, independent journalists- are becoming fewer. Their voices drowned, their budgets starved by the hysteria of the mob and its angry leaders. If humanity is to survive, intelligent people must find ways to first protect themselves, and then prevail once more. But how, and if we have enough time, are complete unknowns,

Kahan, Dan M.; Peters, Ellen; Dawson, Ellen; Slovic, Paul. “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (2017): e56.

Kahan, Dan M.; Braman, Donald; Gastil, John; Slovic, Paul; Mertz, C.K. “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 4, no. 3 (2007): 465–505.

Nyhan, Brendan. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.” Political Behavior 32, no. 2 (2010): 303–330.

#reason #education #psychology #science #learning

World Government: Great Idea or daft fantasy?

We’ve passed a little time this year discussing the idea of a World Government. In our series which began back in January[1] we looked at the basic idea. Many of the world’s problems, we opined, were transnational: mass migration, climate change and pandemics are only a few. Nation states were no longer big enough to solve these on their own, we said. Or rather, their existence precluded the solutions, in any reasonable time frame, which would permit human survival. We also noted the terrible danger of a World State[2] : that it could quickly engender an tyranny even more terrible than those of Robespierre or Stalin: and this time with no where to escape to at all.

We spent some time discussing the idea both in these pages and with friends and acquaintances. We received some surprising responses. Even some quite hardened nationalists and Europe-bashers thought we had a good idea, but that it was utterly unfeasible in any meaningful time frame. We think that they are probably right. For another trope of these pages has been the depressing tendency of humankind to divide itself in to mutually loathing groups, over issues both large and small. We have looked at the work of thinkers Like Amy Chua , Eric Kaufman and David Ronfeldt{3.4] We looked at studies like the Robbers Cave Experiment [5] which seem to provide the essential psychological underpinning to these writers’ ideas. All of the foregoing made us feel that our sceptics had the point, and that our Big Idea was, if not wrong, then at least hopelessly impracticable.

It is the to the credit of Great Big Ideas that even when wrong, they can point the way to fertile new investigations, if they are catchy enough. No one thinks Henri Pirenne said the last word on Medieval Economics, not Freud on psychiatry. But it was the achievement of these scholars to make their ideas so strong that they challenged further studies, if only because some were so eager to prove them wrong. It is in this spirit that we shall turn to looking at some questions we have raised. Is the Nation State, which has served us so well so far, really constrained ? Can people from different groups and identities not only sink them into a common cause but actually achieve something thereby? These will be some of the the in the months ahead. And while you are waiting, don’t forget: problems like antibiotic resistance, climate change and mass migration will be getting worse.

[1]LSS 1 8 25, 14 1 25 et al

[2] LSS 22 1 25

3 LSS 16 8 20

4 LSS 10 3 21

[5]LSS 1 4 25

#world government #nation state #economics #politics #tribalism #amy chua

Heroes of Learning: Leonardo Pisano(Fibonacci)

Have you ever looked at the strange spiral in a broccoli floret and wondered how it got like that? Or hundreds of other things in nature from the shapes of waves on the beach to the arrangements of artichoke leaves? The answer to all this and much more was discovered by Leonardo Pisano, better known to the modern world as Fibonnaci.(C1170 AD-c 1245) [1] [2]

A bright lad from Pisa in Italy, his big break came when his father took him on a business trip to Bugia in what is now called Tunisia. Father and son met an Arab mathematician (the Islamic world was still far ahead in science and technology) who kindly showed them the amazing new numbering system which they had learned in turn from the Hindus. The young Leo realised at once that this strange numerical system of 0, 1 2-9 was utterly superior to the cumbersome Roman system of letters( V X MCXCCVL, etc) On his return to Italy he published the Liber Abaci, whose short 27 or so chapters are one of the most significant books in the canon of western learning. Not only did it update all and sundry on the new number system. Not only was it full of useful applications for this system. Above all it promulgated an intriguing new sequence of numbers which goes 0,1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…..to infinity. Each number in the sequence is formed by adding the two before. Dividing one by its predecessor quickly gets to the Golden ratio, which artists and architects have been using as on of the most aesthetically pleasing constructions for centuries.

We have alluded here before to odd mathematical structures such as pi and Eulers number: which show up again and again in nature: Fibonacci’s sequence is another of them. We have no idea why, but then: nor does anyone else. But the real significance of Fibonacci was his timing. For the first time, and after a long sleep, Western Europe was starting to make original contributions in natural sciences. And it did it by borrowing humbly from other more learned cultures. A lesson we should not forget today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci

[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zm3rdnb

#fibonacci #mathematics #middle ages ##tunisia #india #biology #architecture

Human Evolution: More muddle in the middle?

