Professor John R. McNeill
37th and
202 687-5585
Dear Professor
McNeill:
I have read
your chapter “Sustainable Survival” along with the rest of Questioning
Collapse, the multi voiced response to Diamond’s Collapse. It is encouraging to see so much talent
directed toward the big picture and in particular the question of why things
collapse. (I am particularly pleased
that you take the long view.) When I was
first dragged kicking and screaming into worrying about such things it was
different, sort of like the hobby of looking up for dirigible balloons, not
much company. But however difficult it
is to define just what a “collapse” is, and trust me I still am not totally
happy with a definition, there seems no question that things do fall apart for
societies.
In order to make sense of it
one must look at numbers. And you
juxtapose two numbers that probably seem to have nothing to do with each other,
but I believe they have much to do. You
mention that the Hutu-Tutsi tragedy occurred after they seem to have cohabited
for 300 years. And you mention that the
I do not think that is a
fluke. Nor do I believe in numerology,
only in numbers. Haitian society has not
really undergone a collapse recently, but it underwent a rather typical collapse
in 1804. It had been visited by
I am struck that you point
out that a thousand or three thousand years ago politics was dominated by
kings, who did everything in their power to get people to identify with the
nation instead or religion, tribe or ethnic group, or to identify that group
with the nation. I might want to add
village to the list. Most people were
primary producers living in the village, and the life of the village loomed
large while the life of the sate stooped.
You point out that the effort to sustain a culture or polity is vain;
but villages are almost immortal.
Virtually every village mentioned in the Domesday Book almost a
thousand years ago thrives now. Kalahari
Bushmen keep their bands so distinct that a couple of bands that are within
walking distance (admittedly they walk a long way) are as distinct genetically
as Asians and Europeans. So the band can
survive tens of thousands of years. Not
bad at all, I should say.
So what is the pendulum of
this cycle that drives cultures to extinction?
I think it is fertility. If you
have a big random mating gene pool you will suffer a catastrophic fertility
decline. I put my evidence, thought,
references and correspondence on my website nobabies.net. Probably the easiest
way to look at it is to go to the March 25. 2010 posting, which is a poster I
showed at a genetics conference in
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
There have been 3,735
visitors so far.