WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

The Body and Human Progress: a  of The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700 by Robert Floud, Robert W. Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong  (Jerome Groopman, 10/27/11, NY Review of Books)

Over the past three hundred years, there has been an indisputable decline in morbidity and mortality in Europe, the United States, and more recently parts of Asia. In his Nobel lecture, Fogel highlights how this trend toward increased human growth and longevity sharply challenged two classical views of economic history: the catastrophic scenarios of Malthus and the utopian vision of Marx. According to the Malthusian theory of population, any improvements in mortality were postulated to be short-lived: as the population increased in relation to the food supply, the reduction in death due to one disease would be compensated for by death due to some other malady. Marx envisioned continued oppression of workers, until the unstoppable churnings of history sparked revolution that led to a dictatorship of the proletariat built on the ruins of capitalism.

The Changing Body is a synthesis of some five decades of research in demography, economics, medicine, and sociology, and might be viewed as a culmination of the inquiry begun by Quetelet. Written by Fogel with Roderick Floud, a British economic historian and provost of Gresham College, London, Bernard Harris, professor of the history of social policy at the University of Southampton, and Sok Chul Hong, an assistant professor of economics at Sogang University in South Korea, and presented as a textbook, it poses a "very simple" thesis:

    The health and nutrition of one generation contributes, through mothers and through infants and childhood experience, to the strength, health, and longevity of the next generation; at the same time, increased health and longevity enable the members of that next generation to work harder and longer and to create resources which can then, in their turn, be used to assist the next, and succeeding, generations to prosper.

The authors introduce the term "technophysio evolution" to represent the proposition that "changes in the size, shape, and capability of the human body since the beginning of the eighteenth century both reflect and illuminate economic and demographic change over those three centuries." This synergy between technological and physiological improvements, the authors contend, has yielded a unique form of human evolution.

Posted by oj at October 8, 2011 10:12 AM
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