THE COMMENDABLE FAILURE OF DARWINIAN FAITH

The Erosion of Civilization: The Fertile Crescent's fall holds a message for today's troubled spots. (Jared Diamond, June 15, 2003, LA Times)

Iraq sits along a stretch of land once so productive that the whole region--which included present-day Syria, Iran and Jordan--was known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times, the area led the world in agriculture and technology. It's hard to reconcile that history with the reality of today, when the term "Infertile Crescent" would seem more appropriate.

The Fertile Crescent's current desperation stands as testament to the steepest downturn of local fortunes since the end of the last Ice Age. For 8,000 years Iraq and its neighbors led the world as the source of most things embodied in the term "civilization." Technology, ideas and power flowed outward from Iraq to Europe and eventually to America. Iraq's decline holds lessons the world should heed.

The region's ancient dominance didn't arise from any biological superiority of its people, just as America's dominance today has nothing to do with our own biology. Instead, Fertile Crescent peoples profited from an accident of biogeography: They had the good fortune to occupy the world's largest zone of Mediterranean climate, home to the largest number of wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Until 8500 BC, all the world's peoples obtained their food by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Then the ancient Iraqis and other Fertile Crescent peoples began to develop farming and herding, domesticating wild wheat, barley, peas, sheep, goats, pigs and cows. Even today, these species remain the world's staple crops and livestock. Agriculture fueled a population explosion, and also generated food surpluses that could be used to feed full-time professional specialists, who no longer had to devote time to procuring their own food. [...]

Iraq's decline holds a broader significance. Many other countries today face similar crippling environmental problems, including the deforestation, overgrazing, erosion and salinization that brought down the Fertile Crescent. Other countries already crippled or nearly so by such problems include Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines and Indonesia.

You may well detect a similarity between this list of looming environmental disasters and the CIA's list of overseas trouble spots, places prone to civil wars and violent regime changes--places to which we often end up dispatching U.S. troops. Those two lists are related by cause and effect. When environmental damage makes people economically desperate, they are likely to suffer from poor health and short life spans, blame their governments, kill each other, end up with crazy leaders and seek to immigrate illegally to more favored landscapes.

Actually, unless your left-wing ideology prevents you from doing so, the thing you'd detect first about that list is that if those geographic locations had been settled by the Puritans they'd all be stable democracies now and, with the possible exception of Nepal, they'd be net food exporters, whose surplus food allowed them to support not only a population explosion of any size they chose to indulge in but the influx of immigrants they'd be receiving. Does this mean that Anglo-Saxons are "superior" to the natives of these varied countries? I don't think that conclusion necessarily follows, particularly not superiority in a moral sense. But if we reduce it to Darwinian terms then, yes, quite obviously we can find direct correlations between what biological groups live on a land and the success of the resulting society. In fact, it seems absurd for those who believe in evolution to assert that the shape of a certain finch's nose reveals its brilliant adaptation to a given environment but that the ability of distinct ethnic groups to adapt better than their rivals suggests nothing of the kind. So, instead, folks like Mr. Diamond and Stephen Jay Gould and others whose political beliefs come into conflict with their scientific beliefs have an entirely healthy and admirable tendency to just deny the science--to our great amusement... Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2003 10:10 PM