Must have been hell for glasses-needing people before the Italians invented them. And even then I bet they were too expensive for common folk for a 100 years.
I can't be entirely against war, but if half as much ingenuity was spent back then on civilian needs I guess the Romans could have had glasses 1.5 thousand years before.
Must have been hell for glasses-needing people before the Italians invented them. And even then I bet they were too expensive for common folk for a 100 years.
I can't be entirely against war, but if half as much ingenuity was spent back then on civilian needs I guess the Romans could have had glasses 1.5 thousand years before.
Thing is, people hardly have eye sight problem before that. They didn't do many things require focused eye sight continuously for that long to have problems. And there was natural selection in place back then too...
Thing is, people hardly have eye sight problem before that. They didn't do many things require focused eye sight continuously for that long to have problems. And there was natural selection in place back then too...
Natural selection wasn't in full force ever since the Agricultural Revolution 10k years ago, and besides that, "Natural Selection" kind of implies it WAS Hell for people who needed glasses (just a really short and brutal Hell). Regardless, lack of natural selection isn't nearly as powerful as active natural selection against something, so human evolution mostly stalled, and not all factors of vision loss are caused by self-inflicted behavior or are genetic. (And besides, it's not like scribes who had to literally burn midnight oil to write documents didn't exist for thousands of years...) Malnutrition was severely bad in ancient days, which likely led to poor eyesight, as well...
That said, it's not like most people were literate, so near or farsighted people didn't necessarily need focused vision in specific ranges, at least, provided they were farmers or the like.
Also, what do you mean "half as much ingenuity was spent on civilian needs" back then? Governments STILL spend far more money on military research to the point where practical civilian-use breakthroughs based upon government grants tends to be more accidental side benefit than direct funding.
Natural selection wasn't in full force ever since the Agricultural Revolution 10k years ago, and besides that, "Natural Selection" kind of implies it WAS Hell for people who needed glasses (just a really short and brutal Hell). Regardless, lack of natural selection isn't nearly as powerful as active natural selection against something, so human evolution mostly stalled, and not all factors of vision loss are caused by self-inflicted behavior or are genetic. (And besides, it's not like scribes who had to literally burn midnight oil to write documents didn't exist for thousands of years...) Malnutrition was severely bad in ancient days, which likely led to poor eyesight, as well...
That said, it's not like most people were literate, so near or farsighted people didn't necessarily need focused vision in specific ranges, at least, provided they were farmers or the like.
Also, what do you mean "half as much ingenuity was spent on civilian needs" back then? Governments STILL spend far more money on military research to the point where practical civilian-use breakthroughs based upon government grants tends to be more accidental side benefit than direct funding.
What you said.
But my sense of natural selection wasn't that side. I said it as in you have to adapt and improve to live. Agricultural revolution took place and made human's life easier, yes. But it was still hard. That's why they expanded skills greatly back then. And those who had to transcribe stuff takes good balance for their eyes to keep doing their job too. It's their mean of survival after all. One or two or a dozen have problems, they will start to take measures against it. So if they had problems, it would have had come really slowly. Enough to not realize it. And a human life was kind of shorter, much shorter too.
But I didn't say anything about ingenuity. Or did I? I don't recall.
Technically natural selection is always prevalent regardless if it is a civilization or the wilderness. Luckily, due to the safety of modern society, survival and ability to bear offspring are not tied together. Today, the fitness to reproduce successfully depends on economic prosperity (I mean, I guess you could shack up, but generally contraception or abortions makes the act not fit according to natural selection), so it does make sense that a person without proper vision in the past would have a very difficult time making their way through life without specializing in something.
NWSiaCB said:
Also, what do you mean "half as much ingenuity was spent on civilian needs" back then? Governments STILL spend far more money on military research to the point where practical civilian-use breakthroughs based upon government grants tends to be more accidental side benefit than direct funding.
Governments really shouldn't be spending money on citizen technology. That is up to the private markets. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the gaps in the market are seized by entrepreneurs who compete over each other to make a better and better product as dictated by the end users that vote with their dollars. When a government produces private sector tech, they take up economic opportunities that could be done by the private market with no strain on the federal/state budget as well as stimulating the economy. Plus a private business can never compete with a government who gets its essentially unlimited funding by taking from the people either by taxes or by printing money which increases inflation and devalues the dollars and consequentially the savings of the people.
