Experimental Blog #79

Comments on "Here on Earth" - A Natural History of the Planet by Tim Flannery

"Training in economics" according to Tim Flannery, who is "credited with discovering more species than Charles Darwin and "is one of the world's most influential scientists", makes people less cooperative and "neoclassical economists", in particular, seem likely to become selfish and hardened to the needs of their society.

In an earlier chapter Tim Flannery writes that "there is more genetic diversity in a random sample of about fifty chimpanzees from west Africa than in all seven billion of us." And on the next page he states, "There's as much diversity of thought, mannerism and emotion in a small New Guinean village as there is in the entire world, and in this commonality lies the foundations of our < > hopes for a future."

Speaking of hope and the future; if it is true that people in the past were the same, organically, as people in the future will be, and the world was the same, organically, as it will be in the future; and, also, that all people confirm their own histories, and that everybody together confirms world history; then what real, that is undeluded, hope people think there is for the future depends on what they think of their history and world history in general.

And what about China? The world's oldest continuous civilization, 4000 years at least, and, arguably, the world's most amazing country at the beginning of the 21st century? Don't they seem undaunted by history?