Taking time out as ever from more serious matters, we return to our old playground of human evolution. And not just for R and R, important as that is. Also, because the methods and pronouncements of its scholars are important guides to how we should all approach any complicated and potentially controversial subject.

Until recently the origin of our own species seemed fairly clear cut. It emerged from a pack of other big-brained contenders (think Denisovans and Neanderthals among others) starting around 250 000 years ago, in Africa, and clearing the rest of the field no later than 35000 years BP. However recent work by Professor Chris Stringer of London’s prestigious Natural History Museum and colleagues have now cast this into doubt. It is even possible that the line leading to Homo sapiens may have started to go its own way before 1000 000 years BP. You can read why in these takes from Jonathan Chadwick of the Mail here [1] or a slightly extended version in the museums own PR piece here [2] It all goes back to 1990 and the discovery of a rather squashed skull called Yunxian 2 which was attributed to Homo erectus: a perfectly reasonable decision at the time. But using advanced new reconstruction techniques Stringer and his colleagues assert

……… Yunxian 2 displays a unique combination of primitive and more advanced traits. These include a large, squat braincase and a more projecting lower face, similar to Homo erectus. At the same time, derived features in the face and rear of the braincase, as well as a larger brain capacity, are closer to later species such as Homo longi (‘Dragon Man’) and Homo sapiens.

We have been following this game for for nearly six decades: so what do we think? First Chris Stringer is a fine scholar whom we have always admired. Secondly, we welcome all attempts to re evaluate data and set it in new contexts: that way real learning occurs. Our caveat is more with practice . Always and again in human evolution, new fossils found are baptised with confident new binomial Latin names in the great Linnean tradition. Then vast conclusions are drawn, which, in our experience, are substantially revised some years later. This has led not only to the muddle in the middle to which the articles allude. There are plenty more early on the story, and more than one much later on. We think the first clearing step should be to talk less about species, and more about gene frequencies populations. and ways of life. These clearly cluster at points of excavation, such as Afar, Java or Atapuerca to name but a few. But each point, however iconic, is represented by relatively few bones. There are enormous gaps in space and time between each, into which genes and populations must have been flowing all the time. Is it not possible that there has only been one human line all along, and that many of the variations are likely due to factors such as ecology, climate or isolation? The real answer is to dig, dig and dig again.

[1]https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-15132633/skull-pushes-origins-400-000-years.html

[2]https://www.nhm.ac.uk/press-office/press-releases/analysis-of-reconstructed-ancient-skull-pushes-back-our-origins-.html

#paleoanthropology #human evolution #clade #species #Homo sapiens #China

Mirror Organisms: the ultimate bioweapon?

Anyone who got beyond basic school science will recall the frustrating new level of complexity when the teacher first told you about stereoisometry. You recall-all biomolecules starting with the slightly complicated upwards really have two identical forms, left hand and right hand. Amino acids, proteins you name it. And life can only work with one. All amino acids in living things on this planet have left handed amino acids and right handed sugars. Of course living systems could work the other way round, It just has happened yet on this planet. Until now. Read this Debate heats up over mirror life from Nature Briefing

At a meeting this week in the United Kingdom, scientists are deliberating whether to restrict research that could eventually enable ‘mirror life’ — synthetic cells built from molecules that are mirror images of those found in the natural world. “Pretty much everybody agrees” that mirror-image cells would be “a bad thing”, says synthetic biologist John Glass. Such a cell might proliferate uncontrollably in the body or spread unchecked through the environment, because the body’s enzymes and immune system might not as readily recognize right-handed amino acids or left-handed DNA. But there are disagreements about where to set limits on research — the ability to evade degradation could also make such molecules useful as therapeutic drugs.Nature | 7 min read
Read more: Life scientist Ting Zhu, whose work explores various mirror-image molecular processes, considers how to bridge divergent views on such research. (Nature | 11 min read)

Unfortunately its the down size that worries us here, Not only the uncontrolled spread alluded to by the learned scientists above. But, as the world falls into the grip of authoritarian dictators and ever more powerful plutocrats, the potential these tools give them to get rid of surplus and redundant sections of humanity. Forever.

