Humans on the planet
Erle C. Ellis, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, writes that we’re fully in the Anthropocene, a proposed term to describe an era in which the environment has been heavily influenced by humankind:
Earth’s biodiversity, biogeochemistry and evolution are now profoundly reshaped by us – and are therefore in our hands.
Ellis goes on to assure his readers that this is not cause for despair. Although he appears to fully buy into the concept of anthropogenic global warming (“We are warming the atmosphere, melting the ice caps…”), he thinks the cure for the problem is more of the hair of the dog that bit us:
There will be no returning to our comfortable cradle. The global patterns of the Holocene have receded and their return is no longer possible, sustainable or even desirable. It is no longer Mother Nature who will care for us, but us who must care for her…We most certainly can create a better Anthropocene. We have really only just begun, and our knowledge and power have never been greater. We will need to work together with each other and the planet in novel ways. The first step will be in our own minds.
Ellis actually seems to be trying to counsel against the “humans are a cancer on the planet” crowd. In doing so, however, he overestimates the effect of humans, both good and bad. It is by no means clear that any global warming that has occurred has been caused by humans. And it is by no means clear that we understand any of these processes well enough to alter them in the desired ways. The law of unintended consequences is a bitch, especially in complex systems, and the ecology of the earth is nothing if not a complex system.
One of the commenters at the article has this to say:
Our “cradle” NEVER was “comfortable.” That’s why we, you know, CHANGED it. Just what was comfortable about that cradle? Living in the wild all the time? Smallpox epidemics? Yellow fever? Malaria? Black plague? Measles?
Add your own misery to the list.
The author appears to define the Anthropocene as when human ACTION began changing the Earth’s environment. I don’t think this hits what the actual CORE difference is here. After all, the action of cyanobacteria RADICALLY changed Earth’s atmosphere from carbon dioxide at high pressure to oxygen and nitrogen at relatively low pressure. Going by action alone, we could just as easily call the geologic age since the cyanobacteria the Cyanocene.
It is human UNDERSTANDING that is the unique difference.
Agreed. And human understanding of these things is in its infancy.
[NOTE: One very interesting part of Ellis’s article is how early it was that humans began to significantly shape the global environment:
Significant human alteration of the biosphere began more than 15,000 years ago as Palaeolithic tribes evolved social learning, advanced hunting and foraging technologies, and the use of fire, and used them to open up forested landscapes and kill off megafauna.
These Palaeolithic human impacts were significant and extensive, but they were minor compared with the impact of the rise of agriculture more than 8000 years ago. By domesticating plant and animal species and engineering ecosystems to support them, humans introduced a wide range of unambiguously anthropogenic processes into the biosphere.
Human alteration of Earth systems tends to be far more extensive and complex than one would expect based on numbers alone. Even 8000 years ago, with a population of just 10 million or so, humans had already altered as much as a fifth of Earth’s ice-free land, primarily by using fire to clear forest. The reason small populations had such extensive impacts is that early agriculture emphasised labour efficiency. Early farmers did not use the plough, and that meant constantly shifting cultivation to the most fertile areas. As a result, most of the landscape was in some stage of recovery, giving rise to “semi-natural” woodlands. These were among the first anthropogenic biomes, or “anthromes”.]
From Memeorandum – are we on the cusp of a “mini ice age”?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/
I first heard TV meteorologist Joe Bastardi talk about the prospect for a mini ice age about two years ago when the alarmist propoganda was peaking just before the Climategate scandal.
Funny that when you look at the blogs linking to the “mini ice age” story at Memeorandum, none are the global warming alarmists.
Don’t know about constantly shifting agriculturalists.
I learned that slash&burn was what was done in rain forests. They have poor soil and so you slash and burn the trees. That gives you sunlight to the ground, the wood ash relieves the acidity of forest soils. But you only get a few crops, so you have to move. The land may or may not regain what fertility it had.
Reading “1491” and others doesn’t tell us the Native Americans did slash and burn on the better soils of the Plains and Praries, for example.
This time period will be noted in history for the terribly flawed perspective humans have about their environment and world. And they got it from marxist who found a guilt trip angle in environmentalism to make people cease governing themselves, living spontaneous lives and allowing flourishing human potential to outshine incompetence.
“We will need to work together with each other and the planet in novel ways.” Those are code words for totalitarianism. The ‘old’ ways aren’t good enough, so we need “novel ways.”
“1491” is a great book, BTW.
Reading “1491″ and others doesn’t tell us the Native Americans did slash and burn on the better soils of the Plains and Praries, for example.
I think the current theory is that they burnt the grass to herd the buffalo, with the handy side-effect that it made the grassland have grass the next year, too.
I do believe that humans are having a big effect on the environment, but not in the way these folks are looking at it– I focus more on what we stop from happening, especially when it comes to forest fires. Stop fires long enough, especially if you don’t do anything to clean up the burnables, and you end up with super fires that sterilize the area instead of just burning it out.
I second the thought that the ‘cradle’ was never comfortable. Our species has survived and prospered, give or take a few thousand wars, intermittent plagues, and the occasional genocide, because we have learned to control first stone then metals then atoms, plants, animals, and to a limited extent, the physical environment.
Mr. Ellis is not paying close attention or choses to ignore what is readily observed. Many species to some degree alter the environment. For example, beavers are masters at changing an environment to suit their distinct needs. Termites do likewise. There are numerous other examples.
As far as ‘climate change’ is concerned, poppycock and balderdash is my response. We know very little about the interplay of atmosphere, ocean, magnetic fields, and solar cycle. Computer models of a complex system may make for ‘scientific consensus’ but that does make those models of any more predictive value than throwing bones and unwinding the intestines of a sheep to predict what the climate will be like in a thousand years. However, perhaps in 1,000 years we may have a much better grasp of what is involved in predicting the earth’s climate in 2,000 years.
What is actually involved in climate prediction is Chaos theory, and the main conclusion is that climate prediction is impossible. In principle. It does not matter how many data pieces we have and what computing power we can muster: inherently instable systems are unpredictable.
