The Refrain is catchy, English subs are included too ,and Zeul with his obsession for "The Population contol "and desperate attemt to pressure the humans to stop multiply and adopt the orphans instead, is pleased with the song. READ THIS
Living Beyond the Limits. By Kirill Vladimirovich Pokrovsky, Travis Charbeneau, Helen Foull.
For UNESCO and Club of Rome
Is it THE SELFISH GENE?
PARENTAL INSTINCT? Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive?
"Selfish mothers" will make babies anyhow,- during the war, famine and against all adds,even without concern from the male partner,- when real instinct kicks around 20 or later.In undeveloped states
babies provide hope of the future support for the aging parents, although in many countries baby-girls will be put to death or aborted.
Grandparents play a big roll in encouraging the children to make a "living dolls" to brighten own existence in old age."
("Babies are just cute, aren't they?And cute things survive .It is almost as Dr.Kirill's article"Survival of the cutest",when "cute" victims of war conflict rather raped, them killed and
hunter spears the cubs, but killing mother-bear")
Why Do We Love Babies? Parental Instinct Region Found In The Brain
"Why do we almost instinctively treat babies as special, protecting them and enabling them to survive? Darwin originally pointed out that there is something about infants which prompts adults to respond to and care for them which allows our species to survive. Nobel-Prize-winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz proposed that it is the specific structure of the infant face, including a relatively large head and forehead, large and low lying eyes and bulging cheek region, that serves to elicit these parental responses. But the biological basis for this has remained elusive.
Now, a possible brain basis for this parental instinct has been reported. This research was led by Morten Kringelbach and Alan Stein from the University of Oxford and was funded by the Wellcome Trust and TrygFonden Charitable Foundation. The authors showed that a region of the human brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex is highly specifically active within a seventh of a second in response to (unfamiliar) infant faces but not to adult faces.
This finding has potentially important clinical application in relation to postnatal depression, which is common, occurring in approximately 13% of mothers after birth and often within six weeks. The present findings could eventually provide opportunities for early identification of families at risk.
The research team used a neuroimaging method called magnetoencephalography (MEG) at Aston University, UK. This is an advanced neuroscientific tool which offers both excellent temporal (in milliseconds) and spatial (in millimetres) resolution of whole brain activity. Because the researchers were primarily interested in the highly automatized processing of faces, they used an implicit task that required participants to monitor the colour of a small red cross and to press a button as soon as the colour changed. This was interspersed by adult and infant faces that were shown for 300 ms, but which were not important to solve the task.
The authors found a key difference in the early brain activity of normal adults when they viewed infant faces compared to adult faces. In addition to the well documented brain activity in the visual areas of the brain in response to faces, early activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex to infant faces but not adult faces. This wave of activity starts around a seventh of a second after presentation of an infant face. These responses are almost certainly too fast to be consciously controlled and are therefore perhaps instinctive.
The medial orbitofrontal cortex is located in the front of the brain, just over the eyeballs. It is a key region of the emotional brain and appears to be related to the ongoing monitoring of salient reward-related stimuli in the environment. In the context of the experiment, the medial orbitofrontal cortex may provide the necessary emotional tagging of infant faces that predisposes us to treat infant faces as special and plays a key role in establishing a parental bond.
Also, there is now evidence from deep brain stimulation linking depression to the nearby subgenual cingulate cortex which is strongly connected with the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This lends support to the possibility that changes to activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex secondary to depression may adversely affect parental responsivity."
So it is an instinct .Are we supposed, as Homo Sapiens to suppress our instincts in order to survive ?
