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Isolated Tribes Die Shortly After We Meet Them
Daniel_Stuckey writes: "It's a story we all know — Christopher Columbus discovers America, his European buddies follow him, they meet the indigenous people living there, they indigenous people die from smallpox and guns and other unknown diseases, and the Europeans get gold, land, and so on. It's still happening today in Brazil, where 238 indigenous tribes have been contacted in the last several decades, and where between 23 and 70 uncontacted tribes are still living. A just-published report that takes a look at what happens after the modern world comes into contact with indigenous peoples isn't pretty: Of those contacted, three quarters went extinct. Those that survived saw mortality rates up over 80 percent. This is grim stuff."
C'mon people - aren't we nerds? Clearly we need an OR here, not an AND!
Why do people think it's best to leave others living in the stone age?
The metaphorical White Man has a heavy burden here. Reach out to the savages, and there are adverse consequences, suffering, death, and loss of traditions going back millennia. Stay away, and people who should be your fellow human beings are cut off from the fruits of civilization, and are treated like livestock whose habitat must be delineated and (un)managed to keep their numbers healthy so that more children can be born into a life where their greatest aspiration can be to live just like their grandfathers going back tens of thousands of years.
People complain when you put the wildlife ear tags on the natives.
Learn to love Alaska
We have considerably less data on the isolated tribes that die out before we meet them.
So if someone walks up and shoots you in the head, that's fine because it's evolution?
Evolutionary biology is science, not morality.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A first contact situation with a pilot landing in the New Guinea highlands showed that "Gods" or not, it was not an important enough situation to miss out on lunch :)
In that situation a lot of people turned up to look and then went home after a while. Unlike fiction they recognised the pilot as a person that just happened to have a lot of really cool stuff.
People are people wherever they are even if fiction likes to paint some as more superstitious than a Californian crystal healing fanatic or with less reasoning ability as a meth head.
That makes sense, except why haven't we been visited by the drunken alien frat boys out for a joy ride?
Wait a minute... Random graffiti in corn fields. Mutilated cows. Probe-rich abductions. Suddenly it all makes sense!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That would presume compatible biology. It's just as likely their pathogens take one bite of our incompatible amino acids and go belly up. And that's assuming they're even amino acid based at all.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Explain how tribes can survive after thousands of years without disease?
I'm pretty sure the OP intended to say "new diseases". Obviously they have their own diseases - and their own immunities...they just aren't the same as the rest of the worlds'.
Native Americans used herbs and other plants to heal themselves, and yet today /.ers deny any chance that alternative medicine works.
Yes, because when it's proven to work it's called "medicine".
And what does this say about Europe who used religion as a heal/execute all.
Eh...no comment? People were largely uneducated back then? I'm not sure what the excuse is in this day and age though...
Natives Americans were fairly populated, just divided into several tribes. Without any major population wiping disease.
This is a random link - I'm sure you can find more with a quick search:
http://www.examiner.com/articl...
The only reason that the Europeans had a chance was because the Native American population was already decimated. Not saying that it's "ok" or anything like that, but thems the facts.
I'm not saying that having a large population wouldn't cause such disease, add that fact they lived with there livestock, any disease could jump from human into animal and mutate, or vice verse, and the vaccine for small pox came about because of [essentially] milk maids who didn't get the disease, due to their interaction with the heifers. Their lack of proper hygiene, not deposing of their feces in a proper manner. Contaminating their drinking water with their own feces, animal feces, ect....
Hail dumb luck? Really? What are you getting at? That science is "bad"? By all means - segregate yourself from the scientific community...I don't think you'll be missed.
Heh. There is no singular "current world" outside our tightening sphere of slavery. Also: if you adapt successfully, for a while, you die as well.
What is it with kids these days awkwardly rephrasing Mein Kampf and not even being aware of it? I swear I keep seeing that.
Evolution doesn't "demand" shit, it just is. It doesn't strive towards a certain purpose or zenith, it just wobbles around here and there because it can, because there is energy available to do so, and when it ends, it ends. Yeah, there is competition and fighting, but it's not required for evolution to happen -- all we need is diversity and random stuff happening. And it's actually kinda hard, if not impossible, to get rid of that, and furthermore evolution also laughs at the tiny timeframes you can conceive of, the differences you see.
Where you see a straight line to some kind of goal, it sees you bouncing around local optima, and none of the what any lifeform is doing is distuingishable from anything else if you zoom far out enough. Yet if you zoom in far enough, if you are that lifeform, it always matters. If you zoom in too far, you end up believing what you think matters, matters in general, and that's where unintentional comedy begins.
Last but surely not least: a stone age baby raised by modern parents would behave like any modern child. Most of our supposed progress is not in us, it's in the networks of objects and human relations we amassed; by ourselves, we haven't changed. And 5000 years of progress would disappear in one single generation if it simply ceased to be passed on, you know? Not so for, say, the ability of a bird to fly. Instead of thinking we're hot shit because it feels good to hear us saying that, we should know our place and think for a change, really.
This is the exact type of, romanticized version of the past bullshit, that we are saying is bullshit here.
These tribes, that have never been in contact with western civilization, could be very helpful in the USPTO.
Being void of any reference to technology, we could use them to figure out whether patent applications are truly non-obvious inventions.
E.g., if a tribe member can figure out "slide-to-unlock" by himself, then we can be sure that it is obvious stuff!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Under ideal conditions that is true: a stable habitat with abundant resources and low population densities. But under such conditions, populations grow and people get pushed out into more and more marginal habitats. People didn't adopt farming and civilization for fun, we adopted it because most of us got pushed into poor habitats and had to be clever in order to make a better life for ourselves.