DO take a look at the play “The Lemmings”
all the hoaky stuff that is serious today, was made fun of. they knew that the group wandering around with a death symbol as their peace sign really was… but then again, it was Harvard Lampoon…
Chevy Chase as The Weatherman in the off-off Broadway parody of Woodstock, Lemmings (1971)
[the post i copied from is in caps, have no time to change it]
now… isn’t it interesting that they knew the dominant zeitgeist of 2011 in 1971?
could be cause they knew the goals of the socialists and progressives and how they haven’t changed since moses harmon and the sex communes and their fetish for lucifer, eugenics, euthanasia, etc…
today we are dumber, so we just make up stories to fill in the spaces rather than see.
in this way… we ignore completely the prescience and messages and arguments from long ago that are relevant..
remember, the green strycnine is ok
but the blue, is cut with acid. so watch it
we have tnt suppositories for everyone…
here is CG doing bob dylan.
Christopher Guest – Positively Wall Street
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS83HGHU934
here is jon belushi doing joe cocker
Lonely at the bottom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15addI6Es30&feature=player_embedded#at=21
heck, its been parodied and updated to modern things too like ADHD….
Concentration Camp! National Lampoon Lemmings!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXeHn9k27Iw&feature=player_embedded
Don Carlos:
“We will need to work together with each other and the planet in novel ways.” Those are code words for totalitarianism. The ‘old’ ways aren’t good enough, so we need “novel ways.”
“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.” Mikhail Gorbachev, quoted in “A Special Report: The Wildlands Project Unleashes Its War On Mankind”, by Marilyn Brannan, Associate Editor, Monetary & Economic Review, 1996, p. 5
“In October 1917, we parted with the old world, rejecting it once and for all. We are moving toward a new world, a world of Communism. We shall never turn off that road.” — Mikhail Gorbachev
“Gentlemen, comrades, do not be concerned about all you hear about Glasnost and Perestroika and democracy in the coming years. They are primarily for outward consumption. There will be no significant internal changes in the Soviet Union, other than for cosmetic purposes. Our purpose is to disarm the Americans and let them fall asleep.” — Mikhail Gorbachev.
but who cares, eh?
“… inherently instable systems are unpredictable.”
That’s life. 😉
“.. here is jon belushi doing joe cocker”
One of the top 5 moments of television. Belushi did Cocker as well as Cocker did Cocker, and I’m a fan of Joe Cocker.
What is actually involved in climate prediction is Chaos theory, and the main conclusion is that climate prediction is impossible. In principle. It does not matter how many data pieces we have and what computing power we can muster: inherently instable systems are unpredictable.
basically what sergey is saying is that ALL DATA MATTERS… and given the way math can work, a small piece of data that WE like to say means nothing, can have HUGE effects disporportionate to our belief in its effect.
but notice.. as schrodinger points out, the observer IS part of the experiment and can not be excised.
even if its not a dead cat, you still have the concept of perspective, and various scales we cant percieve directly.
but WORST of all and MOST BASIC is that our computers ROUND… they have to.. and i can point to a 15 page paper on rounding… yes, there are actually that many ways and each have specific effects on series and more.
but i can explain this easier, and i hope sergey can help
if you take a number and generate a series in some simple complex way (N*123/34) and repeat over and over… the series you get being made up of numbers with endless decimal places, will deviate more and more each iteration as your computer is limited in the number of decimal places.
if we did want to simulate, would adding decimal places to the plank length then make the simulation work?
Some Planck units are suitable for measuring quantities that are familiar from daily experience. For example:
* 1 Planck mass is about 22 micrograms;
* 1 Planck momentum is about 6.5 kg m/s;
* 1 Planck energy is about 500 kWh;
* 1 Planck charge is slightly more than 11 elementary charges;
* 1 Planck impedance is very nearly 30 ohms.
lets say our computer CAN handle the decimals perfectly…
then there is another problem..
starting conditions are not ascertainable..
ie, given the uncertainty principal you can know the location of something to high precision, but not its momentum after that… or you can know its momentum, but not its location..
this is NOT a function of our measuring, its fundemental.
AND if that werent bad enough… particles wink in and wink out all the time in pairs.
seems small… but its believed to be the core of black hole evaporation… which basically overturned the connundrum in destruction of information
information IS energy
and energy IS information
randomness in information is entropy
and thanks to claude shannon, and his proof of bool and algebra, we can model things for a time.
but NO model can do better than that..
i recently wrote a paper for the researhers here who are friends in explaining that any kind of concept of stability they think of, is an illusion.
NOTHING is stable, ever…
a computer only SEEMS stable as there are lots of extra things like parity bits to insure that memory dont flip… but its still a statistical thing.. in which the time necessary to flip a bit and not correct it, is greater than the life of the machine.
forever stamps can never be forever
pollution cant hurt the planet..
how long before the current continental plates become subducted?
oh.. and every time they try to prove such stuff, they find out later that they were completely wrong and life is not so fragile.
oil.. bacteria eat it.
plastic bags… bacteria eat it
cant leave any food or energy out and expect that life wont find it, and use it.
in fact, tiny films of plastic chips at sea show bacteria have evolved and you can watch them cut ruts in the materials
einstein was able to do his work, because his and our minds are reality simulators.. and the more careful you are in loading the midn with GOOD PRINCIPALS the more it incorporates into its model.
and the more is available to the homunculous us in the machine as intuition. in fact, we do not live in reality, we live in the model reality constryucted by our minds…
its the ONLY way to explain things from einsteins gedanken being serious as is little read riding hood, to schizophrenics seeing people who arent there, and more..
even the jewish theologians know it
when you save a person, you save a universe…
each of us lives in a universe inside
and that universe creates the illusion of now
we actually live a few instances (about 1/8 a second) from now as a thing. but our mind models extrapolate the future so that we meet the now and so seem to be in it.
models models everywhere, and they only work for a time…
anyone interested in more should read the work of claude shannon (one of the greatest minds who ever existed and we dont know him… he is more responsible for all we have aroudn us than einstein or almost anyone else you can name)
physics and information theory is everything
information theory is literally everythi8ng and physics grounds it into the subset called empirical.
🙂
My BS sensors go on red alert whenever someone defines a new era or a new social phenomenon or anything similar. Mostly, it just means that that have coined a new term for something that most people already knew.
Parker, if humans have affected the earth, what does that say about the bacteria that use us as their lebensraum (microbiome)? Will we eventually need human environmentalists to protect us from the nefarious activities of E. coli etc. Are they responsible for us not being vegans because they wanted us to supply them with certain nutients? Perhaps we need to start protesting our exploitation.
I like the new enviro theme that points out a water crisis. As if washing your clothes and car actually makes water disappear. Where the **** is it gonna go? And if you don’t wash your car, aren’t you simply holding onto water that deprives ground water of runoff eplenishment? That ranks right up there with sea levels mysteriously rising only around certain leftist controlled islands.
