Plagues Upon The Earth: Disease And The Course Of Human History By Kyle Harper — Review

Science Plagues Upon The Earth: Disease And The Course Of Human History By Kyle Harper — Review GrrlScientist Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Evolutionary & behavioural ecologist, ornithologist & science writer New! Follow this author to improve your content experience. Got it! Jul 31, 2022, 04:49pm EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Plagues upon the Earth is a comprehensive environmental, ecological, economic, demographic and political history of humans and their infectious diseases, and it is distinguished by its nuance and readability © Copyright by GrrlScientist | @GrrlScientist | hosted by Forbes Humans are creating a perfect storm of infectious diseases.

getty Contrary to what most people think, nearly all infectious human diseases appeared quite recently — some as recently as just a few hundred years ago. In his sweeping masterpiece, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History: 106 (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) ( Princeton University Press , 2021: Amazon US / Amazon UK ) , author Kyle Harper, a Professor of Classics and Letters and Provost Emeritus of the University of Oklahoma , expertly interweaves economic and demographic history with data gathered by the newest cutting-edge genetic advances (phylogenetics — genetic “tree thinking” — and paleogenomics — genetic “time travel”) to throw a light upon the hidden evolutionary histories and trajectories of human viruses, bacteria and parasites, and shows how infectious diseases are a major reason for the ebb and flow of human societies. It’s really an impressive feat.

Professor Harper is a historian of the ancient world whose work has connected economic, environmental, and social history. He was inspired to write this book after he published The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (The Princeton History of the Ancient World, 2) ( Princeton University Press , 2017). In his newest book, Professor Harper uses his vast expertise to tell the compelling story of how pandemic disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and how the enduring effects of historical plagues are still visible today in modern patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality.

Professor Harper also tells the story of humanity’s progress in medical science and public health, thereby facilitating our escape from the tyranny of infectious disease. This escape makes modern life possible, even as it damages and destroys the natural environment, thus accelerating the evolution of even more deadly diseases. Book jacket: Plagues Upon the Earth by Kyle Harper (Princeton University Press 2021.

) Princeton University Press 2021 MORE FOR YOU New Research Finds A Connection Between Domestic Violence And These Two Personality Disorders This Scientist Helps Andean Forests And Ecuador’s Women In STEM Exceptional Fossil Preservation Suggests That Discovering Dinosaur DNA May Not Be Impossible This book is divided into four parts and twelve lengthy chapters. It progresses in chronological order, starting with the evolutionary beginnings of Homo sapiens and our dynamic and growing crowd of infectious diseases, and continues up to the current COVID-19 pandemic. In chapters 1 and 2, the reader is introduced to the basics of infectious diseases, particularly the ‘goals’ that predicate disease evolution.

“Parasites depend on their hosts and, for purely selfish reasons, they may benefit by limiting the damage they do to their victims”, Professor Harper explains (p. 41). “Imagine the parasitic lifestyle as an ongoing embezzlement scheme (where bilking money translates into genetic success).

The best strategy might be one that is restrained enough to avoid detection by not bankrupting the victim. From a selfish perspective, the best strategy is not always the most harmful in the short run. This is the pathogen’s dilemma, and it is fundamental to the evolutionary history of infectious disease.

” This, then, sets the stage for the remainder of the book. In chapters 3 to 5, we follow human progress from our hunter-gatherer origins to farming, keeping livestock, urban (colony) living, long-distance travel and trade up through the collapse of the Roman Empire. Along the way, we meet a variety of infectious human diseases — vector-borne parasites (chiefly protozoa and helminths), fecal-oral diseases (primarily bacteria) that are often the agents of intestinal turmoil, and respiratory diseases (mostly viruses) — and learn a little about their specific evolutionary strategies and disease ecologies.

