Ask A Genius 370 – In the Long Run…
July 15, 2018
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What about long-term solutions going into the future compared to the past?
Rick Rosner: John Maynard Keynes said that during the Great Depression, when somebody must’ve asked him what’s the best long-term solution. And he was saying, f- long-term solutions. We need to do something about now.
And the deal is, we’re perishable. We are flowers that bloom for a day and then die. We’re done in, even though our lifespans are longer, now by,20 years or so than they were when Maynard Keynes said in the long term we’re all dead—in the long run we’re all dead.
We’re still all dead eventually and pretty quickly. I have been helping my mother in law move into her senior living community, where the average age is, the mid 80s. And I’m the mid to late 50s now, but we do not have much time.
Unless there are great strides made in medicine, I have got, another 20, if I’m lucky, 25 years of competent life left. That’s just nothing. But anyway, we are, we are born and live and pass away fast. It’s understandable that our framework is short term.
We have evolved creatures and we’ve been evolved to create the next—to have sex, have babies, and send the next generation off to do the same thing.
Evolutionary forces tend not to work more than—I mean, an evolutionary victory is spitting out the next generation. Now, we’re—humans are in a slightly different position than a lot of animals in that human babies are born incomplete.
Because our evolutionary tactic, the thing that helps us occupy our niche in the world is having a big brain. But brains can only be so big before they kill the mother during childbirth by getting caught in the birth canal.
So, women, when they give birth, their pelvises split apart, the baby’s head gets forced out. The baby’s head at the point of birth has overlapping plates that can get compacted as the baby passes through the birth canal to make the skull just a little bit smaller. But anyway, human brains are as big as they can possibly be and not kill moms.
But that’s not big enough. So there’s still a lot of growth and wiring that needs to go on after birth. Which means that human babies take, at least ten years to raise. Nobody now would let 10 year olds out into the world on their own.
You can argue that human babies now take 18 to 20—well Donald Trump was just talking about how Don Jr. really can’t be held that much responsible for meeting with Russian.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Editor-in-Chief, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
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Rick Rosner 