Stability (‘long term’) does not exist, there is no such thing as a steady state, thus predictions are fraught with inherent errors because we can never account for all the factors involved in a complex system and even it we could the factors (data) will always change in ways we can not foresee. Long term climate modeling has seemed a fool’s errand to me from the get go.
“”Long term climate modeling has seemed a fool’s errand to me from the get go.””
Parker
They’re basically asking we trust 100 year mathematical models from the same people that couldn’t predict bankrupting debt and chronic unemployement in a two year window.
Erle C. Ellis, associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland
Another intellectual bonsai heard from.
ARTFLDGR:
Most folks don’t have a clue about Schrodinger’s Uncertainty Principle and its broad, non-nuclear physics implications. I’m not competent in particle physics, but the Schrodinger (umlaut lacking) Principle needs to be widely known. I defer its explanation on this blog to you. You’ll do a much, much better job.
expat says, “Perhaps we need to start protesting our exploitation.”
Protest is futile. 🙂 Everything is being exploited, consumed, or preyed upon by something else. The lowly worm is far more capable of altering the earth than homo sapiens sapiens. We should be a bit more humble.
SteveH says, “I like the new enviro theme that points out a water crisis.”
While it is true the total amount of water on the planet keeps moving merrily through the water cycle, there is a water shortage in the Sahara and an over abundance of water in SW Iowa as I type. 🙂
“… sea levels mysteriously rising only around certain leftist controlled islands.”
I believe BHO has already taken care of that problem. Sea levels ceased to rise on Tuesday, January 20, 2009.
Schrodinger’s Uncertainty Principle
That’s usually attributed to Heisenberg, not Schré¶dinger, although the latter did formulate the energy-time bit below.
In the absence of physicsguy, I’ll take a shot at this.
The Uncertainty Principle is a statement that it is impossible, even in principle, to measure simultaneously frequency (i.e., energy) and time (or position and momentum) beyond a certain degree of precision. It is a consequence of the wave-particle duality of matter; every particle has a wavelength (i.e., or its inverse, the frequency) associated with it. The more precisely known the wavelength, the less precisely known the time, and similarly with momentum (velocity X mass) and position.
Simple analogy: imagine trying to determine the speed and position of a pitch by taking a snapshot as the ball approaches. The longer the exposure, the more smeared the ball is in the photo (hence the easier to calculate its velocity by the smear length, and knowledge of the shutter speed), but the squishier the determination of its position. Conversely, the shorter the exposure, the sharper the ball is, and hence the easier to determine its position, but the harder to determine how fast it was going.
Energy-time is a little tougher. For energy (wavelength or frequency) and time, imagine hitting a tuning fork. The frequency is well-defined, but the duration is not — when exactly does the tuning fork stop ringing? A handclap, conversely, is well-defined in time, but is represented by a square wave that comprises a large number of harmonics (multiples of a given frequency, f, 2f, 3f, etc.) and so has no well-defined frequency. (After wracking my brain for a way to demonstrate this in a lecture, I came up with a storage oscilloscope and a TV monitor. It’s kinda cool, actually.)
Occam,
Good post and a rather succinct explanation. As I understand the Heisenberg Principle it boils down to this: The act of measuring (atomic and subatomic levels) alters what we attempt to measure.
Whenever someone starts telling me humans have had such an enromous impact on the Earth, I always ask them how long it would take us to dig the Grand Canyon, to sculpt Yosemite Valley, to carve the Goose Necks of the San Juan River, to dig and fill the Great Lakes, etc. Those are just a tin=y example of the landforms that have been shaped by weather and tectonic earth movements.
We are merely passengers trying to be more comfortable as the world does it’s thing. Two of it’s biggest things are weather and tectonic earth movements. We have no control over either and will probably never have any such control. The problem with our “betters” in the learned class is that they believe because they have a lot of knowledge, they understand EVERYTHING.
There is no steady state of either flora or fauna. Where I’m sitting right now was under 1000 feet of ice just 10,000 years ago. The magnnificent contours of Puget Sound are the result of glaciation and volcanism. We can control neither. All we can and should do is what our less well informed ancestors did, and that is ADAPT.
Thanks, Parker.
Yeah, I left out the observer effect because it’s less intuitive and requires highly contrived macro analogies.
I left a comment at American Digest a few minutes ago.
Don Rodrigo said:
I replied:
I like the new enviro theme that points out a water crisis. As if washing your clothes and car actually makes water disappear. Where the **** is it gonna go? And if you don’t wash your car, aren’t you simply holding onto water that deprives ground water of runoff replenishment?
*shudder* The short-sighted idiots are slowly killing the valley my folks live in.
About fifteen years ago a bunch of city people who have vacation homes pushed for, and got, them to start putting all the irrigation ditches into pipes to avoid “wasting” water. These ditches had been in use for up to a hundred years. They finished everything they could about five years ago, and now they just can’t figure out why the valley’s wells are going dry. Lots of complaints about the bunches of dead plants along the old ditches, too– shockingly, aspen don’t do so well halfway up a rocky hill when you take away all their water.
The bigger farms and ranches can drill deeper, but the ones that use to have springs are having to drill, and the folks that don’t have money to drill deeper are forced to sell to more city people who want a vacation home.
“”The act of measuring (atomic and subatomic levels) alters what we attempt to measure.””
Kind of like liberal polling. The mere act of them measuring public opinion alters the results.
J.J. formerly says, “The problem with our “betters” in the learned class is that they believe because they have a lot of knowledge, they understand EVERYTHING.”
I beg to differ… they (for the most part, but not all) have a lot of dogma and everything must conform to their dogma. If your grant comes from someone or some institution that wants you to investigate the impact of ping pong ball sales on birth defects you tend to discover that the sale of ping pong balls impacts the rate of birth defects. (Absurd I know, but way too prevalent.)
Occam,
You’re welcome.
If your grant comes from someone or some institution that wants you to investigate the impact of ping pong ball sales on birth defects you tend to discover that the sale of ping pong balls impacts the rate of birth defects.
This is absolutely true. Got a grant to study the effect of humans on climate? If you come back and say, “Nah, nothing to see here. Everything’s fine. Never mind” the grantor wonders why he gave you a grant, and makes damned sure he doesn’t do so again.
