This has been the most amazing series. It has completely re-fashioned my thinking about how things got to be the way they are and what we might do to correct them.
There was a 'law of earth and action' and a law of 'paper and abstraction'.
The positing of a conflict between 'anthropocentric' and 'reicentric' views makes me uncomfortable. It seems to me that an ecological perspective - such as that promoted by Aldo Leopold - provides a model for blending the two approaches. Too many 'environmentalists' are misanthropes and, as a consequence, much of the movement is now rejected by ordinary folks. But Leopold saw humanity as just one of the many life-forms in a given biome whose needs should be balanced with all other life-forms.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is a place for a balanced view.
> Amid this pincer movement of the emergent new mercantile economy and world, with the harsh life of deprivation and violence occasioned by the 14th century, Europeans were widely prepared for change
This is too vague. It does not address the possible link between the upheavals of the 14th century with the spatial shift.
It seems that the following is your attempt to answer that:
> Read through the model of the phenotype wars, as I’ve developed it, Grossi’s historical claims could be stated as the fact that the gradual growth of prosperity across the long expanse of the medieval period gave rise to relaxed Darwinian conditions and a growing social niche for spatial phenotypes, which had not been present under the far harsher Darwinian conditions prevalent during the earlier medieval period
But that's kind of vague and too general as well.
I find more intriguing J. Daniel Sawyer's idea (and it's probably not his proper, but rather taken from his readings) that the Black Death by decimating the population of Europe changed social relations and opened the opportunities previously not available. The change in "Darwinian conditions" was not gradual, but rather relatively sudden: from the Black Death and attending horrors to the situation where the field was wide open for those who could take advantage of it.
This has been the most amazing series. It has completely re-fashioned my thinking about how things got to be the way they are and what we might do to correct them.
There was a 'law of earth and action' and a law of 'paper and abstraction'.
The positing of a conflict between 'anthropocentric' and 'reicentric' views makes me uncomfortable. It seems to me that an ecological perspective - such as that promoted by Aldo Leopold - provides a model for blending the two approaches. Too many 'environmentalists' are misanthropes and, as a consequence, much of the movement is now rejected by ordinary folks. But Leopold saw humanity as just one of the many life-forms in a given biome whose needs should be balanced with all other life-forms.
I guess what I'm saying is that there is a place for a balanced view.
> Amid this pincer movement of the emergent new mercantile economy and world, with the harsh life of deprivation and violence occasioned by the 14th century, Europeans were widely prepared for change
This is too vague. It does not address the possible link between the upheavals of the 14th century with the spatial shift.
It seems that the following is your attempt to answer that:
> Read through the model of the phenotype wars, as I’ve developed it, Grossi’s historical claims could be stated as the fact that the gradual growth of prosperity across the long expanse of the medieval period gave rise to relaxed Darwinian conditions and a growing social niche for spatial phenotypes, which had not been present under the far harsher Darwinian conditions prevalent during the earlier medieval period
But that's kind of vague and too general as well.
I find more intriguing J. Daniel Sawyer's idea (and it's probably not his proper, but rather taken from his readings) that the Black Death by decimating the population of Europe changed social relations and opened the opportunities previously not available. The change in "Darwinian conditions" was not gradual, but rather relatively sudden: from the Black Death and attending horrors to the situation where the field was wide open for those who could take advantage of it.