My take on our JINS discussion

This post is more about England in the 1500s and less (not at all) about Panama. But there is some Biology stuff at the end...

Today we talked about an article by Jan Knippers Black entitled "Introduction: Understanding the Persistence of Inequality." Her main point was that there are three basic ideas about why Latin America is so poor. The first is the Corporatism theory which places blame on the Iberians who colonized Latin America. The argument which we discussed in class said that it was the Spanish and the Portuguese who were responsible for introducing the hierarchical social structure that resulted in the exploitation of the poor. We compared Spain and England's governing and religious policies. I have issue with the idea of calling England a protestant country. When Columbus got to the Americas, England was still very much a Catholic country. It did not split from Rome until 1534 for issues more complex than just Henry VIII wanting a new wife. First of all, he wanted a son for a legit reason. England had very recently come out of a civil war. Henry had no legitimate son, a problem because up until that time in history England had no example of a woman successfully inheriting the throne. The only time a woman had inherited, there was a huge civil war between Matilda and Stephen. Henry wanted to avoid that at all costs. Creating the chance for a son was not Henry's only motivation for cutting ties with Rome when the opportunity arose. Henry also wanted more control over his own country and its wealth. When Henry split from the Catholic Church, the hierarchical structure was still very much in place; the difference was that the king was now the head of the Church and not the pope. This is an important point because we discussed that it was the hierarchical structure in Spain that created the problems in Latin America and if England had colonized it, that wouldn't be a problem and they wouldn't be as poor. I disagree for a couple of reasons. One, for the reason explained above. England was very much hierarchical so the same thing may have happened. Two, for the most part we seemed to be using the United States as an example of what happens to a British colony. The U.S. was hardly the only British colony and if we look at the examples of Ghana (which was briefly mentioned in class) and India we see two places that were colonized by Britain but still remain poor. I didn't really have enough a problem with either of the other two to discuss them more in depth. Part of this was also to show off my knowledge of Henry's split with Rome. It's a topic I have studied a lot over the years so I like to talk about it when possible.

Bio Lecture today was a little depressing. We talked about the carrying capacity for humans on the earth and discussed all of the horrible things we are doing to the earth. What stuck out to me most was that male sperm count is down in the U.S. because women taking birth control pills urinate out some of the extra hormones/chemicals from those pills which doesn't get filtered out in the water purification process. So men end up drinking it and have fewer sperm because they have extra feminine hormones. We also talked about how the Aral Sea has pretty much disappeared and how the Sea of Galilee is going to become a salt water lake if they don't start working to conserve water.