A new understanding of humanity reached through recent innovations

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A new understanding of humanity reached through recent innovations (4/8/05)

In "The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine" Roy Porter provides insight to humanity's current state of development. For most of humanity's history we've chiefly been concerned with two things, from a medical perspective:

Understanding ourselves
Surviving communicable diseases (yellow fever, flu, etc.)

The two focuses, oddly, turned out to be linked. Many great medical thinkers postulated a number of interesting theories of the human body that gradually led us to our current state of understanding, but it was Descartes and a few of his contemporaries whose perspective of the body as a machine led us to understand not only how we worked, but what was killing us. Thus we understood the importance of good hygiene, and as hygiene practices improved governments on all levels saw the benefits and, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, installed public hygiene programs and resources which led to a great reduction in people exposed to communicable diseases. Those diseases not "cured" by hygiene practices were then fought using our newly discovered knowledge of the world, also based strongly on the descendants of Descartes' thoughts. By this I mean vaccines and medical drugs.

Mind you, we're now hovering over our timeline somewhere around 1950, and not only are we reeling from all of the insights science is giving us, but we were also seeing it's benefits. People were now starting to die from so called "age-related diseases" such as cancer and heart issues. Before the 1950s people simply hadn't lived long enough to die from these issues, and while they were certainly seen and researched, the effort couldn't really begin in earnest until the 1950s. It is within this context that the readers must set their brains, to understand our progress from here on.

In 1962 John B. Calhoun wrote a piece for Scientific American entitled "Population Density and Social Pathology." Calhoun had conducted an experiment whereby he compared the behavior of rats in crowded and uncrowded conditions. The results stunned many. In the crowded conditions the rats soon set out to kill, maim, sexually assault and even cannibalize each other, while the uncrowded rats showed little of that behavior. For any city dweller, the results spoke volumes about human behavior, and so the experiment was repeated time and time again in numerous species, each time producing the same results.

It wasn't until the 1980s when evidence to the contrary rose. Researchers like Andrew Baum noted it didn't seem to apply in humans, and it is here that I wish to introduce the reader to Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal. Researchers such as Dr. de Waal began to notice the crowding issue expressed itself differently, non violently, in most primates, such as chimpanzees and Rhesus monkeys. de Waal even collaborated with Dr. Filippo Aureli and Dr. Peter G. Judge to put together an article in the same publication in which Calhoun published his original studies, Scientific American, to sum up what they were seeing.

What the researchers were seeing was stress. In crowded conditions stress levels skyrocket and in non primates that meant aggression, whereas in primates aggression actually dropped, as well as most forms of social interaction, and there was an increase in the sort of nervous ticks we notice in even ourselves; scratching themselves and playing with their hair. I hope the reader, at this point, is beginning to draw a connection between our brief overview of medical history and this discussion, because stress takes time to cause major changes in a person's life and so, it hadn't been studied much until the 1950s and on. In fact, a PubMed search for "stress heart disease" churns up 979 hits, displaying a well known link between the two, and even cancer seems to be at least slightly linked with stress. How else do we see the impact of stress on out lives? Try IBS. Think about all of the people seeing psychologists these days, have insomnia, or calling out sick. Science has really only had 50 years to make the links but their beginning to appear and the thrust of it all is this: stress plays a far more important role in our lives than we'd like to think.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing though. Most of humanity's developments have been spurred by stressors. In fact, at the most basic level the economies that seem to work best, to be most efficient, are the ones that build in the concept of competition, a stressor. However it is politics I would like the reader to focus on, for within politics we often find ourselves considering the best way to deal with other people, directly or indirectly, and given that this is essentially the question we ask ourselves when we feel crowded, I hope the reader can begin to understand some of the mysteries of the world's political situations. It seems as if we primates have a few methods for dealing with the other primates. Ideally we'd like others to leave us alone and we'd leave them alone, a wonderful classical Libertarian utopia. But when we must interact we find Republicans and Democrats, Tories and Liberals, each party displaying an ever so delicate dance around the question that confronts us today: how do we deal with others? Do we depend on them to shape up on their own, or force them to? Do we depend on them to plan ahead, or do so for them?

The answer, I hope, is obvious. Both. Those that can help themselves must be empowered, and those that can't have to be helped. But instead of doing this portions of the "let's not bother dealing with the others" mentality creep in. Prisoners are sent away and punished, rather than reformed. Welfare recipients remain on welfare, rather than returning to work. Some of us turn to religion and expect the churches to deal with people, rather than us. Others focus on sports or music and find the escape they seek. The stress levels decrease. The noises in the night, sirens, domestic disputes, homeless people begging for money, and all the other little annoyances people force us to deal with, it seems, are gone.

Would it be fair then, to say that the burgeoning hordes we find ourselves fearing, the huge prison population, the huge numbers of mental health cases, the welfare recipients, the retirees, the kids who pull a Columbine, all of those who feel like their stuck in a rut and can't get out; Would it be fair then to say they've been left behind? Cast aside? Mostly. Although being left behind implies someone made the decision to do that, and it is that reason which prompts me to set all this down in writing. We are leaving people behind and we need to stop doing that. We have to act as nations, states, or as a species, and ensure that not only can we provide a multifaceted approach to helping and governing people but that we stick with it and ensure everyone can come along, that everyone is given a chance to participate in our society based on who they are now, and not in the past.

Perhaps it is time for a new political party. I don't know. I just see the pattern I've outlined above, playing itself out, and I'm hoping we can break out of it and move on to something more productive. Something where we can work off of actual past experiences, understood, tested, and validated (think more academic journal and less party philosophy). Something where everyone understands the importance of that process and is willing to help it in order to help the greater good. Something where we all recognize that a lot of todays problems are being caused by people falling behind, and where we take greater steps to extend a hand to those who are, to help them, because one day it could be us. Something, basically, that works.

Follow-up (6/28/05): Early experience, not genes, shapes child abusers.

"There is evidence that early trauma causes people to become more susceptible to stress, and less able to cope with emotionally challenging situations, so that they could react more easily by 'losing it'," he [Maestipieri] says.