ok, I’m trying to post this for the umpteenth time. Don’t know what’s wrong with this comments page, but I’m having only a ten per cent success rate getting my posts uploaded. What’s going on?

Trying one more time:

Paula, look at the “What a Way to Go” website again. Daniel Quinn opines….” but I really think it would be more to the point to have What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire seen in every high school classroom in the world!” So Paula, are you saying high school students .. “have already concluded that doomsday is the inevitable, correct, near-future scenario.” ?

This movie seems to contain an ample amount of facts and figures all imbedded in arguments presented to convince. It seems highly unlikely this film is aimed at Ish Con groupies, Teaching Drum grads or Black Clad Messengers from Eugene, Oregon, for example. Not that these kinds of people wouldn’t be interested in the film, only that, judging from the trailers and the websites and links, this documentary would seem to be covering old ground, using some of the same arguments, claims and speculations in the service of promoting specific scenarios. Again, from the trailers and website, What a Way to Go seems short on ..”evaluating existential outcomes”, as you insist. Instead, it seems to lean toward explaining basic assumptions like: “Peaking fossil fuel flow rates”, “Critically degraded ecosystems”, “A changing climate”, “An exploding global population”, “Teetering global economies”, “An unstable political climate”.

If this is preaching to the choir, it must be a choir of slow learners. Either that, or (more plausibly) the film is really just recruiting new choir members.

There simply was plenty of everything else, and it’s evolutionarily not worthwhile to invest energy in learning to digest these things [lectins]

Also, You can’t “Learn” to digest something. A species can adapt to digesting something ONLY if some member of that species has some amount of that ability already, and if that ability allows one to produce more and/or healthier offspring. We all have the ability to digest a certain amount of lactose as an infant, adapting to adult lactose tolerance is basically selecting for individuals that keep that tolerance to an older age.

JimFive

I understand, and it’s a good point. The question is, why would we be able to eat these things? There simply was plenty of everything else, and it’s evolutionarily not worthwhile to invest energy in learning to digest these things when they were fairly hard to come by, to begin with.

I think a big part of what I’m perceiving does have to do with the way people behave with regards to this issue, and not with the reasoning behind it.

I get you.

I also think, and I doubt I’ll find any argument, that all sorts of other elements came into play when talking about health and vitality of h/g’s. Much of it was the rest of their lifestyle: the safety and security they experienced, the fresh air they breathed, the vigorous and stimulating movement they engaged in, etc. Basically, they lived and were happy because that’s how they evolved. It makes no sense to think that we’d evolve as miserable, depressed people. I can’t see how people could honestly suggest that the rising rates of depression and mental anguish are just an artifact of better detection, and that in fact, people have always been mentally ill and unhappy with existence writ large. It’s crazy to me. It makes so much more sense to think that what we long for and are happy when we live the way we lived for so long, and that the brief flicker of empire, not the human condition, is what ails us.