Medical Advances, Pop Rocks, Agriculture, and Nic Cage

“News team, let’s hunt.” – Anchorman

The view from the coffeemaker (story below).  No coffee was injured in the making of this post.

I was talking with a coworker at the coffee machine back when I was working in Houston.  Our offices were in the 45^th story of a gleaming skyscraper.  Very futuristic.

“So, Mr. W, what do you think the most important invention was?”  I have no idea why he called me Mr. W, but it’s been a theme – Mr. W.  No idea why.

“Ever?” I asked.  This was the setup.

“Sure.  Most important invention ever.”

“Agriculture.”

I love it when I look into a person’s eyes and literally watch their brain slowly melt from the answer they just got.  That was the case here.  For a full fifteen seconds he didn’t move, blink, or breathe.  I think his brain was rebooting.

After he got past the login screen:  “That’s . . . that’s a good one.”

I had that answer ready because I’d been thinking about just that.  What was the most significant invention in history?  Heck, even the Bible talks about it – the story where Cain (the farmer) killed his brother Abel (the sheep herder)?  It’s potentially an allegorical story about where agricultural civilization replaced the earlier pastoral civilization that’s come down to us over thousands of years.

Or maybe Cain was just a dick.  I kid.  We all know Abel had it coming.

However, agriculture was transformative.  Prior to that, it was hunting, gathering, and herding.  Or starving if you didn’t know how to hunt, gather and herd.

Notice that I didn’t say that agriculture was good for us.  There are plenty of ills that came from agriculture, but it was undoubtedly the most significant transformation that humans have ever encountered, with the possible exception of the invention of Pop-Rocks©.  I heard a kid ate a whole bunch of Pop-Rocks® and then drank a Pepsi™ and his stomach exploded.

I found this, oddly, at the Pop Rocks© website, where they assure me that their product hasn’t killed anyone recently.  That they know of.  I kid.  Pop Rocks™ has a website to assure you that you are in no danger of a stomach rupture eating their product – it’s here (LINK).

I heard that they experimented with a product called Pope Rocks©, but it was made illegal because it reportedly turned water into wine, which is totes illegal in Utah.

Oh, yeah, I was talking about agriculture.

Agriculture was an important step – it made people stop moving around.  If you planted a crop, you had to stay there and grow it.  And if you stayed there, and had food?  Now you had to defend it.  And you had to have houses.  And you could make pots.  And buy furniture from StoneAgeIKEA®, which was largely abandoned by 3000 B.C. because no one had invented screws or hex wrenches.

Just that one invention changed economics, developed division of labor could exist.  Mankind now had farmers, soldiers, generals, and developed taxation and accountants.

Yeah.  Taxes.

But this didn’t make mankind a bit healthier.  In fact, it made the average person die sooner.  Oh, and when they died?  They had new diseases like arthritis.  And they didn’t grow as tall or as robust as their nomadic ancestors.

Why did we do it?  Dunno.  Women like houses, probably.  And men could brew beer (which happened to show up about the same time as the first agricultural settlements.  That same downfall occurs throughout history – women and beer.

I assure you that you didn’t want to mess with this guy.  And he was probably average.  Not sure that Twinkies®, cars, and air conditioning helped his overall health . . . . and I’m sure that Google® now thinks I want to see pictures of shirtless men.  Oh, the things I do for you, readers.

Let’s face it, not everything that modern medicine has done has helped our health.  Some studies have shown that the nomads and herdsmen, on average, lived longer than the farmers that followed them in history.  Oh, and don’t forget, if you don’t have farms, no need for slaves, right?

But let’s look at medicine more directly:

What actual changes have made life healthier?

• Well, agriculture has increase the overall amount of nutrition. We wouldn’t be able to feed everyone on Earth if we didn’t have that.
• Maternal vitamins and nutrition make healthier and smarter babies. That’s good.
• Sanitation is amazing. Not living in poop somehow makes you healthier.  Who could have imagined that?
• Cheap food. Hard to be healthy if you’ve starved to death.
• Pest control. Vermin are also not real healthy to live with.  Plague and all, right?

• Clean drinking water is much better than the alternative, but not as good as Scotch, which I guess is another alternative, so clean drinking water is second.
• Antiseptics are good. Much less Civil War surgery.

• Antibiotics are also pretty good. I’m pretty sure that they’ve saved my life more than once.

• Trauma surgery is now awesome – many things you would have died from 20 years ago are now survivable, from gunshots to car accidents.
• Vaccinations are, on balance, probably good. Is there proof that they kill people?    More people have died from HPV vaccinations than from HPV.  So, yeah.  But I’ll skip the small pox, thank you.  Oh, they don’t vaccinate for that anymore?

So, what’s not on this list?

• End of life care. It’s expensive.  And it barely makes life longer.
• Many cancer treatments are difficult and require hacking and poisoning the sick person. Some really do extend life, for decades even.  (Some don’t do much of anything.)  But none are more important than clean water, exercise, and PEZâ„¢ to human health.
• Most really expensive diagnostic tech. Sure, some of it is awesome, but I’m not sure an MRI machine is all that awesome.

What societal changes are actually hurting health?

• Cheap food. Yeah, it’s a paradox.  Starve or be fat.  Sue me.
• Automatic stuff.   As a whole, we have to do much less work than 20 years ago.  Much, much less than 40 years ago.  And 100 years ago?  Oh, my.  Elevators replaced stairs.  Natural gas replaced firewood.  Cars replaced bikes.  Exercise drops through the floor.
• Climate controls. I’ve got a theory that if you turned off the air conditioning and the heat in your house you’d actually be healthier.  But this theory will never be tested because I have The Mrs., for whom climate control is a right up there with free speech and free shotguns.  Thankfully she likes it about 60°F in the house all the time, too.
• What is in Doritos?  40 different ingredients, many of which have never been incorporated into the diet of a human until the last 50 years.  What’s in a steak?  Cow, which we’ve been eating as soon as we developed spears.  Because steak is worth building a spear and chasing a wild, untamed giant auroch through the forest.
• Lack of genetic culling. I’m not in favor of this as a policy, but it is a fact that the genetic pool is degraded over time when people who would have died out reproduce and pass along defective genes.  Let’s look at me:  I wear glasses, and developed the need about age 20.  I would have made a crappy nomadic warrior, so, unless I was smart, I would be squinting at the horizon while Ugg and Trevor chased the hairless caribou across the frozen tundra of the African veldt.  And no food for my family.  So we died off.  But wait!  This is 2018, and I’ve got lots of kids because I don’t have to squint, but glasses?  Yeah, that’s a thing for half my kids.  Ugg and Trevor had kids with keen eyesight.  Again, not a policy since I like my life and the kids I have, but as we save more people with health issues like my nearsightedness that can be passed along genetically?

Like anything, there are good and bad effects of changing our civilization.  Without agriculture, we never get to the Moon, but we also never get Nicholas Cage movies.  A tradeoff?