April 5, 2010
Jarred Diamond
Professor of Geography
UCLA
California, 90005-1524
jdiamond@geog.ucla.edy
Dear Professor Diamond:
I have now read Collapse, Questioning Collapse and your review “Two Views of Collapse” NATURE vol. 463 no. 7283 February 18, 2010 page 880. It is heartening to see skill being applied to an issue that is of such great importance.
I have not come up with a definition of collapse that completely satisfies me. But it seems to be a regular feature that bad things happen on a large scale. At all events, collapse does occur, and it occurs with discouraging predictability. There is more or less a brick wall to social orders at about the three hundredth birthday and a tendency for a crisis at one hundred fifty years. If this were due to mistakes made by leaders, as societies age their chance of enduring farther would increase as the leadership would have proved its worth. This is not found, although in some cases there is a shakedown period during which life expectancy, if you will, rises; these are easily explained. If collapse occurred because of external forces such as invasion or climate change, life expectancy would be constant with age. This is not true either. Collapse becomes ever more likely as societies age.
My evidence is posted on my website nobabies.net, where I put my thoughts, evidence, references and correspondence. I have not had much to post in terms of replies. The easiest access is to go to nobabies.net and look at the March 25, 2010, entry. That is a poster I presented last month at a genetics meeting. I think I collared about two dozen experts. Some were willing enough to challenge me. One even looked at an article you wrote I had put up called “Life with the Artificial Anasazi.” When I pointed out that the final collapse was right on schedule he said, “They moved out.” Evidently he had read your article. But I pointed out that these people moved in groups. That is evident from the stepwise increase in population in earlier years. There is no conspicuous stepwise fall in the final plunge.
Nobody had a substantial contradiction to make. One even muttered ruefully, “It’s got to be true.”
As you must suspect from the fact that this was a genetics conference, I believe the cause is genetic. The justification and evidence for that are also on the poster.
Keep up the good work. If enough people care the truth should come out. And do take a look at what I have done and tell me what you think.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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