“”I always ask them how long it would take us to dig the Grand Canyon, to sculpt Yosemite Valley, to carve the Goose Necks of the San Juan River, to dig and fill the Great Lakes,””
J.J.
They have no P-E-R-S-P-E-C-T-I-V-E of scale. One oil well in the Gulf of Mexico is going to destroy ocean life for decades and if everyone stopped recycling for a week the world’s trees would be gone the next.
The answer, of course, is in Marilyn Monroe’s stuffing, but we don’t have the taste buds for discernment.
http://www.religioperennis.org/documents/Oldmeadow/Critiques.pdf
They have no P-E-R-S-P-E-C-T-I-V-E of scale.
Absolutely right. Surprisingly, even most scientists lack any appreciation of relative magnitudes. Magnets affecting chemical reactions? Sure. That’s roughly like diverting the path of a runaway truck by breaking wind in front of it.
The problem is pedagogical. A number of disparate phenomena are taught, but with no connection between them, and so no perspective on which are large, which small, and which in between.
That, and a lack of common sense, and/or willingness to ask awkward questions. For example, if secondhand smoke can really kill people who are just in the same room with a smoker (and who therefore are exposed to smoke for a miniscule fraction in time and concentration of the smoke to which the smoker himself is exposed), how does any smoker live long enough (assuming a linear dose-response relationship) to finish a carton of cigarettes?
Great thread!
foxfier
It appears that the Native Americans were pretty prodigious farmers. Buffalo were more important once they got horses.
European diseases killed, according to “1491” about 90-95% of the Americas population from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego.
What the whites observed was the relicts after the death fronts passed. Including old growth forests which were new, so to speak, after the locals were too dead to keep them down by clearing and farming.
“”how does any smoker live long enough (assuming a linear dose-response relationship) to finish a carton of cigarettes?””
It’s weirder than them just NOT thinking about the obvious. For some reason they CAN’T think about the obvious.
90%+ fatality rate over a whole nation? That sounds… highly questionable. Some villages had that during the plagues, I know, but sounds more like a Coast to Coast with George Noory caller than a serious work.
90%+ fatality rate over a whole nation? That sounds… highly questionable
Sorry, not to be contrary, but despite my default skepticism, I can believe that this might be possible. (Not to say it’s true, merely that I can’t discount it out of hand.)
I say this because I view Indians as having experienced in a few years the selection pressure to which Europeans had been gradually (and intermittently) exposed over centuries. Integrated with respect to time, the two might well be comparable in mortality.
It’s like the profitability of a grocery store (with 1% margins, and high turnover) compared with an auction house (say, 100% margins but low turnover).
So I don’t find 90% mortality rates of Indians (and Hawaiians) necessarily implausible. They weren’t paying the mortality freight in installments; they got a balloon payment demand.
A longitudinal study which surveys the opinions of lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgendered persons at folks studies departments will clear up that issue, Occam.
I have read that fatality rate, as well, in books about epidemiology. In fact, it happened pretty early in the contact between Europeans and Native Americans. At least, it sometimes reached that level. See this.
Also this:
And this:
Note how early this happened, so early that, by the time the settlers really started arriving, the native population was already comparatively sparse.
That’s exactly the problem, Occam– it sounds like something a computer programmer would come up with when he’s trying to figure out how to explain why two continents don’t have the population that his theory requires.
For Hawaii, it could be possible– incredibly unlikely, but possible, because Hawaii is (relatively) TINY, the big island is something like 100×75 miles, and boats would let you move a lot more quickly than would be possible in, say, the Cascade Mountains on foot, folks are more likely to be related and share the same immunities/ weaknesses, etc.
There should still be some really heavy evidence before something so incredible is even considered seriously, and even the author’s defenders admit he’s very light on actual evidence.
I know the guy got a lot of credit for suggesting stuff counter to what he learned when he went through school as a boomer, but the “many wave” theory was in the old text books in my high school over a decade ago, as were theories that the Indians had a wide range of cultures, some exchange of goods (a “no duh” observation to those who’d found obsidian heads over a hundred miles from the nearest obsidian range) and weren’t the zero-environmental-effect guys that a lot of philosophers liked to paint them as. I’d probably be a lot more impressed if I wasn’t two generations ahead of the impressions he’s “shattering.”
So we got potatoes and corn from the native Americans- but no diseases going back the other way-towards Europe? Or did Europeans who made a round trip , die of the disease before they got back to Europe so it never spread in Europe?
Neo-
both of those illustrate how incredibly unlikely an overall mortality rate of 90% is; same way that some European villages were “wiped out” (I don’t have the data on if everyone died, or everyone that stayed died–I don’t think it exists), the Mandan lived in three villages with a total population of about 1600. (page 10)
The Taino were tightly packed on an island and were…um… not exactly dying solely to disease.
The final link doesn’t have any citation, but seems to be an edited version of this page about the plague know as “the Great Dying,” and probably several other sources; I think I found the paper they lifted the last paragraph from, but other than it saying that the plague was restricted to the coast (in that little google sample quote thing) I don’t know what they had to say, or what the linked page edited.
Jon-
AFAIKT, the guy’s theory is that the American Indians were so genetically homogeneous that they got really sick from stuff Europeans had, but Europeans were diverse enough to not get sick in anything like the same numbers.
jon baker,
Corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and other horticultural delights plus syphilis were brought back from the New World.
BTW, I can wrap my mind around the 90% estimate. Remember, Europeans had been exposed to small pox, measles, typhoid, tuberculosis, and so forth for centuries. Set loose on a new continent these diseases would have spread rapidly and with high mortality rates in a population isolated from the rest of the world for a 10+ millennium.
So we got potatoes and corn from the native Americans- but no diseases going back the other way-towards Europe?
Syphilis would top the list.
Oops. Just saw Parker’s comment of 11:19.
A pretty good work on the diseases of Europeans and why the Indians had no resistance is Jarod Diamond’s, “GUNS GERMS AND STEEL.” His hypothesis is that people in Europe had been living in close contact with horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, etc and the manure from them for long enough to develop immunities to the many diseases that arose from them. When the Spanish started exploring in the 1500s the disease vectors were set free in a population with no immunity. At least that’s the theory and seems plausible to me.
By the time Pizarro reached the Incan Empire in 1532 the natives were considerably weakened by the ravages of small pox. The Spanish had armor, horses and better weapons, but it seems unlikely a force of 180 men, 27 horses, and one cannon could have defeated the much more numerous Incas unless the Incas were terribly weakened and disorganized from disease.