Significantly, we also are greeted by an extensive discussion of vivax and falciparum malarias, the latter of which, like an unwelcome and especially violent neighbor, turns up again and again throughout the book (and human history). Chapter 6 goes on to detail how human society was inadvertently engulfed in an outbreak of a rodent pandemic: plague. In this chapter, the reader learns what we currently know about the evolutionary origins, life cycle and impacts of plague on human civilizations that resulted from construction of a system that supports the rapid intercontinental transmission of animal germs.

Chapters 7 and 8 follow infectious disease from the Old World across the Atlantic during the conquests of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and South America. This triggered the Columbian Exchange, which refers to the whole ensemble of transfers of animals, plants, insects and, of course, pathogens, that ensued when people began to cross the Atlantic regularly to the New World. The Colombian Exchange also redistributed human populations: the Indigenous Peoples of the New World were devastated by infectious diseases from the Old World, particularly respiratory pathogens, but also fecal-oral germs, providing opportunities for new societies to pop up in the desolation left behind.

Of course, focusing on infectious diseases makes it easy to view “the depopulation of the New World [as] a lamentable accident, minimizing the role of violence and deliberate exploitation”, Professor Harper writes (p. 243). At the same time that the Indigenous Peoples of the New World were being depopulated, Africans were involuntarily shipped across the Atlantic as slaves in the biggest forced migration in human history; and Europeans started a process of colonization and settlement of the New World that would last several hundred years, reaching its peak in the nineteenth century.

“Over the course of the sixteenth century, the result was one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in the history of our species”, Professor Harper writes (p. 247). Chapter 9 explores the broader pattern of the ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’, where war, famine and plague were seemingly everywhere in the Middle Ages.

This synchronicity of crises is thought to be due to three events: climate change and climate instability caused by the Little Ice Age, human overpopulation, and outbreaks of infectious diseases, especially plague, which was accompanied by typhus and by a more virulent strain of smallpox. Finally, chapters 10 to 12 discuss the relationship between wealth and health in modern history, arguing that both were influenced simultaneously by the growth of scientific knowledge and the emergence of centralized states with the power to enact and enforce public health campaigns. These last three chapters also detail the convoluted intellectual road we followed in our quest to ultimately understand and then overcome many infectious diseases.

The book also discusses the current COVID-19 pandemic in the light of what we have learned from other, historic pandemics. Professor Harper’s view of how to control infectious disease is one where evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence of overall health between societies. As Professor Harper warns us at the beginning of his book: “We do not, and cannot, live in a state of permanent victory over our germs.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberation from infectious disease, but interruptions are inevitable, not anomalous” (p. 3). At the end of his book, he once again explains that we have been warned again and again that another pandemic is inevitable.

The evolution of pathogens is the basic reason we can never entirely escape the risk of global pandemics. Evolution is the source of new diseases and new strains of old diseases. New diseases emerge when microorganisms that infect animals cross the species barrier and adapt the ability to transmit between humans.

New strains of old diseases evolve in response to selective pressures we place upon them. Antibiotic resistance, for example, is a form of evolutionary response to our ample use of a select number of chemical weapons against bacteria. Similarly, microbes have strong incentive to change their outward appearance in order to escape from our vaccines.

On basic Darwinian principles, those strains that adapt the ability to survive and reproduce in such an environment will pass their genes on to future generations — to our peril. (p. 505) With more than eight million of us alive on the planet today, any infectious disease that can sneak past the human immune system will have an enormous field to exploit.

This book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent — and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself. This powerful, meticulously-researched and timely analysis is a brilliant crowning achievement. It is, quite simply, the best book I’ve read in many years.

It will appeal to microbiologists, epidemiologists, medical professionals, economists and political historians — actually, it’s difficult for me to think of anyone who will not find something eye-opening and enlightening in the pages of this comprehensive, beautifully written and eloquent book. 26a8b4067816acd2da72f558fddc8dcfd5bed0cef52b4ee7357f679776e6c25d NOTE TO “CONTENT” THIEVES: This piece is © Copyright by GrrlScientist . Unless otherwise stated, all material hosted by Forbes on this Forbes website is copyright © GrrlScientist.

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