Evolution

[davywavy]

There's a theory which suggests that humanity spent a period of it's evolution in an isolated community on an island off the coast of what is now Ethiopia. This band of early hominids, cut off from the mainland, turned to beachcombing at low tide for food.
As a theory, it explains a lot. Humans are the only great ape which can swim, we've got far less body hair (which would become waterlogged) and the body hair patterns we do have appear designed to channel water off the body. Moreover experimentation shows that given the chance people revert to a 25-hour sleep cycle, which would match the tides.
What's interesting is that this partial adaption to a semi-aquatic nature suggests that had the isolated group stayed there then humanity might have gone in a different direction and returned to the sea full time like whales and dolphins.

There are evolutionary advantages to an aquatic existence, especially for a large and otherwise fairly crap mammal. In the sea you tend to be bigger than most predators, and the speed advantage of, say, the tiger over a person is lost between a shark and a dolphin. From being a bit of a blundering loser and generally easy target for a hungry predator on land you can, like a whale or a dolphin, move sharply up the food chain in water.

Anyway, I got to thinking about this when I started hearing about Oil and Gas companies shifting to offshore refining. By offshore here I don't mean shipping refining to different countries, but instead building floating refineries. On the one hand, these behemoths can be easily shipped to the crude resource. On the other hand, unlike an onshore refinery, they can also easily be relocated should the taxation or regulatory regime in any given country become unwelcoming or even antagonistic (should the country start nationalising assets). The oil industry, like whales, is returning to the sea. Vast, slow moving, but ultimately mobile. If you look at countries - and their tax regimes - as predators and asset and cash-rich companies as their prey, then in evolutionary terms it makes complete sense for them to become more mobile.

It struck me again when I saw this article the other day about how national jurisdictions were powerless to require companies to cough up. The problem that nations have, as predators, is that they are not only immobile but actively inimical to any attempt to pursue interests onto each other's territory. However, and this is the important point, evolution is not a fixed process which leads to a defined end point and stops. The fact that the predators have actually noticed their prey are increasingly mobile means they're acting upon it in experimental ways.
We've seen nationalisation of strategic assets (Argentina seizing Spanish company Repsol's assets), which might be seen as an attempt to corral up animals and domesticate them. We're seeing the rise of supranational organisations and attempts to tax by them (The EU proposing their financial transaction tax - a badly designed blunt instrument, and doomed thereby, but it's a development) and we're also seeing countries trying to make themselves into places which attract business, reasoning that siphoning off a smaller share is better than none at all. A little like flowers giving honey to bees in return for a bit of pollen here and there.

What's certain is that as governments grow ever more desperate over their inability to pay for social entitlements they will become more aggressive in chasing tax revenues, and the mechanisms for doing so will be varied. Some will fail, others will succeed. When people decided they wanted whale oil in large quantities, they invented the harpoon gun - a change to which the whale has yet to evolve a defense.

I'm interested to see what happens next.

Comments

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

This of course raises the question of whether taxation is a predatory or parasitic action. If the former then governments need to develop more powerful methods of acquiring tax, if the latter then they need to look at developing a more symbiotic relationship.

Of course, part of me dearly wants to see mobile oil platforms captured by governments who then take their tax from any profits gained from said platform, but mostly because I think it would be a great excuse to yell 'avast!' on a more regular basis.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Part of that struck me; Argentina, when they nationalised repsols assets, just grabbed their onshore production facilities. If they'd grabbed one of their FPSO (Floating production storage & offloading) vessels, that would have been piracy and an act of war.

It makes sense to change the mechanisms of trade under those circumstances.

[belak-krin.livejournal.com]

But surely the question would be - if the FPSO was put into the waters of a particular country (or indeed international) for the benefit of their taxation - who would it be an act of war against? Surely a company cannot claim the protection of a country it has abandoned to avoid tax? Unless of course we want to consider Taxation as a kind of protection racket - pay us your taxes and we'll keep protecting your offshore facilities...

[(Anonymous)]

The reaction of our own government is to hike up taxes on land-based property. Buildings can't vote, or run away. This was announced 3 weeks ago...



DEPARTMENT FOR COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT

Business Rates

The Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Brandon Lewis): I am today announcing the Government’s intention to postpone the next business rates revaluation in England to 2017



Note for non-property geeks: the last rates revaluation was based on commercial rents at April 2008. The next one would have been based on rents at April 2013, which in some cases are now half what they were in 2008. However, it now looks as if the rates are going to be fixed at 2008 levels for another 5 years.

Notice all those empty shops in the high street? Or, in other words, the whale may not have evolved a defence against the harpoon, but on the other hand the population of whales didn't exactly flourish did it?

H

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Driving down the value of commercial property whilst attempting to prop up the value of residential.
That'll work.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis (http://www.aquaticape.org/) doesn't actually explain anything very much, and is contradicted by an awful lot of evidence. Humans are not the only great ape that can swim. While we have much less body hair hairloss is just as well explained by the need for thermoregulation on the savannah- and of the aquatic animals in our size range all of them (i.e. big sea otters and the Amazon Giant Otter are very much hairier than us), our patterns of hair, such as they are, are no different from terrestrial apes, and nor is our fat distribution.

We are very much smaller than most marine predators- i.e. sharks and whales, Tigers (which admittedly aren't African anyway) are very fond of water, and regularly hunt in and around rivers and lakes. And given the presence of crocodiles and sharks we are going to be pretty near the bottom of the food chain for most of our evolutionary history (not that we weren't anyway, when faced with big eagles and sabre-toothed cats, the standard australopithecine response appears to have been to offer a range of condiments to accompany the meal).

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

The most recent proposition for making the (poorly conceived) European FTT a reality involves a co-operative scheme of only 10 countries. (France, Slovenia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Austria, Belgium, and Spain -- Estonia used to be interested, but they have since rejected the idea.) The fact that they didn't manage this even on the eurozone level is pretty indicative of how divisive the idea is policy-wise. The Commission is thrilled, of course, but there's no clarity yet on who'd collect the tax, and the Commission's central motivation for propping up the FTT so forcibly has more or less always been the possibility that it might be them.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. My post appears to have been caught in the spam filter because of the link I added to a site debunking the AAH. I do hope you don't mind reposting the text without the link:

The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis doesn't actually explain anything very much, and is contradicted by an awful lot of evidence. Humans are not the only great ape that can swim. While we have much less body hair hairloss is just as well explained by the need for thermoregulation on the savannah- and of the aquatic animals in our size range all of them (i.e. big sea otters and the Amazon Giant Otter are very much hairier than us), our patterns of hair, such as they are, are no different from terrestrial apes, and nor is our fat distribution.

We are very much smaller than most marine predators- i.e. sharks and whales, Tigers (which admittedly aren't African anyway) are very fond of water, and regularly hunt in and around rivers and lakes. And given the presence of crocodiles and sharks we are going to be pretty near the bottom of the food chain for most of our evolutionary history (not that we weren't anyway, when faced with big eagles and sabre-toothed cats, the standard australopithecine response appears to have been to offer a range of condiments to accompany the meal).

[(Anonymous)]

That's a shame - I like the swimming monkeys idea. So where does the 25-hour sleep cycle come from? Tides are the only 25 -hour cycle in nature.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

It doesn't exist. Turns out the data was faulty, and humans have roughly 24 hour sleep cycles like other species.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

That's even more disappointing.