Charles Mann’s “1491” expands on Diamond’s theories for the Americas. We’ll probably never know the full story, but those two authors seem to have done some good work in trying to understand what happened.
J.J., Diamond makes some good points, but the overall thesis is dubious, and politically fraught: in discussing his book, he ascribes “inequality,” as he puts it, to geographical and geographically-related factors (e.g., ranges of domesticable plants and livestock).
It is the biological/ geographical Doppelgé¤nger of historical materialism. If geography, with its attendant biological dispersion consequences, explains the relative rates of development of various societies, why is such development not uniform in time? Why, for example, did China blossom, then fade, several times? Or Egypt? Or Mesopotamia/Iraq? Or Persia? Their geography was constant, as was their access to domesticable plants and animals, yet through history these countries have been either in the ascendant or downtrodden.
Sorry, but Diamond’s geographical materialism thesis, while politically correct (and exculpatory to the appropriate ethnicities), is clearly simplistic, and does not suffice to explain observations outside the epidemiological sphere.
JJ formerly raises a good source IMO. Jared’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a well thought out, well researched book. His Collapse is also an interesting read. Other excellent reads are The Red Queen and The Future of Disease by Matt Ridley. While I’m offering unsolicited reading suggestions I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
The Spanish had armor, horses and better weapons, but it seems unlikely a force of 180 men, 27 horses, and one cannon could have defeated the much more numerous Incas unless the Incas were terribly weakened and disorganized from disease.
Disease, plus internecine strife, plus the enmity of innumerable tribes the Incas – like the Aztecs – had brutally subjugated, and, yearning for the opportunity to get their own back, saw the Spaniards as that opportunity.
Think about it. Could 180 men today, even armed with automatic weapons, but with other help, conquer a nation of 16 million Incas (the estimated population of the Inca Empire)?
Assume that the male population of fighting age would be perhaps 6% of the total. One million guys, even if armed with only slings, rocks, and such against automatic weapons, would be a pretty formidable foe for 180 men.
Sorry, make that “without other help”
Occam,
I agree with your general ideological perspective ala Jared, but I digested that and accounted for it when I thought about his conclusions in G,G, & S. Yes, he’s a PC fellow. But there is plenty of info and insight after one takes into account his PC agenda. What I took away from G, G, & S is that human development is situational. Developing the seeds of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is doable, developing the seeds of civilization in Papua New Guinea is an all together proposition.
excuse me… altogether DIFFERENT proposition.
OB said, “Diamond makes some good points, but the overall thesis is dubious, and politically fraught:”
I agree that Diamond is a liberal, and he draws conclusions I don’t agree with. I was merely citing his conclusions about how the disease vectors arrived and helped to weaken the Indians., which wa sfurther amplified by Mann in “1491.”
I also found his book, “COLLAPSE” to be slanted toward the idea that we are overwhelming poor old Gaia. He did, however, validate the Medieval Warming Period by chronicaling the Norse settlements in Greenland. The AGW crowd would probably have preferred he not point out proof of something they deny.
I agree that the Incas were involved in strife between two brothers as well as the difficulty of controlling the “slave” populations. All of that worked in favor of Pizarro as well. From Wikipedia:
“When they returned to Peru in 1532, a war of the two brothers between Huayna Capac’s sons Huascar and Atahualpa and unrest among newly conquered territories–and perhaps more importantly, smallpox, which had spread from Central America–had considerably weakened the empire.” Always good to have one’s comments reviewed by a discerning eye. Thanks, OB.
Parker, I have read “THE BLANK SLATE” and found it very interesting. We seem to have read some of the same books and taken similar messages from them. I’ll try to make time for some of your other recommendations.
With regard to Diamond, if one gets out of him what Parker got, there’s nothing wrong with that. It is nonetheless worth echoing OB on what Diamond himself is aiming to convey – as OB nicely put it, a geographic/biological Doppelganger of historical materialism.
That subtext of ideology does unfortunately get through to a lot of people who have sucked on the Diamond teat, as opposed to reading him with a sieve. I vividly remember a 25 year-old Manhattanite raving to me for hours about the solution to all mysteries of the universe and life, dredging up every stray thread he could recall from “G, G & S” as support. “Collapse” has had an even worse effect, for reasons noted by Victor Davis Hanson:
http://victorhanson.com/articles///hanson042305.html
As Hanson summarizes the book (accurately, in my view): “[It is] a synthesis of the previous pessimisms from Marx to Toynbee to Paul Ehrlich and Kirkpatrick Sale.” As Marx might have said, it was the perfect exposition of the ideology of the ruling class circa 2005.
I tend to skim Diamond simply because the truth in what he says is much more adequately conveyed by others – for instance, (as Parker suggested) Matt Ridley, and my personal favorite, David Landes (“The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”). Peter Bauer ripped Diamond’s reductionist style of thought to shreds in his bracing “From Subsistence to Exchange,” when Diamond was still playing with TonkaToys. Deepak Lal wrote a sadly neglected but 100% awesome and PC-free anti-Diamond tome (“In Praise of Empires”). What with Ridley, Landes, Bauer, and Lal – among others – Diamond just doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. In his work, as with most things in life, what’s new isn’t true and what’s true isn’t new. Even worse, most of what isn’t new in his work isn’t true either – cf. the Hanson quote above.
The general thrust of this counter-literature is that development is situational, but it is much more dependent on the situational factors of culture and exchange than on geography and biology per se. With utmost concision: Ideas Have Consequences.
*Almost forgot: I should mention while we’re on the topic that Niall Ferguson has a new book out on just these themes, called, appropriately enough, “Civilization.” I haven’t read it yet, but Ferguson is always worth a perusal.
“Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California is one of my favorite places on Earth. When the glaciers, which formed its sheer vertical walls, receded some ten thousand years ago, they left a large lake in the upper half of the valley, dammed up behind the detritus of gravel and boulders deposited by the melting ice at the lower margin of the active glacier. Over a few thousand years, the lake silted up, creating the flat floor of the valley. When tourists first started visiting the valley in large numbers, less than a century ago, the valley floor was a mix of forest and meadow, with a large, clear lake at the upper end of the valley, reflecting the spectacular, granite faces which surround it- – Cloud’s Rest, Half Dome, North Dome, and Washington Column. Today the forests have taken over more of the valley floor, and the siltation of Mirror Lake continues, so that even in years of normal precipitation the lake is reduced to an expanse of mud with a small stream meandering through one side during half the summer and fall.
