Humans

J. B. S. Haldane had gloomily observed that “the world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.” The world is overflowing with wonders, and yet we take them all for granted, seldom stopping to marvel at them.

Fortunately we have the means literally at our fingertips to learn about them and how they came to be. I spend a good deal of time on the internet (Youtube channels, particularly) appreciating the advances humans have made in science, technology and engineering that made the wonders possible.

The economics point of view is particularly helpful in understanding how the modern world works. Except for the most recent dozen or so generations, all previous 10,000 generations of our ancestors lived lives of extreme poverty and deprivation that we cannot even imagine. We are the fortunate ones.

All of us have an intuitive notions about the nature and causes of the material wealth we enjoy. But most of them are wrong. The truth is surprisingly counter-intuitive. I know this from personal experience. I used to think that more population leads to more poverty. I had it exactly backward. Now I know that human prosperity is a positive function of the number of humans.

Common sense tells us that given limited resources, more people means fewer resources per person. Again, fortunately for us, that’s wrong. The truth is that resources are not limited and that more people enables the growth of resources per person.

My claim here is simply this: that there are no limits to resources because humans create resources, and the more people there are, the faster is the growth of resources. The world of today is better than any other time in the history of humanity is because there are more humans today than any time before. We are spectacularly better off in 2024 than say in 1024 because now we are over 8 billion people and not a measly 0.3 billion a thousand years ago.

It is reasonable to say that humans don’t actually “create” resources. After all, the laws of conservation of matter and energy rule out the production of matter and energy ex nihilo. We have to make do with whatever was created before we got here. We don’t create the ores out of which we produce metals we use; we don’t create the crude oil out of which we get fuels, plastics, lubricants, etc. So in what way do I maintain that humans create resources?

It’s simply this. Stuff exists on or near the surface of the earth. It’s been there for eons: the ores, the “fossil fuels,” uranium, whatever. But have you ever heard of stone age people using metals or fossil fuels? They didn’t but we do. Why us and not them?

Because we figured out how to make that stuff into resources. All of the resources we use was “made” by us from per-existing stuff. We learned how to transform stuff into resources. That knowing how to create things we value out of stuff that exists is called “technology.”

Humans are the only life-forms in the known universe that have technology. The corollary to that is more humans means more technology, and therefore more resources, and therefore more wealth, and therefore more flourishing.

But wait there’s more.

What is it about us humans that we need billions of us for the great wealth we create? Is it language? Or is it our big brains? Or perhaps our opposable thumb? Or (as the religious would claim) our “divine origin”? Or the ability to organize governments?

Those and many other factors may explain some bits but it is not the most critical factor. That critical factor is human diversity.

From a previous post on Diversity:

Life on earth is impossibly varied. A blue whale is quite a different beast from a hummingbird even though they belong to the same tree of life. A blue whale (137,000 kg) is 65 million times more massive than a hummingbird (0.002 kg).

The diversity I am thinking about is within our species homo sapiens. You have seen one specimen of a particular species of whales or hummingbird, you have seen all the others. One common pigeon is indistinguishable from any other.

If you have seen one human, you have seen only one human.

Every one of us is different in our physical and mental endowments. Certainly, a Chinese looks similar to other Chinese, and looks different to Germans who look somewhat alike. But every human is differently endowed in terms of their mental capacities and their preferences.

Take IQ; a crude but useful measure of intelligence. IQ is distributed on a normal curve with a mean of 100 (by construction) and a standard deviation of 15. There are extremely smart people at one end of the scale, and extremely dumb people at the other end. The “profoundly gifted” are rare: fewer than 1 in a million.

Now let’s think about someone like Murry Gell-Mann (1929 – 2019).[1] He was certainly profoundly gifted. His preference was physics. Let’s assume that profoundly gifted people are one in 10 million. Some are scientists (Einstein), inventors (Tesla), mathematicians (Euler), some musicians (Beethoven), some whateveryoulike, etc. In a population of 8 billion, you’d have around 100 profoundly gifted people. The profoundly gifted people make the great advances that result in human advancement.

It has been estimated that around 100 billion people like us (anatomically modern human beings) have ever lived. Therefore we can estimate that there have been 1000 profoundly gifted people ever. And that the majority have lived in the last few hundred years.

The past was poor because there weren’t enough people for the population to have the really smart people because smart people are rare. I conclude with a bit from the previous post on diversity:

Anatomically modern humans have been walking the earth for about 200 to 300 thousand years. An estimated 100 billion of us have been born — including the eight billion currently alive. We have created immense wealth. Before we showed up, the world had zero wealth. Even as recently as 10,000 years ago, there was hardly any wealth at all. Then we invented technology, and with it came an explosion of wealth.

We have to note that it wasn’t the masses of humanity that created the wealth. The creation of technology (defined as knowledge of how to do something) is primarily due to a very tiny fraction of the population. I would say around one in 10 million people advances technology; the rest of us are passive beneficiaries of the advances. Technology grows relentlessly.

It’s thanks to the diversity within our species that we are so successful in dominating all other life forms on earth. We have great mathematicians like Euclid and Ramanujan; great scientists like Bohr and Einstein; great musicians, novelists, et cetera.

Be well and keep wondering about the wonders of our world.

Image at the head of the post: The Buddha meditating in minus 20 degrees Celsius in Westmont IL.

NOTES:

[1] Murray Gell-Mann was “.. an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co-inventor of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which explains the confinement of quarks in mesons and baryons and forms a large part of the Standard Model of elementary particles and forces.”