http://www.familycare.org/news/if_the_world.htm

Kind of humbling....


Wealthy Chrisisall

(IMG:http://blogs.chron.com/whitehouse/archives/peeps.jpg)

The figures are humbling - there is great inequity in the world.

When reducing the population of the world to 100, the choice of categories greatly impacts the outcome. To some extent, the categories chosen are a function of the writer's political agenda.

For example, 33 Christian, 67 non-Christian. Why is this interesting? Why is it more interesting than for example, that 55 in the village believe the same God (Jews, Muslims, Christians) while 45 believe in a variety of other Gods or no God at all?

Or that nobody in the village is Jewish, and yet, these zero Jews own about 13% of the wealth of the village?

Why is it more interesting that 1 has HIV, than that 15 are gay, and 25 are varying degrees of bisexual?

The village analogy brings home inequity, but it also ignores the fundamental reality of what happens in a village, versus what happens on a global scale. In a real village of 100 people, none of those statistics would hold: assets would be shared very efficiently, the gene pool would blend; disease would spread; those who endangered the village with risky behavior would be banished. On a global scale, there are borders and boundaries and great distances. On a global scale, inequity is much more practical.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
(IMG:http://blogs.chron.com/whitehouse/archives/peeps.jpg)

That's only 17 peeps, and peeps of color - for example, pink peeps - are under-represented. Peepist!

Not another peep out of you!

The only good peep, is a tasty peep.

Peeping Chrisisall

(IMG:http://wwff.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/peeps.jpg)

(IMG:http://galorebot.com/blog/media/1/20070407-jesusofpeeps.jpg)

(IMG:http://boingboing.net/images/wecomeinpeeps.jpg)

(IMG:http://santiagodreaming.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/peeps2-753381.jpg)

War Of The Peeps

I see Tom Cruise in that group to the leftisall

It's actually called "We Come in Peeps."

That'll work tooisall

"They've found your peepin' alien." - X-Files

(IMG:http://i279.photobucket.com/albums/kk155/xinaamuchh/r1mm1i.jpg)


Actually, a very interesting article. I've forwarded it to a social scientist friend of mine to see what he thinks.

All we are saying is give Peeps a chance.

Sorry, don't think this matters. My understanding that the minimum number of peeps required to maintain a functional genetic diversity falls somewhere between 150 - 200 peeps. Ergo, with only 100 peeps, after 2 or 3 generations, bye-bye homo sapiens. Might not have been so nice to have known us, eh?

It's why I'm importing an Asian bride, yeah.


(joke)

Sheesh, more outsourcing....

.
. . .Hmmm. I too have read that it takes at least 200 individuals to start a healthy race.
Yet, I think lately, the anthropologists have told us that, according to gene code, all the people on this planet are descended from the same Eve ... just like in the Bible.

Confused by Science Again (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_confused.gif)

(But then, wasn't there is bit in Genesis 6:1-4 "the sons of God are captivated by the beauty of the daughters of men. They subsequently marry them and produce an offspring of giants known as the Nephilim." Genesis goes on to say that these Nephilim were "mighty men" and "men of renown."
Prob'ly this belongs in the Human race nearly wiped out thread.)

something confuses me:

5 are from the US and Canada

5 control 32% of the world's wealth

all of those 5 are US citizens


that don't add up...

I noticed that too and was going to say something but I'm just glad we got included.

canadianisall

Charlie--it's the nature of statistics. Because not all variables apply to all possibilities, there are inconsistencies, especially with a very small sample. Or something like that.

The MVP (minimum viable population) for human beings seems to be around 150--providing, of course, that genders are balanced optimally and everybody's fertile. Places like New Zealand seem to have been populated from a group of at least fifty females and a comparable number of males, so "viable" would also depend on genetic makeup (fewer potential bad genetic permutations = higher potential viability). Basic physical anthropology classes usually cover this topic.

For good measure, as long as they're socially compatible (i.e. don't immediately start killing one another off or something), a couple of thousand is best.

Isn't the number of people the human brain can intimatly track something like 100-150?

I have trouble with, like, 20.


Does not play well with othersisall

I think you're right, Cit. I remember that coming up in courses on communities. Which is kind of why market economics on a large scale is problematic. Adam Smith theorized the idea of the "invisible hand" in the small, face-to-face environment of eighteenth-century Edinburgh (and, more specifically, his fellow publings who discussed all this stuff with him). Most communities work best when small precisely because we behave better without "supervision" when there aren't that many of us.

Democracy is also a fine idea, but it originated within the confines of small-scale, very specific kinds of communities (i.e. propertied men). No wonder we're having so much trouble with it.

And Chris, you're a better man than I am. I can handle about 5.

Who are all you people...

it depends what you mean by intimately (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_eek.gif)




I know that BO, especially when they can only use whole numbers (what if there's a really short peep?), I was just being pedantic (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_razz.gif)

Trust you to think like that (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_rolleyes.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_razz.gif)

How was that humbling?

I don't think I like what you're implying...

And I, of course, would know nothing about being pedantic (IMG:style_emoticons/default/icon_confused.gif)

It occurs to me that the low number for the MVP (no, we'er not talking baseball here, especially not in Rangers land) would require everybody to produce children, or arrange for someone else to, in order to sustain the minimum.

A much larger minimum (a thousand or so) would provide a whole lot more freedom gender-preference-wise. It would, of course, also require more effort at governance, which would in turn possibly lead to conflict, so maybe smaller is better. Or at least smaller segments of population spread out over a broad area.

I can't help but wonder how much better off this dear, sweet earth would be without the likes of us--or at least with many fewer of us. Who knows, though. If we keep screwin' with things, we may not have much choice in the matter.

James White wrote an excellent pb novel called All Judgment Fled on this issue carried to extremes and accelerated: A ship is sunk in WWII but because of how it was hit less than a dozen people survive in some interconnected waterproof chambers. The water is deep enough that the survivors can't swim up to the surface. Luckily there are bean seeds in one of the compartments and they juryrig a bike to provide power for lights to grow the beans. The population eventually explodes to nearly a hundred but there's not enough genetic diversity and they die back down to (I think) 3 or 4 by the time they are rescued.