A conservation ethic, dedicated to the preservation of the biosphere in its status quo, would be just as lethal- – both to ourselves and to the rest of the system- – as it would be to pave the entire planet with concrete and asphalt. If we were to attempt to preserve Yosemite Valley, unchanged forever, which Yosemite should be preserved: the Glacial Lake, the silted marshland of a few thousand years ago, the Yosemite our grandparents knew, or the Yosemite to come, with very little meadow space
and no Mirror Lake?
How shall we use and shape the planet?”
– J. P. Valk, ‘Doomsday Has Been Cancelled’ –
“We are the legitimate children of Gaia; we need not be ashamed that we are altering the landscapes and the ecosystems of Earth. But we do owe our mother careful attention to our handiwork and to our treatment of Gaia’s other species of life.”
– J. P. Valk(in ‘Doomsday Has Been Cancelled’) –
Developing the seeds of civilization in the Fertile Crescent is doable, developing the seeds of civilization in Papua New Guinea is an all together proposition.
I know one of the key factors considered relevant in the development of civ is the availability of domesticable animals. The Americas have very few, compared to the Afro-Eurasian land mass. While there were some likely variants of the AEA land mass’s species who had gotten across one or more land bridges in the past, the substantial die-off that occurred in the last influx of proto-civman in about 10k BC appears to have killed off a lot of them. What remained did not lend itself to domestication, as the AEA species did. You can tame oxen far more readily than you can buffalo. You can tame horses and camels and sheep far more readily than you can alpaca and llamas. That made a huge difference in the development of fixed-place groupings of humans, which made a huge difference in the speed and level of development of civs. When you don’t have to move around as much to sustain your population, your ability to build on previous human efforts is magnified substantially… and when the animals help to relieve the burden of work (as oxen, and then horses, did) that, too, makes a huge difference.
I do not believe in such epidemic mortality rates as 90% or higher. This never happen even in pure lines of mice. Bottleneck effect does not last for several thousand years, and Indian populations must have developed enough genetic diversity since initial colonization of America. Plaque that devastated Europe in 13 century also was a new bacteria for europeans, it came from Mongol steppes, but mortality rate never exceeded 50%, and conservative estimates make it 30%. Actual statistics does not exist, and hearsay about all social catastrophes usually is wildly exaggerated.
I don’t buy the concept that heroes and villans were created by a mere flip of the coin of nature as to which peoples possessed the best immunity plan upon intermingling. Because the coin could just as easily have landed on tails.
The only difference between humans and every other species alive today because it mercilessly beat out its competition, is we humans fret and cry injustice about it all. Which is looking more everyday like the achilees heel of our species. We’ve become hyper emotional creatures and want to flat out reject how the world actually is.
Quite a few people understand that developing of deterministic chaos concept by Kolmogorov and its later elaboration in works of Arnold (see Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser, or KAM theorem) was even more devastating blow to materialistic determinism than Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Financial markets are unpredictable due to the same reason why weather and climate are unpredictable: they all include chaotic dynamic which allows only short-term prediction, and close to singularity points even this becomes impossible. It will take another several decades until this knowledge became recognized by the public, as it took several decades before quantum mechanic became widely accepted.
Ref domesticable animals.
Wild cattle are pretty wild. Not speaking of domestic cattle gone wild. But, possibly, speaking of African water buffalo, descended from Asian carabao imported to do ag work.
How do you domesticate such massive and aggressive animals?
Kill and eat the all but the most tractable 5% as calves. Repeat.
As Diamond said, referring to–excusing the failure of–the domestication of zebras, be around a zebra stallion and you’re dead. There’s a reason stallions are gelded, and bulls. Don’t need the aggravation. Still. With species domesticated for thousands of years. Zebras aren’t unique.
IIRC, Diamond was making excuses. The Incas failed in part because they weren’t used to European intrigue and treachery. Riiight.
Zebras dodge lassos. Well, most creatures dodge whatever’s coming at them. Anyway, the use of the lasso implies the animal is already captured, in some sort of confinement if you’re using it from the ground.
One of Diamond’s favorite cultures must be the smartest on Earth because whenever strangers meet, they may fight to the death and quickness in figuring out clan relationships to avoid fighting or whatever finetunes their intelligence. Figure…if you’re smart you don’t have a culture like that.
Anyway, Diamond was making far too many excuses. When I saw a jacket blurb saying,in effect, that this would strike a blow against racism, I should have known.
So, you don’t like the death rates in the Americas. Take it up with Mann. Saw a discussion about the subject, not Mann, on CSpan. At the end, one of the audience said the whole thing made him sick–unintended play on words, I suppose. For some folks, the required narrative is that every Native American was shot by Daniel Boone or a close relative. Illness takes away the genocide story. Can’t have that.
Thanks Occam for catching my mistake…
I was mixing up the names. I seldom get to talk about the wickedly weird and cool scales of our reality. 🙂
you did a very good job in your explanation…
and in the interest of Feyman and his wise truth that if you understand it, you can explain it in regular terms and abstractions. (ie, those wierd stories that the left likes to claim are stories are how a symbolic mind transfers information in which the key is principals that cant be elucidated. in fact, thats the point, the discovery of principals then elucidating them. in a way, we need to be able to discuss them before we know them!)
I will now try to unravel the confusion i caused with mixing Schrodinger (missing the umlauts. don’t you know umlauts cost a whole lot extra? Frusen Glé¤djé got you by adding more than umlauts beating out the others.. just trying to be economical in bad times. 🙂 )
ok, the laymans explanation of heisenberg
the only problem in your explanation Occam is that you were trying to use macro objects to explain a quantum truth… but it was a good one!!
the key to understanding it in its simplest is that at the subatomic level, you cant measure anything without affecting it in some way.
to know where something is you have to affect it. there is no way to see it as its below the size of light itself. it doesn’t radiate energy. in fact, its existence and substance is all that it is, and if not for something else striking it, or its mass having affectation over a long distance, its existence wouldn’t exist. ie, a something that has no affect on anything doesn’t exist and so is a nothing.
another term for it is the “principle of indeterminacy”
put most succinctly by Werner Heisenberg himself, an we can do no better
well, down below it gets even WEIRDER…
the mind would say, thats fine… i understand that it being too small you have to affect it and so change it. but one can infer from this, and assume that if you know enough of something you can say it took this path and not that one.
well, through a whole lot of experimentation, we found that, that macro intuition, does not apply.
everything exists as a particle and a wave (which i think was where occam wanted to go). that is its existence is in a supposition of states its there and not there.
when your at the beach, you can be knocked over and dragged out to sea by a wave. its there, and not there, you cant pick it up, you cant remove it from the medium it exists in. you can add energy to it, or remove it, or guide it, but the thing is a thing and not a thing
particles exist in our universe (in the classical interpretation, not string theory), as such energy bundles. in one way you can think of the fermions (hard matter like electrons) as standing waves that reject more energy and accept no more energy, and bosons (force carriers like light) as traveling waves…
to make matters more complex, any object that is made of an even number of fermions, becomes a boson… so only odd numbers of fermions remain fermions.
ack…
the knowledge in symbolize and understanding is dotted all over the human landscape..
