Torgeir,
The Social Epidemiologist, Massao is now on this list if he doesn’t have to go
through an approval cycle. Do you know if he has to do that? In the old old
days Andreas Ramos used to rubber stamp anyone that wanted to join. In the
even older days on Phil Lit I think prospective members were examined in some
way before they were allowed to post. But I don’t know why that would be the
case now,
And so,
I’ll assume that Massao is receiving Lit-Ideas posts and that everyone else
here is befuddled as I was by the nature of Social Epidemiology and that is why
no one else has voiced any opinions about it. :)
Welcome aboard, Massao.
What occurred to me while reading the Wikipedia article on psychological
epidemiology is an article I read years ago about an experiment with rats. A
group of rats were placed in an enclosed environment and then observed through
several generations. At first the rats behaved normally, but as they became
more and more crowded, abnormalities occurred. Rat homosexuality was observed.
Rat gangs that ganged up and preyed on the aged and weak were observed. Rat
murders occurred. The conclusion at the time was that when rat-population
increases beyond a rat-tipping point, then some rats will develop deviant
traits.
I suppose it is common to think that we humans don’t need to crowd ourselves
into overpopulated regions like congested cities in order to behave abnormally.
We can do it quite well in rural areas and out in underpopulated areas like
North Dakota. Think of the movie Fargo, fiction of course, but we expect
deviant behavior/mental illness to occur wherever humans occur. Maybe
individual rather than communal stressors are involved.
And yet, and yet . . . I am prepared to assume that rat-like congestion in
cities where the population is extremely dense will be the stressor for some
examples of epidemiology. That would be hard to prove, I suppose, because we
don’t have useful data from earlier towns and societies when we did not live in
highly congested communities.
On the other hand, since so much is being done with genetics, perhaps Social
epidemiologists are looking seeking answers to the sorts of questions I am
interested in getting answers for. Perhaps they are looking for dna that
inclines one toward aberrant behavior. Perhaps abnormal genetics doomed Anders
Breivic to sociopathic behavior.
Lawrence
