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A Tool with No Blood on It

2021-10-22 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:55 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Science & nature · mode: Personal essay

Using Vavilovian mimics such as false flax, weeds that evolved to resemble crops, Hank argues that solutions create new problems, as agriculture, fossil fuels and the internet did; borrowing Maggie Nelson's 'tool with no blood on it', he says no such tool exists and the human experiment aims only at a slightly better world.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Early agriculture and selection; why 'artificial selection' is a misleading term

  • ★★ Hank says about 12,000 years ago people began controlling the plants that made their food, planting seeds from slightly better plants, which made things much better over time. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank thinks the term 'artificial selection' may eventually be moved past: humans aren't fake, and some evolution through human selection is unintentional. (hedged) — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Hank explains that weeds most resembling a crop are least likely to be pulled, so over generations weeds come to look almost entirely like the crop: Vavilovian mimics, still a problem today. — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — Vavilovian mimics: weeds that look like crops, false flax and the seed-sorting machines

  • ★★ Hank says Camelina sativa, sometimes called false flax, is impractical to separate from flax in the field, so the seeds were separated by big machines. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Hank says the sorting machines created a new evolutionary pressure for false flax seeds to look and act like flax seeds, so now the machines can't tell them apart. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Hank sometimes worries that we look at our world and see only the problems; false flax is a problem created by a solution, agriculture. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Solutions create problems: agriculture, fossil fuels, global warming, a tool with no blood on it, the internet; P.S. the cat is named Gummy Bear

  • ★★★ Hank says agriculture has created many problems but also solved many, probably including the biggest an individual can have: not wanting to watch your child starve. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Hank's thesis: solving problems creates new problems. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Hank says the last hundred years' gains in quality of life and in the value placed on human lives needed coal, oil and gas, fuels that created many problems. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Hank says global warming was not created by evil but by people solving problems; some fossil-fuel problems will require stopping their use. — 00:02:26 · climate change

  • ★★ Hank says Maggie Nelson, on The Ezra Klein Show a couple of weeks ago, said people now have a deep hunger for a tool with no blood on it: the truest thing he has heard said so beautifully. — 00:02:26

    “a tool with no blood on it”

  • ★★ Hank shares that hunger but doesn't know that such a tool exists or can exist. (unsure) — 00:02:26

  • ★★★ Hank says the world is messy and we must stop thinking we can survive in it without harm: mitigate harm, solve problems, and accept the solutions will create more problems. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Hank says the internet is an amazing solution that has created many problems; he wanted it to be a tool with no blood on it, and it is not. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Hank says the human experiment is not an attempt to arrive at perfect, but always an attempt to select for a world a little better than before. — 00:03:18
  • ★★ In a P.S., Hank says his cat is named Gummy Bear, Orin's decision, cute for a cute bouncy cat; secretly he likes it because Geberker remains a good nickname he still uses. (playful) — 00:03:18 · Orin Green

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says rye and oats were once weeds in wheat fields that mimicked wheat so well they became staple crops. — video description
  • ★★ The description says the bigger the solution, the more problems it causes, but that doesn't mean life was better before it. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: agriculture · Vavilovian mimicry

Also: People: Maggie Nelson · Orin Green

Works: The Ezra Klein Show

Concepts: Camelina sativa · climate change · fossil fuel · Internet · selective breeding

animal: Hank's kitten

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