World Population Growth
| Year | Population |
| 1 | 200 million |
| 1000 | 275 million |
| 1500 | 450 million |
| 1650 | 500 million |
| 1750 | 700 million |
| 1804 | 1 billion |
| 1850 | 1.2 billion |
| 1900 | 1.6 billion |
| 1927 | 2 billion |
| 1950 | 2.55 billion |
| 1955 | 2.8 billion |
| 1960 | 3 billion |
| 1965 | 3.3 billion |
| 1970 | 3.7 billion |
| 1975 | 4 billion |
| 1980 | 4.5 billion |
| 1985 | 4.85 billion |
| 1990 | 5.3 billion |
| 1995 | 5.7 billion |
| 1999 | 6 billion |
| 2006 | 6.5 billion |
| 2010 | 6.8 billion |
| 2012 | 7 billion |
| 2020 | 7.6 billion |
| 2030 | 8.2 billion |
| 2040 | 8.8 billion |
| 2050 | 9.2 billion |
Beyond the Limits is a sobering but inspiring sequel to The Limits to Growth, the much-discussed 1972 report commissioned by The Club of Rome. Like its predecessor, Beyond the Limits uses the World3 computer model to generate scenarios extending to the year 2100.
In the earlier volume, the authors concluded that, if trends in population growth and resource consumption continued, the limits to that growth would be reached within the next 100 years. Now, "in spite of the world's improved technologies, the greater awareness, the stronger environmental policies, many resource and pollution flows |have already~ grown beyond their sustainable limits," they write.
The authors marshal an impressive array of statistics to show that all of the major renewable resources--agricultural soils, groundwater, forests, marine fisheries--are being destroyed on a global basis by overuse. The rate of species extinction is rising exponentially, and fossil-fuel use has driven atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide far higher than they've been in the past 160,000 years.
"The human world is beyond its limits," the authors declare. "The present way of doing things is unsustainable. The future, to be viable at all, must be one of drawing back, easing down, healing."
But what do "drawing back" and "easing down" actually entail? One approach is to employ technologies that increase the efficiency of resource use, decrease pollution, control soil erosion, and increase land yields, say the authors. The tremendous amount of waste and inefficiency in today's global economy presents an equally large opportunity to conserve resources and cut down on pollution.
Yet, while "green" technologies will be necessary for the transition to a sustainable society, they will not by themselves bring sustainability, the authors assert. The World3 computer model suggests what would happen if these technologies were used to maintain growth in population and consumption: The accumulated costs of the technologies would eventually cut into the investment available for further growth. At this point, the material quality of life would begin to steadily erode.
Also necessary, therefore, are "deliberate social constraints on further population and industrial growth," say the authors. In one World3 scenario, all couples opt to have no more than two children beginning in 1995, and they have access to effective birth control. In addition, people set themselves a consumption limit equivalent to the standard of living in present-day Europe. Furthermore, beginning in 1995, the world begins to seriously implement "green" technologies.
By the mid-twenty-first century, the result is a stable world population of just under 8 billion, all of whom are living in material comfort. Pollution is declining, and natural resources are being depleted much less quickly than today.
Other scenarios indicated that the longer the delay toward sustainability, "the lower the population and material standard that will ultimately be supportable," the authors note. Thus, "there is no time to lose in easing down below the limits ... and there is also no reason to waste time."
The authors acknowledge that achieving sustainability will be psychologically and politically difficult. Today, growth is seen as an almost unqualified good. In the Third World, large families are often regarded as a source of economic security, and economic growth seems the only solution to poverty. But population growth is clearly unsustainable, and current patterns of economic growth aren't even benefiting the poor. During the 1980s, per capita income fell in 40 less-industrialized countries containing nearly one-sixth of the world's population.
Meanwhile, people in the industrialized world try to use material growth to satisfy needs that "are in fact nonmaterial--needs for acceptance, self-importance, community, identity," say the authors. Because material goods cannot fully satisfy these needs, the appetite for more and more goods can never be quenched, resulting in great harm to the planet.
The authors believe that the creation of a sustainable society will require a genuine commitment to the idea of sufficiency: Everyone should have enough, but not necessarily more. Where economic growth is necessary to raise living standards in the less-industrialized world, that growth should specifically serve the needs of the poor. In the developed world, people must try to fulfill their nonmaterial needs in nonmaterial (and therefore less wasteful) ways.
