Biohistory and Global Warming
Global warming has been a hot issue in recent years, with attitudes largely defined by political orientation. Those on the left tend to see it as a serious threat to humanity, and the right as an overblown danger that is an excuse to bash business.
In political terms I am distinctly on the right. As a businessman I dislike the high marginal tax rates which discourage effort and enterprise, and I favor limited government. I am also a social conservative, for reasons that will become clear later in this article.
However, my life-long passion for science tells me that global warming is a serious problem. Massively increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere must have ill effects, whether these be melting ice caps or rising sea levels or ocean acidification or all of the above. It is hard to predict exactly what these effects will be, but they surely will happen.
As for dealing with the problem, I favor a steep carbon tax. Nobody likes taxes, but those that encourages energy efficiency and new technology are preferable to those such as payroll taxes that increase unemployment. And a carbon tax is far more efficient than government ‘direct action’ schemes such as subsidizing solar panels. Markets are far better than governments in picking the most efficient way to achieve results.
But science also provides hints that there is another and far more serious problem facing our society. This started with a study of civilization rise and decline that I did as part of a PhD in history. I came to the conclusion that changes in society could best be explained, not by impersonal economic and political forces, but by a change in the temperament of the general population.
For those who are interested, a vivid and convincing account of this process can be found in Gregory Clark’s book ‘A Farewell to Alms’. Clark shows how Englishmen changed in the 500 years leading up to the nineteenth century. They became harder working, more disciplined, and more ready to sacrifice present leisure and consumption for future benefit. The end result was that massive explosion in wealth and mechanical ingenuity known as the Industrial Revolution.
My own studies found an equally major change in family patterns during this period. People became more monogamous and family minded, more strict about sexual behavior, more likely to control their children, and more likely to start such control at a younger age. Cross-cultural studies showed the same pattern. Wealthy and civilized societies were far more likely to control their children, restrain sexual activity, and to form nuclear monogamous families.
There were fascinating hints that this difference was rooted in biology. People in the nineteenth century not only married later but reached puberty later. In animals, later puberty is normally a result of food shortage. And so too are all the family patterns found in civilized societies. Animals in food-limited environments, such as gibbons, tend to delay breeding, form nuclear monogamous families, and provide intensive care of their young. Thus, people in the nineteenth century were acting as if they were short of food, in biological terms, when they were not. After all, middle class Victorian women were presumably better fed than famine-ridden peasants in the thirteenth century. So why did they reach puberty some years later?
The explanation can be found in the science of human behavior. Food shortage affects behavior and physiology at least partly by reducing testosterone. But laboratory studies show that testosterone can be reduced by other means, such as limiting sexual activity. In other words, culture has the potential to change behavior in a way that creates the civilized temperament, and thus makes civilization possible. These cultural forces are normally found in religions or religion-like philosophies such as Judaism and Christianity in Europe, and Buddhism and Confucianism in East Asia.
The problem of our current age is that extreme wealth is undermining this ‘civilized’ temperament, not only directly but by weakening cultural norms such as chastity and the control of children. The result is economic stagnation, increased cynicism about government, and a growing gap between rich and poor. Our civilization is declining just as did Rome and all others in the past, and for exactly the same reason.
Ironically, this decline will in the end solve our global warming problem. As economies decline and technology retreats in coming decades, the remaining fossil fuels will become increasingly hard to extract. This will naturally bring about a return to water power, the use of animals, and back-breaking human labor. With time, the surplus CO2 will be gradually absorbed and the world return to the pre-industrial norm. Not that this will be any conservationist’s Garden of Eden. For subsistence farmers, trees are firewood and fodder for goats, wild animals a source of food. Thus, even the suffering caused by global warming will be utterly dwarfed by the misery of decline.
But what if we were to take some tiny portion of a carbon tax, even a fraction of a percent, to invest in some basic biological research? Over the past eight years I have been running a research program through several Melbourne universities on the neuro-science of food shortage. We have come up with some highly significant findings, one of which is that the decline may not be inevitable. Rat studies suggest that it might even be possible to ‘immunize’ humans against the malign effects of too much wealth.
This approach, which I call ‘biohistory’, also suggests that there may be ways to greatly enhance human creativity. This applies especially in fields such as science and technology, vital to dealing with the problems we face.
With the help of science, and enough determination, we might one day be able to achieve a society which is both stable and sustainable.
Dr. Jim Penman has devoted his life to the scientific understanding of social change. Having obtained a PhD in History from Australia’s La Trobe University, he is now an honorary fellow and guest lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne. Dr. Penman is the pioneer of ‘Biohistory,’ a revolutionary new scientific theory examining the physiological underpinnings of social change and its probable effects on civilizations. He is also a successful businessman and the founder of Jim’s Group, Australia’s largest franchise network with 3,400 Franchisees in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. To date, Dr. Penman has co-authored ten peer-reviewed papers in leading journals including Behavioral Brain Research and Physiology and Behavior. Dr. Penman currently lives in Melbourne, Australia, is married and has ten children.
Learn more about Dr. Penman and Biohistory at www.biohistory.org.
Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West is available in hard cover and paperback from Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Amazon and other select online and retail locations.