How did Salgado cope with the climate? “The cold was a problem,” he admits. “The clothes I brought with me did not work. They were guaranteed for -50C, but when I got there it was -35C, and after two or three hours you start to feel cold.” The Nenets made him a coat and from then on he was comfortable outside for 10- to 12-hour periods.

In Salgado’s 40 days in Siberia, he did not wash. “The Nenets wash themselves once a year, in August. After that, they are good for another year.” Do they smell? “No! If everybody smells like this, there is no smell.”

It sounds as if their entire life is predicated on survival and little more, I say. Oh no, Salgado says, that’s not true. After a day’s travelling, they would build temporary wooden homes, or tchoums, cook their only hot meal of the day on a wood-fired stove, drink vodka and have long conversations. “There is so much love in their lives: wife to husband, husband to wife, for their children. Everything around them makes their life very rich, and they tell each other such nice stories.”

Salgado has come away from Genesis more convinced than ever of our need to re-establish our relationship with the natural world. “The big problem today is cities. We are animals, born from the land with the other species. Since we’ve been living in cities, we’ve become more and more stupid, not smarter. What made us survive all these hundreds of thousands of years is our spirituality; the link to our land. Today, we are isolated, and we must do something about this.”

What limits fetal growth during pregnancy? The OD says it’s the pelvis—implying it’s a unique constraint due to bipedalism. But the EGG hypothesis suggests that the primary constraint on fetal growth and gestation length is maternal metabolism (energetics, growth,gestation). Mothers give birth when they do because they cannot possibly give anymore energy into gestation and fetal growth. And when you look at the data available on pregnancy and lactation metabolism in humans… it shows that right around 9 months of gestation, mothers reach the energetic throughput ceiling for most humans.

Here’s Herman’s Figure 3 showing the EGG for humans, plotted with real metabolic data. Circles are the offspring, squares are the mother. Notice how fetal energy demands increase exponentially as the end of a normal human gestation period approaches. To keep it in any longer, mother would have to burst through her normal metabolic ceiling. Instead, she gives birth and remains in a safe and possible (!) metabolic zone.

The starred dot is a human infant at the developmental equivalency of a newborn chimpanzee. This is the thought experiment that Stephen Jay Gould famously wrote about. That’s the age you’d have to birth a human baby to be like a newborn chimp, since we’re born born more helpless than chimps. Keeping a fetus in this long—that is, adding 7 or more months to our gestation—would be physiologically impossible because it would require a mother to exceed 2.1x the basal metabolic rate, bursting through the ceiling for most humans.

This reflection on the relationship between economic development and happiness in Jamaica since independence fifty years ago relies to a good extent on  currently available data on life satisfaction (happiness),  and on income and other  socio-economic  variables.  After briefly surveying measures of happiness, and international evidence on happiness and income, the Jamaican situation is considered and compared with that of a sample of developing countries with similar life satisfaction scores, and with other Caribbean countries…Results of the pilot tests are presented, and questions are raised for future Jamaican development policy.  Since Northern countries are often used as comparators in studies of this kind, new and emerging sources of unhappiness in those countries are discussed, resulting in doubt being cast on their high life satisfaction scores. A paradox in the income-happiness relationship  among Caribbean countries prompted reflection on whether there might be a missing link - connecting happiness, social capital and creativity. Finally, the salience of  life’s goal of  happiness raised  the question as to whether happiness should/could be treated as a  human right, and whether there might be ways of strengthening parliamentarians’ responsibility for ensuring that economic development improves the well-being of the Jamaican people as a whole.