Thread by @NickSzabo4

Biological scalability is the ability to support a larger, denser, and/or wealthier population in a given ecosystem.

Farming was the big breakthrough in biological scalability. Less obvious but still very important were advances in hygiene, such as the use of boiled water (as herbal or proper tea) or alcohol to avoid drinking disease-carrying village water.

East Asia was probably the biggest early innovator biological scalability: pottery to protect stored food from vermin; alcoholic beverages (made from wild plants) and tea to avoid the need to drink village-polluted water.
penn.museum/sites/biomolec…
dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/why…

The same East Asian regions that innovated in biological scalability prior to agriculture also were the first to domesticate dogs. Dogs likely served as intruder alarms for early villages, making them more secure: an increase in social scalability.

Life itself underwent revolutions that increased its scale. One of the earliest was when it evolved the ability to break the triply-bonded N2 to create the single-N-containing molecules needed to make all amino acids, and thus all proteins.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2010/10/elemen…

Besides amino acids made from scarce single-nitrogen molecules, another crucial building block hard for life to get from the environment is phosphate, out of which is made the core molecules of life: DNA, RNA, and the ubiquitous energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP).

Perhaps over 800 million years ago, long before land was colonized by plants, land was first colonized by lichens. By opening up an entire new environment, land instead of just sea, lichens increased the scale of life itself.

To be pioneers of dead rock lichens, a symbiosis of algae & fungus, have to do everything for themselves: convert CO2 & H2O into carbohydrates via photosynthesis, fix nitrogen, & obtain phosphate. But on land phosphate is embedded in rock, not dissolved in seawater. How to get?

That's where the fungus half of the lichen partnership comes in. It grows hyphae, tiny root-like structures that crack rock, increasing its surface area. It then uses oxalic acid to dissolve phosphate out of that new surface. Then it can absorb phosphate much as it would at sea.

Now let's loop back. Drinking room-temperature alcohol, Europe developed glass craft while hot-tea-drinking China developed porcelain. Europeans look at chemical reactions through glass & discover modern chemistry, but "china" is still the envy of the world.

Beating back the pioneering Iberians, Britain now dominates the world's seas. Following on long Veblen good pattern, English upper classes covet tea and tea-drinking apparatus from the opposite side of the planet, and the middle classes want to emulate them, but can't afford it.

In steps the English entrepreneur, who following on Dutch work figures out how to make cheap but workable knockoffs of Chinese porcelain ("china"). Among the techniques are grinding flint with water or steam power, and by the mid 18th century grinding bone to make bone china.

Among the gazillions of nearly random fertilizer experiments tried by British "improvers", presumably somebody tried this ground bone. It worked wonders, especially on hay meadows which fix nitrogen but deplete phosphate. Here's a bone crusher from Zurich canton in Switzerland.

Crushing & grinding greatly increases the surface area of bone much as the lichen's hyphae does for rock. Next step was applying sulfuric acid to the ground bone or apatite rock, giving us superphosphate, much as lichen applies oxalic acid to dissolve phosphate from cracked rock.

Hay fed the cattle that gave northwestern Europe its high-protein diet & the horses that powered its transport & farm equipment. Hay was the gasoline of stationary pastoral economies & their ultimate protein source.
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/lactas…
unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/06/trotti…

Phosphate-fed hay supercharged the economies of many of the more pastoral regions of northwestern Europe, among them the English Midlands, Scottish Clydeside, Wallonia, and much of Switzerland. Their increased muscle and brain power made them leaders of the industrial revolution.

Practical experimenters had cracked a deep & ancient secret of life, greatly increasing biological scalability over the course of a mere century, creating new muscle & brain power & boosting the productivity of agriculture, freeing up workers for much bigger industrial scales.

The Narborough bone mill, with a big cast-iron wheel typical of industrial revolution water power, partially restored. It made calcium phosphate fertilizer out of bones from slaughterhouses, whaling, and, it was rumored, from a Hamburg cemetery:
norfolkmills.co.uk/Watermills/nar…