“Watch the ripples change in size but never leave the stream” David Bowie, Changes…
this opens the door to what is called the classical slit experiment… and the revealing of such things as Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” we now refer to commonly as entanglement. (without getting into it, entanglement allows two particles to share some informational connection instantaneously outside of time at any distance. spooky… so once two things are entangled, the changing of a state of one, will instantly cause a change in state of the other, distance is irrelevant and therefor so is time)
in the slit experiment, and its variations trying to tease more out of it. a light source in which the photons are aligned, as in a laser beam, is spread out and allowed to hit a wall with two slits in it a certain distance apart (in relation to the wavelength).
on the other side of the slits you have a wall or screen… when set up right what happens boggles the senses whose mind models modeling is confounded.
if you let the light go through both slits and hit the wall, you will get what is called an interference pattern not a wall lit up smoothly with the light
that is, the light after passing through the slits and spreading out, interferes with itself. and what is seen on the wall is a standing wave pattern showing where the waves cancel each other out, and double up on each other in the form of bands.
if you cover one slit… you get a screen lit with light like normal. if you uncover it, and cover the other, you get a screen lit with light like normal.
the photons are entangled, and so we decide to see whether they are particles or waves… so we put a beam splitter in the path so that we can peel off some photons and check them out.
we leave our detector off, and we turn on our laser, both slits are uncovered… and voila we see the pattern. great… everything is working. we turn on our detector, and wham… the pattern on the screen disappears depending on what kind of detector you have! if your detector detects waves, the pattern will remain… if it detects the strike of a photon as a particle, the pattern disappears.
ok… now.. you say its cause everything is so close together… if we separate things farther, we can then spread out the distance light has to travel and we can do better.
much like Occam description of a baseball!!!!
great.. no matter how far you go.. the wave form on the screen is measured to change instantaneously. faster than material light can travel.
[i worked out a great explanation of how this can be having to do with cavitation of space time, but hey, who wants to listen to what i say?]
the experment even works for light from a star light years away… where the photons had to know their later state 300 million years ago… (we will get to this in a second, and THATs scrodinger with the umlauts)
the experiment even works when you send photons out one at a time! ie.. your source now only sends out one photon at a time at the slits… and your screen can detect where they land.. just as your eyes can detect where they go when they bounce off when looking at the pattern made by many photons.
so it measures this one, then that one, etc.
you add up all those measurements to see the pattern that is constructed by smearing out the spray of photons over time… and its a wave pattern of dark and light.
this last part is very important to get to be able to step to the next step.
the light interferes with itself
and so, the only way that can happen, is that the photon doesn’t choose a side or path to the wall or sensor screen…
it takes ALL PATHS at one time.
it goes through BOTH slits at the same time, and so interferes with itself. (and yet the geneticist i work with who is a friend don’t get how far removed he is from how things “work”)
the photon is self entangled so to speak. it does not follow a path from source to end.. it follows ALL paths from source to end…
and if you try to measure it as you go, you are causing a determination. your affecting it in some way to make that determination. the universe then has to resolve the path and so the waveforms path and everything collapses and it has a definite location.
but if you haven’t measured it, the particle takes all paths to the detector which is the screen and your eyes.
so its more than just juggling two variables which work in opposition.
its juggling all variables and potentials up until the moment of detection when the whole of those variables relationships collapse and the particle then has a definite path. but if you dont detect it as a particle, the time before that it was traveling, it has no actual path… it is all paths.
this is why quantum physics is statistical at its bottom. not because of the same reasons at the macro level, but because this indeterminacy has no other way to work with it.
at the macro level, its as Sergey alludes to when mentioning Kolmogorov.
kolmogorove and smirnov worked out some wonderful math to analyse value series to determine whether they are random or not. this is not the same as claude shannons entropy. this is way too far off course to discuss here.
i will leave this teaser though that the geneticist biologist friend cant get his mind around. that for the class of problems he is looking at, and doesnt know he is lookign at, statistics breaks down and bercomes useless. and to tip a hat to sergey, the more the kolomogorov test declares randomness, the less able statistics become. and so statistics cant be used to make a determination of whether a series of values is created by true random processes as plucked from the universe… OR its made by a series of tick tock determinant formuleas whose informational entropy makes them random (for a time beyond which can be measured or determined for other fundemental mathematical reasons)
everything snowballs out for me…
anyway… so the reason you cant measure something and know this stuff, is that your measuring is what makes the whole collapse into a path and make a determination.
it was Schrodinger and his dead cat that elucidated this effect to a layman’s sensibilities (and other physicists).
in much of my explanations of math, i try to show that in truth, given valid math, Copernicus and ptolemy as a problem is only an argument as to which input value is correct. ie, which perspective is correct. when to my math, and the kind of math of Heisenberg, debroglie, and Schrodinger, and others. every location input as a vector would solve the problem if you had a GENERAL solution not a specific one who makes the location source a constant rather than a variable. (so doc dont see that i know becuase i solved for ALL values in the mathematical solution space… not one and said thats it)
why do i bring this up, because it was Claude shannon that proved in his paper that algebra with boolean functions and iteration was mathematically equivalent to other systems, and so was mathematically equivalent with reality so far as the machine can execute in limits what the math can do unlimited.
why do i bring this much later information theory position in? easy… it was schrodinger that was saying… wave mechanics wave mechanics… and it was heisenberg crying for the matrix 🙂
but in truth, they were both complete mathematical descriptions from complete mathematical systems, and so, like algebra with booleans, were equivalent.
