Truth and Consequences September 8, 2000
 

This'll be a short column this week - head colds are terrible things. You don't really feel sick enough to stay home but you can't really get much accomplished at work. Breathing is just too difficult and clogged sinuses are not conducive to rational thought. Let's hope this column is not too irrational but I may be more of a downer than I usually am. Just blame the little rhinoviruses in my head.

Unintended consequences will always be with us. Random things happen and we must be ready to adapt. Now, the movie Jurassic Park, while it may be populated by 'idiots' (Come on, wouldn't any scientist be leery of the results of mixing frog DNA with ancient dino DNA? Or clone more docile dinosaurs than Velociraptor? But it was a fun roller-coaster of a movie.), did present the premise that not everything is predictable. That some things are too complex to foresee. Jeff Goldblum's inane monolog to the contrary, chaos theory describes the nonlinear processes that can occur in the world. Seemingly small changes in starting conditions can have huge effects in the end. Unintended consequences end up being more important than the predicted ones.

One of my favorite sites is a tech newsletter called The Register. With the motto "Biting the hands that feed IT", it offers a tabloidy, gossipy insight into the high tech world and its consequences. One of the unintended consequences of the freedom of the Internet concerns privacy. Privacy is gone for good, when banks sell databases credit card numbers to merchants who then use them to run up millions of dollars in false charges. Or how about Amazon and its truly original approach to pricing? Or its Big Brother approach to privacy? These are instances of information getting into the wrong hands or being used in ways many of us would find disturbing. Yet, approaches to prevent the improper dissemination of information also present difficulties.

Check out this story. This poor woman was not allowed to enter a site because it ruled that her name was obscene! Screening software, to protect us from improper sites, has a lot of problems. Not only do it get words confused but most are now made up of proprietary databases of approved and disapproved sites. And the government has made it illegal to examine these databases yourself to check them out. AOL got in trouble with the breast cancer discussion boards when it added breast to its database of outlawed words. Without having any knowledge of why a site has been banned, it makes it difficult to exercise ANY judgment.

Now, random things happen. An asteroid hits the Earth, kills off the dinosaurs and allows mammals to fill the niches. Without that asteroid at that time, would we even be here? In fact, there are lots of things that just happened to occur that moved our cultures forward. But maybe not for the reasons we generally think.

We have all been taught that the invention of agriculture was a milestone of human progress. We could support a much larger population than simple hunter-gatherers. It allowed leisure for some to investigate such things as the arts and the sciences. It required the domestication of animals, to provide further food and help in preparing the harvest. Man's whole idea of dominion of the Earth seems to stem from our ability to cultivate our own environment where ever we go.

Yet, it is quite likely that one of the major consequences of agriculture has little to do with simply being able to grow more food. Jared Diamond wrote a provocative book several years ago titled Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. He had spent a lot of time dealing with native tribes in New Guinea. And what he was struck by was the fact that many of these people were 'smarter' than your average civilized person. In order to survive, they had to have a huge storehouse of knowledge and intelligence. The environment selected for these traits. The dumb ones died.

Diamond's premise (at least one of them) was that modern civilizations do not select for intelligence. You could be pretty dumb and still survive. What modern agricultural civilizations selected for were people with really incredible immune systems. Because agricultural civilizations created large populations huddled together that, when combined with poor sanitation, made them ripe for infection. Anyone who could not fight off the disease, died.

Almost every major communicable disease of mankind is a consequence of an agricultural society. Large populations resulted in polluted water systems, providing a niche for waterborne illnesses, such as cholera. Many infectious diseases, such as measles, influenza and small pox, actually appear to be directly derived from the diseases of domesticated animals. The common cold may come from horses. Some illnesses, such as small pox, having only humans as a host, could only spread if there were large population centers. A good case can be made that it is the spread of these communicable diseases to naive populations, more than any other event, that allowed 'civilized' groups to overcome the native populations. Whole populations were decimated by smallpox. Actually, more than that since decimate means 1 in 10. Is there such a word as bi- or tri-mate? In many cases a third or half of a local population could be wiped out.

And we are discovering that it is not just human populations that are being destroyed. We all know that the AIDS virus seems to have entered the human population from a simian host. But the process works in reverse. It now appears likely that many primate populations in the wild are succumbing to our diseases in much the same way 'native' human populations did. Many humans have taken to observing apes and chimpanzees in the wild. But very few of them take any precautions to prevent the transfer of disease. It seems that the great apes can catch a cold just as easily as we can, but for them it is much deadlier.

It would truly be ironic if the popularity of these animals is their downfall. If our great interest in studying them, in order to learn more about ourselves, provided the means to drive them to extinction. Makes me think of Pig Pen in Charlie Brown. except instead of carrying around a dust cloud, we carry around a cloud of disease. It provides a very strong selective pressure, on us and on those that co-inhabit the Earth with us.

SPOILER ALERT: If you have never read 'War of the Worlds', skip to the end of the column.
Remember, the Martians in 'War of the Worlds' were destroyed by disease, not by Mankind.

Maybe our disease resistance will be the greatest innovation our species evolves. All because we learned how to huddle together and grow our own food. Truth or consequence. I just wish I was a little more resistant to cold viruses right now. I want to get a good night's sleep.