#isomers #biochemistry #bioweapons

The Slippery Slope fallacy: the one we’ve never got on with

“Don’t throw that rubbish there! Put it in the bin like you’re supposed to!” Many years ago we lived on a pleasant private estate in West London with trimmed lawns, walkways, security, a residents association, all those sorts of things. The only problem was some of the residents, who were either too lazy or felt culturally compelled to throw their domestic rubbish down by the rubbish chutes instead of putting in properly, as we, the decent majority did. This bad practice spread, being quickly copied across the estate and soon we all had a widespread problem with flies, rodents and an ugly disfigurement of our pristine areas. It’s called the slippery slope. Another example is when the office agrees to step out for a single drink and, three hours later, the entire company ends up blind drunk ,broke and embracing each other with varying declarations of love. Everyone copies bad behaviour, because they feel entitled, or are missing out. And so crime, disorder, drugs and violence spread quickly through communities, reducing everyone to common beggary.

And that raises a bigger problem for us here at LSS. For years we have proudly touted our Enlightenment, Whig, rational, call them what you will credentials like a badge of honour. Central to our purpose, hardened readers will recall, is the practice of reason and logic. Avidly do we follow websites like your logical fallacy which are stuffed with every classic example you could wish for: post hoc propter hoc, texas sharpshooter, all shining beacons of clear thought each one of them.. Standing out like a dead rat in a melon souffle is the slippery slope, of which the authors state

Allowing to happen will cause Z to happen: therefore we should ban A now!

Yes, we see the error. The slippery slope is a fallacy for it allows one to jump to conclusions without checking each intervening link from A to Z for both logic and empirical fact. Its the classic howler of someone like a Daily Mail columnist, carried away on tides of hysteria and dread. The trouble is: it’s how humans really behave. It’s the way most of them are.

So our problem with the slippery slope mirrors a more general problem. Reason, learning, and all the the qualities which we prize are not always good guides to how society works. (Try a Friday night out in Croydon if you don’t believe us) Yet the values we espouse are the only ones which will ensure not only the good life but also human survival in the long term. The problem we now have is how do we form a critical mass to allow those values to prevail?

[1]https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/

#logic #fallacy #reason #slippery slope #enlightenment

Exclusive: We reveal the only definite finding from quantum physics(and you can be certain of it)

Always believe someone who tells you that they don’t know what’s going on. Especially when that someone is one of the best trained and most intelligent people in the world. That’s why this story from Nature Briefing caught our attention as the week-ender for this session of blogs: What Does quantum Physics Mean anyway?

First sketched out a century ago, the equations at the heart of quantum mechanics underpin technologies from computer chips to medical-imaging machines. But no one seems to agree on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the maths. A Nature survey of more than 1,100 researchers — the largest ever on the subject — has revealed just how widely researchers vary in their interpretations of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments, and their confidence in their answers. [1]

The survey asked questions like “is there a real quantum world behind – or does all this work we’ve done only represent what’s inside our heads? What are the most favoured explanations for quantum theory? What is a wavefunction anyway? Is there a boundary between classical objects and quantum objects (i.e ,between the table you’re sitting at and the atoms it’s made from) And the answers that came back-and remember who gave them-read more like the responses to political opinion polls or market surveys about the best brands of instant custard.

From all of which we concluded the following.

1 If the brightest and the best think like this about something they have studied for decades, it suggests the rest of us might do well to be a little less opinionated on many things

2 Above all this includes certain journalists who think they know it all on things like climate change, vaccines and global warming

3 Watch the last episode of Jacob Bronowski‘s TV spectacular The Ascent of Man on You Tube. or one of the other streamers. It’s still good after 52 years [2]

4 There is still much out there to discover-as we tried to hint with our little blogs on Euler’s number and π(LSS 14 3 22; 16 4 24)

5 All knowledge exists within certain limits, and is probable. Of this last point, you may be certain

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02342-y?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=a8d315930b-nature-briefing-daily-20250730&utm_medium=email&utm_term=

[2]https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x20p9h4

#quantum physics #uncertainty principle #knowledge #reason #science #nature

When was the best time to have been alive? Start of a new series

When was the best time in History that you could have lived in? With all the problems facing us now, like climate change, rising xenophobia, faltering economies-it’s natural for the mind to wander to other times and other places , where they had it good, in ways that we just can’t seem to manage.

It’s easy to idealise bits of the past when you didn’t have to live there and use the toilets. It’s also easy to make mistakes. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!” declared Wordsworth, while on a tour of Revolutionary France. He just got out with his life, as did many other deluded middle class intellectuals. And even the Nazis tried to drum up a cultural vibe, what with Leni Reifenstahl and all that modernist architecture. That duly said, it is possible to pick out certain periods when the humans really did seem to be doing better for a while. Like a football team putting together a run of successful results. We will try to identify those times using the following criteria, if you will forgive us, gentle readers.