ie.. a set problem can be casted to algebra that can be casted to waves, etc.. (which would lead us to Kurt Godel and his “Incompleteness Theorem” which sounds like dick cheney giving a speech. 🙂 )
this is why we can use computers to solve or simulate! and why you can cast wave mechanics into iterative logic algebra and get wave mechanics answers… or matrix answers.
having determined equivalence, the geniuses argued who was right like gallileo… if they were equivalent, then both and neither… just like their theories, their answers and an infinity of them, exist in supposition
anyway..
schrodingers cat was the gedanken (thought experiment) that made conceptualizing what was going on easier.
i have spent years trying to reveal how this ties into genetics and biology… to confused ears mostly.
from wiki
at the quantum level, the cat is neither alive nor dead and all that would entail the outcome to be either or, is resolved once you open the box, not before.
ie. outside the perception of a conscious mind there is no reality (technically).
what schrodinger was doing, and before they did the slit experiment revealing the qualities of entanglement, was poking fun at it.
problem was, he was right in his joke. the cat is not alive or dead till you open the box…
now… my explanation, to be honest, is actually one of several competing explanations, some of which can never be determined.
the form that i explained is “objective collapse theory”
really… is it any wonder that by nto being allowed to take college and finish degrees, that no one will have lunch with me and discuss what i am interested in? or how contemporaries who like American idol thing i am just making stuff up.
i might as well dig a hole, clime into it, and set up a small device to detect the decay of a particle.. then close my eyes and wink out of existence 🙂
in truth i actually tend to lean towards the relational interpretation
Think about it. Could 180 men today, even armed with automatic weapons, but with other help, conquer a nation of 16 million Incas (the estimated population of the Inca Empire)?
Battle of Chosin Reservoir
“The Chosin Few”
Wiki lowers the numbers…
just as it does for other things (like gulag deaths)
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
SUN TZU (500 B.C.)
Be ready for what the enemy is capable of doing, not what you think he will do.
[has anyone bothered with that tactical missive when debating our leader and the progressives? nope… i debate that they should not be allowed the power to do X and most argue that they wouldn’t do X (implying that it doesn’t matter they have the power its not going to be used – and their only real point to their point, as with hux, its not what they think they will do)]
It was bitter cold. The temperature was below zero. The wind howled. Snow fell-a snow so dry that dust from the road mixed with it in yellowish clouds that swirled about the column of trucks. Tundra-like, bleak, and without vegetation in most places, the land was depressing
Armies & Commanders:
United Nations
* General Douglas MacArthur
* Major General Oliver P. Smith
approx. 20,000 men
Chinese
* General Song Shi-Lun
* 200,000 men
while your assertion or desire is to know if 180 men can take over so many.. well, 200,000 men with guns and such, and supplies, couldn’t stop 20k..
Were surrounded men! we have them right were we want them, any direction we shoot we kill enemy
Colonel “Chesty” Puller… was made famous that day
you see.. it depends on a lot.
and rather than desease, i would say that the fear of a weapon which can be pointed and a hole appears and strikes ones enemies down… is big scary
its LATER, when they are normalized to the gun that they would be willing, as in the civil war, to charge.
but a small group, with good arms, high ground, bottleneck approach and the fact the native best warriors would be up front leading the charge.
would make it easy to cut down the head…
which is why our military goes butt end first.
what your wanting to know is ASYMETRIC WARFARE… as in vietnam…
Below is a representative list of interstate asymmetric wars fought between 1816 and 1991:[citation needed]
Franco-Spanish War, First Anglo-Burmese War, Second Russo-Persian War, War of the Cakes, First Anglo-Afghan War, Uruguayan Dispute, Austro-Sardinian War, First Schleswig-Holstein War, Second Anglo-Burmese War, Anglo-Persian War, Italo-Roman War, Two Sicilies, Franco-Mexican War, Second Schleswig-Holstein War, Anglo-Abyssinian War, Anglo-Egyptian War, Tonkin War, Franco-Siamese War, Second Italo-Ethiopian War, Second Boer War, Sino-Russian War, Tripolitanian War, Franco-Turkish War, Polish Revolution, Italo-Ethiopian War, some Israeli-Arab conflicts: the First and Second Intifada, and various conflicts with the Hezbollah,[9] Sino-Japanese War, German-Polish Confrontation of World War II, German-Danish Confrontation of World War II, German-Norwegian Confrontation of World War II, German-Belgian Confrontation of World War II, German-Dutch Confrontation of World War II, Italo-Greek Confrontation of World War II, German-Yugoslav Confrontation of World War II, Korean War, Himalayan War, Vietnam War, Second Sino-Vietnamese War, Nagorno-Karabakh War, Soviet War in Afghanistan, Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, Iraq War, 2006 Lebanon War 2011-Libya Civil War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
dgr,
In noting wisely and in passing that
“the light interferes with itself”
I have to say that your eructation on the uncertainty principle leaves me highly uncertain about just what you are trying to say, but as you said “the light interferes with itself.”
I take that as metaphoric unless you mean that we all have to go back and stand over those water filled shadow trays in high-school physics just to make sure that “the light interferes [still] with itself.”
Could it be that that too is still uncertain? And will it help increase certainty and not entropy if we drown Schrodinger’s cat in one of the water trays?
I don’t have time right now to find links, so I’m doing this from memory, but the accepted reason that diseases went almost entirely in one direction (Europeans to Native Americans) has to do with the way contagious diseases work. In summary:
(1) epidemic diseases almost always emerge from an animal vector which requires close and lengthy contact with human beings. That had occurred in Europe (and especially Asia, where a great many diseases originate)
(2) they flourish when the human population is of a certain density (which was achieved in many parts of Europe and especially Asia)
(3) over time, with repeated epidemics and repeated exposure, the population becomes more resistant to them (selection). In addition, for diseases that are endemic in those populations, such as measles for example, most of the adults have already had them and survived, it’s the children that get hit. This means that there is less disruption to society, because much of the die-off is of children rather than adults—plus, certain diseases are milder in children. The Native American population was hit at the adult and child level at the same time, since exposure happened all at once, and no one had acquired immunity (although probably some of the survivors had natural immunity).
It has little to do with any innate differences between racial/ethnic populations. It’s mostly about demographics and the way diseases work.
Syphilis may have been an exception to the direction of the diseases, since some think it came from New World to Old. However, that’s a highly complex and very controversial theory that many people think is incorrect.