Past Prime
A fun parlor trick in introductory life-science courses is to explain what makes human beings different from other creatures. This would imply that our youths might otherwise wake up one day and wonder if they are, in fact, dogs, slugs, or (say) giant insects. Nevertheless, among the suggested distinguishing features, an obvious one is that humans are uniquely capable of living in the past or in other imagined places that we haven’t even experienced first hand. This seems to be a side effect of our having the facility for language. We can tell stories to each other and ourselves, and we do so incessantly.
One favorite story we tell is an allegory about life in general, based on our experience of the earth’s seasons: birth, flourishing, decline, and death. In the narrative seasons of our own kind, we are almost always in the later phase of decline, blundering into oblivion as so many past empires that left behind them landscapes strewn with stone monuments and broken pottery. If animals construct similar narrative stories, they aren’t telling us.
In this spirit, today we ask if we’ve reached the point as a species where we can no longer improve, but instead have to endure stagnation before entering our long, inevitable decline. Environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel makes the case that we’re coming up against “peak human”, the genetic boundaries of our potential.
Our species’s inventiveness has permitted us to improve on the greatest feats of strength, speed, agility, and smarts generation after generation. Top performance has improved incrementally, however, as has the average performance of nations and peoples. For an easy example, perusing these charts for 100-meter-sprint contests, we see that the world’s top male performers now finish under the ten-second mark, and women under the 11-second mark. The world’s fastest in the 1970s were above the respective numbers. In fact, today’s top-20 best in the world also come in under these benchmarks—unattainable 50 years ago.
Even taking into account improvements in the technologies of running shoes, athletic garments, track paving materials, training, and even performance-enhancing drugs, there are still improvements. What separates them is mere hundredths of a second. But at some point, we will have reached a hard boundary of what is possible. World records will then stop rising altogether.
Population statistics also continue to change. The tallest people in the world are still Netherlanders, but other countries and peoples have been catching up while the Netherlanders have stagnated, having reached their peak. There are similar trends with longevity, IQ, and any other metric you might choose. But at some point, the incremental improvements will stop. The question pondered in the podcast is whether that time is now or just around the corner.
At any rate, it introduced some interesting food for thought—I had never heard of “rectangularization”, for instance (around the 19:30 mark), or “nature deficit disorder” from around 22:00. The video podcast is below; an audio podcast version is here.
I have always liked his writing, and believe it or not I read him on NR in the before times, and he is an interesting character, marches to his own drummer, which I always admire
I just don't like the mean...lol
ALERT: Sudden Russian Death Syndrome strikes again!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/igor-shkurko-found-dead-in-siberian-prison-as-mysterious-deaths-pile-up-under-putin?ref=home