There has to be peace, or general political stability, over a wide area. We”ll illustrate this with a counter example: Beethoven and Schubert wrote some pretty good music during the Napoleonic wars, but you wouldn’t have wanted to have lived through those wars would you?

Learning is advancing, preferably big time : despite all the wars and coruuption, Big Stuff was happening in Renaissance Italy- arts, sciences, architecture, you name it. By that criterion. all those Cardinals and Condottieri have to be in with a shout

Trade must boom According to the great Professor Davis, this is the great sine qua non of civilisation

The staging must be right The backdrop of islands and temples etc gives the Classical Greeks an enormous leg-up before they even take the pitch. Whereas Lancashire in the Industrial revolution? You mainly died at thirty, after a lifetime of bracing hard work. Although it probably felt like much longer.

There must be a long running cultural movement No one sat down one day and declared “OK chaps, it’s the Bronze Age and humanity stands on the edge of a bright new frontier. Put away all those stone tools and mammoth skins, and let’s start living in cities!” The periods we refer to must be embedded in a long movement of progress and general moving forward.

And all too often they come at the end of it. The swinging sixties ended in strikes and inflation. The Renaissance city states were leaned upon, terminally, by much bigger places like France and Spain. The long peace of Rome degenerated into the Crisis of the Third Century. But we are nothing if not triers here. And so our first try in the next blog of the series will be China in the Tang dynasty 618-907 AD, using the western calendar. Let’s see if they were really, really, like, cool?

#renaisance #history #china #greeks #learning #science #society

Heroes of Learning: Steven Rose (and why things are never simple)

No book ever tore through the calm assurances of progress through co-operation like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. [1] It wasn’t so much the book itself. That was an attempt to popularise, albeit sometimes in colourful language, the discoveries of an important group of evolutionary theorists such as William Hamilton and EO Wilson. It was the use made of it by political activists, zealous propagandists of the Free Market, to prove that every attempt at co operation, collective action and sharing resources was against the basic laws of nature. “Out upon your Trades Unions, your Keynesian economics” they thundered in a thousand articles in places like the Daily Mail “we are nothing but animals. Your only purpose is to pass on your DNA to make copies of yourself. Look at them lions. mate! When one of them takes over a pride he kills all the cubs and mates wiv the females to make sure his genes get frough! Go and do like wise!” It was not an experiment we felt disposed to try. Compete, for the other fellow is your genetic enemy was their credo. All barriers to that competition were both evil and deluded.

It was simple, it was seductive, it was based on some facts. It played well in the broken restless zeitgeist of the 1970s when the pillars of the old prosperity- high taxes, demand management for the common good, collective institutions like the IMF and UN seemed ineffective. It sold by the million; and swept ever more voters into the booths for one Margaret Thatcher in 1979, whose own simplistic and reductionist nostrums seemed to chime so well with those of the book.

One man did not buy. His name was Steven Rose, a remarkably accomplished scientist who spent most of his work in neurobiology and biochemistry [2] This obituary summarises his work better than us. But it was his insistence on complexity and the irreducible flexibility of the human mind, that still allowed hope for a way out from the genetic prison in to which we had been so neatly incarcerated

He wrote: “It is in the nature of living systems to be radically indeterminate, to continually construct their – our – own futures, albeit in circumstances not of our own choosing.”

Look at that carefully, then leap with us to another part of the scientific forest. Where the BBC showcases a new technique to rid the world of the scourge of inherited mitochondrial disorders [3] Basically you take a fertilised ovum from a normal male-female coupling, but put it as the nucleus in the egg of a different female. Which then develops as a normal embryo until nine months later a healthy baby emerges[3] A three parent child? Sort of. Two parents get to pass on their DNA, no doubt to the blissful delight of Dawkins’ more extreme followers. And a different mother sends her mitochondrial DNA cascading down the ages, which rather complicates matters for some. Now look at the Rose quote again what was that about continually constructing?

At the time of the great Dawkins controversy the old BBC Horizon programme ran a show in which the quoted one of the wiser and more humane scholars in the Selfish Gene camp. His name was John Maynard Smith. And he ended with this thought “humans are not just animals- we are not prisoners of simple genetics” At the time it seemed a forlorn hope. It has just been proved triumphantly real.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/10/steven-rose-obituary

[3]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn8179z199vo

#richard dawkins #sociobiology #biochemistry #medicine #DNA #mitochondria