For my first post I wanted to write something witty. Something very clever and thought provoking but then someone posted a link to an article on my Facebook feed (and we’ll have a lot to say about the concept of surveillance capitalism in the near future) an email/article posted on the Dr. McDougall website discussing how coconut oil of all things became elevated to super food status. I am not going to rehash the article. It is more than 10 years old and quite interesting but the overriding topic at least for me is the idea of unintended consequences and that is what I want to discuss today.

            I could bemoan the lack of intellectual curiosity prevalent in today’s world. Certainly I could spend page after page after page critically analyzing how we’ve went awry, where we’ve went awry, when we went awry, etc. but to what end? I don’t think there would be much accomplished by doing this or arguing with people who haven’t done any research and really don’t care about research in the first place unless it solidifies their position. I guess this may qualify as an unintended consequence of having a 2 party political system and a media obsessed by reporting 2 antagonistic sides to every story even when reality is much different.

            As humans we’ve been a fairly clever lot since the inception of our species some 200,000 years ago. Before that our ancestors apparently were just club wielding super predator dolts who went around bashing everything on the head and eating everything that moved and the ability to acquire easy calories in the form of meat allowed us to grow these enormous brains where we have the ability to reason, communicate, build magical things and well do whatever we want. At least that is the story that keeps getting put on TV in pretty much every documentary about human evolution. I wonder why they do that? Promote something that couldn’t possibly be true. Something more akin to Lamark’s hypothesis of acquired characteristics instead of how evolution by natural selection actually works. Honestly, knowing the fundamental concepts of evolution as we have done since the time of Wallace and Darwin. Darwin published his treatise back in 1858. Wallace was ready to publish first but was persuaded to wait for Darwin by the Royal Academy of Sciences. As probably another unintended consequence Wallace is largely forgotten while Darwin is celebrated. They both discovered the same thing. They both had overwhelming amounts of evidence to support their ideas but we only teach about Darwin. We have known ever since that there are a number of mechanisms that can drive evolution but one of the primary drivers is that only the most fit are able to survive and pass along their genes. At some point in our evolution being very clever was an adaptive response to external stimuli and only the most clever were selected while the less clever members of our species died off without successfully passing along their genes.

            But being clever isn’t the same thing as being smart or intelligent but especially having wisdom. A species that kills its own by the millions by waging war, withholding or hoarding resources, making all kinds of useless plastic junk that just piles up in the ocean or in landfills, continuing behaviors that cause disease while simultaneously endeavoring to prevent disease all over the world through aggressive clean water and vaccination programs. We are a species that allows other members of our own species to die of starvation when we over produce food and recklessly misallocate those resources. So we are certainly clever, yes. Intelligent and wise, not a chance.

            Anyway, back to the topic. Unintended consequences are things that seem to plague our species. Probably one of the most famous examples of unintended consequences is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The people who set this in motion undoubtedly didn’t think they would set off World War I but they did. Another example would be the Haber-Bosch process which was a cheap, easy way to mass produce ammonia therefore allowing our species the ability to make a lot of things from cleaners to fertilizers. A boon to our species but one with an unfortunate dark side. It made the making of bombs really easy and led to the wholesale destruction found in World War II.

            In its most simple terms unintended consequences are results that vary from the original intention of the idea or purpose. In the original article about coconut oil discussed the explosion of modified vegetable oils as a direct result of findings in 1960 and a statement from the American Heart Association that cooking with lard and other rendered animal fats was unhealthy. What they didn’t realize was that with their one statement trying to convince people to eat healthier they’d set off a cascade of events that helped lead to an explosion of heart disease and other lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, etc. Of course, they’d have no way to predict that our lifestyles would dramatically change into one of consumption and quick, easy high fat fried meals which are nutritionally poor and calorically dense. The fast food lifestyle is the real culprit but those pesky unintended consequences always pop up when you least expect them. So anyway, the next time you plan your next project or lifestyle alteration remember that unintended consequences are always present and try to account for them.