The Greatest Human Who Ever Lived

IronDuke

Ancient Mariner
Who’s the greatest person who ever lived? Alexander? Jesus? Mohammad? Churchill? Napoleon?

We can disagree on the answer, I suppose, but I think it is “none of the above.” The greatest human being who ever lived was born in Iowa in 1914, five months before the First World War began. His name is Dr. Norman Borlaug.

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and his adherents argue that human population grows exponentially, but the potential yield from the arable land on earth only grows linearly, or is even finite. When the population line crosses the food line, Malthus argued, a society will collapse in on itself and die. Real wrath of God type deaths – riots, panics, wars, rape, murders, the stuff from the scary parts of the Bible.

It had happened quite a few times in human history, actually. The central Asian steppes encountered this problem on a bi-century basis, almost. This caused the waves great migrations into China, Russia, the Middle East, etc. which have played so important roles in world history (the Scythians, Huns, Tartars, Turks, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, etc were all products of this.)

In the mid-20th Century, most of the best demographers, social scientists, statisticians, and biologists were in panic mode. The food production threshold of China, India, most of Africa, and the Soviet Union was about to peak or had already done so, and the population levels were breaking through. Mass starvations on national scales were already happening. More than half of the world’s population was thought to be S.O.L. and J.W.F. – S**t Outta Luck and Jolly Well F**ked. This was a crisis which makes the Global Warming scares of today look insignificant. The world as we knew it was headed for certain doom as mass migrations of refugees would come careening into the Western World, and those “left behind” would sink into an abyss of protracted anarchy.

When you’re hungry, after all, nothing else matters. A starving man is a dangerous person to everyone around him.

Until the Green Revolution. WTF is the Green Revolution, you might ask? I’m glad you asked!

The Green Revolution was a series of breakthroughs beginning in the 1950’s in the area of food production. New strains of staple crops – rice, wheat, corn, etc. were developed, which yielded harvests often double what they once were. Combined with new techniques of planting, harvesting, etc., outputs of food often quadrupled within a few years! It’s really quite remarkable. Never before in human history has so much food become so readily available. (I suggest Clive Ponting’s Green History of the World for more info).

The instigator of the Green Revolution was none other than Dr. Norman Borlaug, a biologist who actually got down to work instead of wringing his hands and panicking. In the 1960’s, Dr. Borlaug moved to Mexico and worked with the people there to develop new strains of corn and wheat which more than tripled the output of farmers there. In Mexico alone, he was credited with saving a pesky million lives.

Then he moved to India, and while the constant wars with Pakistan were raging, he developed and introduced heavier strains of wheat which doubled production. The main problem with wheat before this innovation was that the high-yield wheat plants necessary to feed a country with a population as large as India were too big for their own good. The seeds of the wheat (the part that gets turned into flour) were being bread larger and larger, which caused the plants to be top-heavy, and the stems would break under their own weight, ruining the crop.

Borlaug tinkered with the genes of the wheat, and found a way to dwarf the size of the stem, lowering the centre of gravity of the plant and making the plants shorter but with the same high yields as before. India’s food production (in gross calories) quadruples. Another million lives saved in just that one year.

He then travelled with his family to China and did basically the same thing – invented new varieties of rice plants which had a high output, were not susceptible to breakage, and whatnot (rice plants are neat looking, by the way). Millions more lives saved.

Dr Borlaug wasn’t one to rest on his laurels. He went to as many African countries as he could manage, and introduced new varieties of local crops there which more than doubled food output in some of the world’s most deprived countries. After the successful results achieved in Mexico, India, and Pakistan, the new varieties of wheat were introduced into certain parts of Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, and Lebanon. Even the Soviet Union (and the successor states today) adopted Borlaug’s research.

Borlaug did all this work for next to nothing. He didn’t care about the religion, language, or skin colour of the people whose lives he was trying to save from starvation. In 1970 Dr Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The citation credited him with being the architect of the “Green Revolution,” and saving a BILLION (with a goddamn B ) lives. Not one, not a thousand, not even a million. One billion people by 1970 had not died of starvation because of Dr Borlaug’s work. Think about that for a moment. One Billion.