If the world could wean itself from its addiction to growth, if the limits to growth were fully recognized and accepted, the outcome could be a Sustainability Revolution "as profound as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions," say the authors.
Beyond the Limits not only serves as a powerful wake-up call regarding the earth's plight, but also offers the promise of a much better world. This clearly written, insightful volume is itself an important tool toward the sustainable future it champions.
At the close of the first millennium, hermits descended from the hills to warn, "The end is nigh!" As we near the conclusion of the second millennium, we may be forgiven for wondering if the medieval eccentrics were guilty only of hasty judgment. The entire twentieth century seems like a runaway ocomotive bearing down on the year 2000 and freighted with cataclysms--world war, technology run amok, omens of nuclear Armageddon, environmental collapse, economic decline, and global overpopulation. There is certainly something apocalyptic about starting a new thousand-year cycle.
At the same time, the phrase "ushering in the millennium" promises something distinctly utopian. Alternating with humanity's pessimism is the "hope that springs eternal," and we look with excitement and anticipation to life in the next century--just as our predecessors did during the fin de siecle of the 1890s. Back then, the promise that technology would create heaven on earth was still shiny and new. Over the past 100 years, despite having been badly "Frankensteined" several times, we remain enthralled by the promise of a twenty-first century we long ago populated with marvels: robots, helicars, and world peace.
Clearly, our two eternally opposed views of the future--apocalyptic and utopian--will go at one another as never before in the current fin de millenium decade, making for a uniquely paradoxical era that may be called "apocutopia."
Still, what's so magical about the mere turning of a calendar page? Do such anachronistic and superstitious attitudes about time really matter? All of us can remember being asked on various birthdays, "Well, how does it feel to be 14 (or 35 or 77)?" What a dumb question!
Or is it?
Still, what's so magical about the mere turning of a calendar page? Do such anachronistic and superstitious attitudes about time really matter? All of us can remember being asked on various birthdays, "Well, how does it feel to be 14 (or 35 or 77)?" What a dumb question!
Or is it?
How we feel about the twenty-first century matters a great deal. How we feel has mattered ever since the Industrial Revolution enabled us to begin shaping the planet to our own ends. Our power has grown so exponentially in recent years that how we feel about the twenty-first century could determine whether there will even be one.
The most recent change of any strong apocalyptic character is the still-volatile collapse of communism. A utopian idea from the Bible to the Bolsheviks, communism as we know it has been a flop. Yet even as so many gloat over the apocalyptic collapse of communism, the more honest may admit to sharing the same utopian goal as the Biblical and Bolshevik communists of yore: a better life--and better and better and better. If we are even more honest, we'll admit to having already adopted various forms of governmental social engineering that are socialism in all but name. And if we are more honest still, we'll admit that our real challenge has never come from some variation in economic theology. The real challenge of apocutopia consists of pausing long enough in our gloating to seriously redefine things like "better," "progress," and even "utopia," to get away from our hopelessly barbaric, truly anachronistic appetite for "More stuff!"
"More stuff!" failed the communists--and they didn't even produce much of it. "More stuff!" will similarly preclude any sort of sustainable future everywhere that "More stuff!" prevails as the definition of progress--especially in places that have too much stuff already.
The Club of Rome's 1972 Limits to Growth study was not an invitation to dis-invent the Industrial Era, but to join "in understanding and preparing for a period of great transition--the transition from growth to global equilibrium." In the cancer patient, this would be called the transition from metastasis to stasis.
And that might be as good a working definition of "utopia" as we may realistically expect to encounter right now. I personally find it rather appealing.
Whether we are frightened or hopeful, pessimistic or optimistic, conservative or liberal, the apocutopian nineties are a period of thoughtful ferment--a time for ideas that will help us make that "great transition" redefining progress from the brutish and untenable "more stuff" to the civilized and supportable "enough stuff." That would truly "usher in the millennium."
No comments:
Post a Comment