So who’s the greatest person ever?
 
Rather than basing all your knowledge about this remarkable man on Duke's laudatio, here is a magazine article that goes more in-depth and features a long interview with him in which he explains his basic principles and answers to some of the more prominent criticisms against his work:

http://www.reason.com/news/show/27665.html

On the premise that he is doing the right thing and he has indeed saved more lives than anybody ever did before, there are a couple of points I'd discuss with him if I had the chance.

By the way, Duke, uncritical use of superlatives is not always the way to go for historians.
 
It should be noted that this is one of the Duke's blog entries, not an attempt at serious, critical writing.
 
So mankind still has a chance.  This makes me think that if one man could save so many people, I could try and add my two cents. 

I'm studying economy and finances right now, and I'm really hoping to earn a lot of money, but not in the way that I want just to be rich and famous, no, that's far from what I want to do.  What I want is to invest my own money in poor people, I want to build, for example, a "whatever" factory, so that they can work there, and earn money and produce something useful for society, just as a plus.

Having said that, it's important to me, not because I want to be regarded as a great man, it's important to me because of what I believe, the way my parents raised me.  So if any of you feels like giving me any suggestion, please don't hesitate, and help me develop a strategy or a plan in order to accomplish this dream of helping lots and lots of people.
 
Indeed this was a post I wrote for my blog. And yes, Perun, I do often write a bit more formally when I submit papers to my academic colleagues. This isn't supposed to be for publication, dude; it's a short little quip I wrote at 2:00am about a man I found admirable. There's a big difference.

Why the hate, dude?
 
Iron Duke raising the banners for social awareness!?

If producing food is important for being the greatest person who ever lived, I can't think of a better one, at the moment!

Seems no one else dares to post his/her own "greatest person who ever lived".
 
Forostar said:
Seems no one else dares to post his/her own "greatest person who ever lived".

For the simple reason that I don't have any.
 
I don't really like the idea of "greatest human" very much.  A person shouldn't be judged "better" than others simply because of their life achievements.  Saving a billion people is impressive, no doubt, but does that really make him a "better" person than others?  Humans aren't statistics that need to be ranked.  And I don't mean that in a negative way.  :)
 
It depends on your definition of "great".  I mean, nobody has intrinsic human worth greater than another.  However, certainly some people have had more effect on the course of human history than others.  Take that Jesus bloke.  He's a pretty powerful candidate for "great".  And Mohammed.  I mean, these aren't just minor religions they spawned, we're talking some super powerful shit.

Popular culture demands that when we declare a "greatest person", however, that they have positive effects on the globe and not negative.  Consider 2001, when Time Magazine considered very much naming Osama Bin Laden their Person of the Year.  It can certainly be argued that the man had more effect on the globe than any other, but there was a huge outcry against this possibility.  The honour went to Rudy Guiliani instead.

In that case, we all know who the greatest German *should* be (as in, which German had the greatest effect on the globe), but they may hesitate to choose that German because his impact was not entirely positive...

We are, of course, discussing Martin Luther.  Who did you think I was talking about, Hitler?  Christ.  Someone go make a Greatest Austrian thread and I'll back him over the Governator, at least.

But back to Greatest Person Who Ever Lived?  I don't care to choose.  The Duke is an environmentalist green commie pinko, so of course he chooses Dr Eatingstein here.  I don't think I could pick.
 
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I always believed that the greatest human was Mohamed,
considering from where he started, his means, and the result that he achieved
 
Forostar said:
Seems no one else dares to post his/her own "greatest person who ever lived".

Because there is more than one. This man is definately ONE of many "greats", but greatest... not a chance. Also, one man's hero is another man's villian so meh...
 
Duke obviously meant "greatest" in terms of greatest benefactor of humanity, or, irrationally speaking, "most wonderful person ever". Don't mix that up with "influental". Most influental people were not benefactors, but pretty much the opposite of that. So, if you're asking me for my opinion on the most influental people, you might even get an answer, even though that would be a list (not a ranking!) of at least ten or twenty people.
 
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